Volunteering at National Rebuilding Together

25th April was the National Rebuilding Day where University of Michigan, Dallas Alumni Club decided to volunteer. Being part of the Alumni Club, I found out about the opportunity and was quite excited since this was going to be my first volunteer work experience in the USA. One of my friends Nileshbhai and I registered as a volunteer for the UM Alumni club. It was a saturday morning and we were suppose to assemble at the place around 8 am, so I woke up early quite excited about the opportunity. My excitement had two reasons, first it was an unselfish work which I would be doing, that would make someone happy and the other reason was to meet fellow wolverines. Its been almost three years since I move to Dallas, Texas from Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I miss Michigan a lot since I have some of the loveliest memories there...

The house we were assigned belonged to a 90- year old lady. She was very nice and friendly. The week before some other group had helped clean up the interior rooms and organize things inside. Our assignment was cleaning from the outside like the car garage, the backyard, painting the house exteriors, weathering the windows etc. We assembled in front of the house around 8 am and introduced each other and started working. Initially we started with garage, there was hardly any space to walk into the backyard since the garage was full of stuff. We threw away lot of items and kept some, which were her fond memories like a rocking chair of her grandmother etc.

Next when there was enough space to reach the backyard, we went there and started working on it. It looked like it had not been taken care of for years..The grass and the trees were overgrown. Some of us started cutting the trees while others picked up the twigs and big branches so that it would be easier for the lawn mower to work.

It was fun, but scary at times when we encountered small snakes on our paths...Finally we managed to clean up everything in the backyard and it looked beautiful....completely different from what we had started on....

The next work for painting the exterior house. We needed to apply the primer initially and then once the primer was settled for an hour, we could start painting. We divided into two groups, one group was working on the front part and the other group was working on the back side.

Over the door, it was difficult to reach from the ladder, so someone climbed on the roof to get to it..The enthusiasm of people to work and help was tremendous. It was a pleasure to be a part of such an enthusiastic group..

Around noon all of us were hungry and were waiting for the pizza which had been ordered. We ate the pizza and in the meantime, the primer had dried so we started the painting operation. I painted the entrance door and the lady came out to show us one of her pictures as a flight attendant. It was a beautiful pic.

Some of the volunteers were working on painting the floor in one of the rooms where the carpet had been peeled off..We were almost done, when someone remembered we needed to paint the fireplace. So we started working on the fireplace...It was about 3:30 pm and we were done, with paints on our jeans, hands and t-shirts....The house looked beautiful and totally different from the morning when we started working on it.

It was a great satisfaction to be helpful to somebody in this way....I have decided to look for more volunteering opportunities in the future.

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