In the spring of my freshman year, Kellenberg Memorial High School was looking for volunteers to help fix up and refurbish a house in Hempstead. The woman who lives there had taken a couple of kids into her household and took care of them. The only problem was that the house was becoming run down, and both the outside and inside needed a lot of work to be done.
This lady had been too kind to the community for the school to watch this house unravel. In the middle of the baseball season, the coaches had asked the freshman team for volunteers to go and help the cause on a couple of Saturdays. A few of my friends and I volunteered to go that next Saturday and we worked from about 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. We went to the house and worked on the rooms inside. The team did things from fixing doors and windows to even just tightening a couple of screws on a bike for the kids. The woman greatly appreciated the work done, but we and the coach decided to come back the very next week and to work on the outside of the house.
The next week after we did our best to renovate the interior of the home, we came back to the house to plant bushes, trees, and flowers and to simply clean up the yard altogether. The school ordered a load of plants and soil for the front and back yard. The team cleaned out all the garbage surrounding the house and started digging up the grounds for the planting of flowers and trees. About six or seven of us totally renovated the yard. The outside of the house itself was washed, and the windows and shutters were cleaned. Now not only did the inside look good, but the exterior of the house and both the back and front of the yard looked brand new.
The work that I did personally on this house meant a lot to me because of how I was still adjusting to Catholic school, let alone high school. It showed me both the spiritual and service side of doing things for the community. The team came together and helped out a woman and a household that was obviously in need of a lot of help for the family and the house itself.
Eddie Crean is a junior at Kellenberg Memorial High School, Uniondale. |
