Skip to main content

From Bama to NOLA

 

During the Christmas break, I had the pleasure to help with my home church's 8th annual Give Back mission. Each year members of the kitchen committee get together over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays to help serve the homeless communities. Hours were spent grocery shopping, prepping and preparing the food for it to be set up and served early Christmas morning. Not only was I overwhelmed with joy to be back home in Alabama, but I was also thrilled to be amongst my family members participating in a selfless act. Seeing the smiles and hearing the many “Thank you” and “God bless you” coming from the population we were serving made me see that every little effort is meaningful to someone. This made me grateful for the little things in life such as laughter with important people in my life and being able to fellowship with them.

December hours: 7

 





After making my way back to New Orleans, I had a wonderful opportunity to assist Second Harvest Food Bank in the 50/50 Raffle at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome for two New Orleans Saint’s games. The objective of the 50/50 Raffle is to sell raffle tickets for a jackpot that is drawn at the end of 4thquarter. The lucky winner goes home with half of the jackpot winnings and the remaining half of the proceeds goes to Second Harvest’s charity organization of choice. The United Negro College Fund and the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation were the two organizations that were given proceeds for the two events. I was able to see firsthand how serious the Saints’ games are to Louisianans, and I must say it is an unforgettable experience. 

January hours: 17

Total hours: 24

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

September Nights: Jump in with Jade

My transition into the great city of New Orleans has been a tasteful one. Each visit prior to moving here, I always looked forward to the food. Now that I have easy access to it, I have been taste-testing a variety of the Cajun and sea food options NOLA has to offer. Uber eats has become a savior for me now that I have been consumed with my studies. Crawfish is one tap away, and I have become very grateful for it. On the other hand, the “happy weight” I intended to gain will be obsolete because of the absurd amount of walking this city requires. Having a car here is useless and expensive. On a more serious note, I wanted to assess the ins and outs of The Big Easy before diving into charity work. The next several months will be dedicated to meaningful volunteering which I look forward to doing for the post-Katrina New Orleans.

Returning to KIPP

Although my hours for the semester have been completed, I wanted to finish out the semester by volunteering with the organization that I committed to throughout my time in New Orleans.  And what better way to finish out with the same people I started with – my fellow classmates. We visited KIPP and helped to organize the computer station that the students will be using to take their upcoming state exams. Although there was not much work for us to tackle this time around, any amount of work that can be done to help the efficiency of the school for the betterment of the students is well worth it. After just sitting for the NBME shelf exam, I understand the need to have functional operating computers to make testing day go as smoothly as possible. March hours: 3 Total hours: 27