BEST SPRING BREAK EVER!!

Spring Break Trip

Day 1, 2 and 3.

Holy cow, I am so much busier than I expected to be. For many college students, spring break is a time to get drunk on the beach, enter wet t-shirt contests, or visit some tropical area of the world for a week.

Other students spend their spring break going home to finally get to see their family after a long cold winter stuck at college. With not a lot of days off during spring semester, it is hard to go home for the weekends if you live too far away from campus. That is the partial reason that I chose UNL. I am close to home to go home on the weekends, but far enough away that I am with a completely new set of people than I was with in high school.

I don’t fall into either of these categories. I don’t have any desire to spend a week on the beach with a bunch of people who are drinking and as I mentioned on Facebook early this week, I completely hate swim suit shopping almost as much as I hate actually wearing a swim suit.

Since I go home pretty often, I didn’t want to go spend a week sitting on te couch, even if it would have been a nice chance after a hectic couple of weeks in college. If I would have gone home I could have easily finished some homework that is coming up in my classes. I could have spent some time with my family and Matt. As much as I love spending time with them, I wanted to do something I would remember. I wanted to cross things off my bucket list and meet new people from UNL.

When I first heard about the trip, I was extremely excited. It is called Pay It Forward 2014. It is put together by the organization Students Today, Leaders Forever at UNL, but also nationwide.  The trip is based on service learning projects. We are in six different cites over a course of eight days. In the morning, we spend the day volunteering within the city that we are in. Then we do a little touring before moving on to the next city.

Day 1:

We left UNL at around 1 pm. We loaded up the charter bus with all of the things that we would need for the next few days, our high expectations, and the people that would soon become our family for the next eight days. I could hardly hold back my excitement and I don’t actually think that I have stopped smiling since we left the UNL parking lot.

We were on our way to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Isn’t that just where every college student wants to spend their spring break? After spending what seems like forever on the bus, we finally arrived in Cheyenne. It was cute and calm. We were in the neighborhood right by the state capitol building, which was very different than something you would see in Nebraska. Every house was slightly different, including brick houses, pink houses, white houses with picket fences and small houses. We stayed at a little church and after unpacking the bus and setting up, a group of us took off walking towards the state capitol building. After getting slightly lost, we found the building and spent some time taking pictures and walking around it before returning to the church for supper and ice breakers.

            After spending time talking with everyone, we crawled in bed (our sleeping bags on the floor) and shut off the lights.

Day 2:

Morning came all too quickly for everyone. 6:30 wake up and we were up, packing and making breakfast so we could be out of the church by 7:45 and on the way to our service site. We were suppose to volunteer with a mobile petting zoo in Cheyenne, but because it had snowed while we slept, the outdoor petting zoo had very little for us to do. They set us up with the Cheyenne Animal Shelter, where we spent the morning sweeping, mopping, doing dishes, and making dog treat packages containing dog toys with wet dog food and kibble.

After finishing up, we headed to our next site, which was Colorado Springs. We couldn’t be at our housing site until 8pm, so we had plenty of time to tour. We stopped at the 16^th Street Mall in Denver, Colorado and spent the afternoon there. We ate lunch and spent the day shopping and checking out the touristy stores. Around 4:30, two of the girls and I were pretty burnt out from shopping and decided to go get pedicures together since in a few days we would be in the South and wearing our sandals.

I have to say that I haven’t had a good pedicure since before I enlisted in the guard, so you can only imagine what combat boots do to girly feet after two years. They scrubbed my feet and legs with a salt scrub and massaged lotion into them. I have to say that this is probably the best thing I could have ever asked for because of my eczema on my legs. The scrub and lotion did wonders on my dry skin. I got cute little French tips on my toes to match my upcoming outfits for the week.

            After the pedicures, we walked around Barnes and Noble before returning to our charter bus to head to Colorado Springs. We already knew that we wouldn’t have showers at this housing site, but that was the only site that didn’t have showers. We got to our housing site at around 8:15, settled into sweat pants and claimed our sleeping bag area for the night. After spending some time in small groups talking and getting to know each other a little better, we headed to bed.

Day 3:

It snowed while we were asleep in Colorado Springs too, which also ruined our plans for our service learning project. We were supposed to clean up a trail in a park in Colorado, but because it was covered in snow, we couldn’t do much. We loaded up the bus and headed to our next city, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The cold weather was over for the week and we were headed south to help out there.

            We ended up picking up a park in Santa Fe. We ended up playing base tag with everyone in the park before heading to our housing site. The housing site bought all of us pizza for supper, and gave us popcorn to eat while we sat around in their youth center. We finally got to shower and spend the night hanging out before going to bed for the night. Our bonding activity for the night included a trust exercise with a ball of yarn. One person starts with the ball and they admit something they struggle with. Another person raises their hand and the first person passes the ball to the next person, while still holding onto a piece of it.

Day 4:

Today, we spent the day cleaning up the old trading post of the Santa Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico. This was especially cool because this was one of the poorest pueblos in the Santa Fe area. We tore apart an adobe wall, moved bricks from the back of the building to the front, moved dirt, and cleaned up piles of broken glass from the old housing part of the trading post. It was dirty, dusty, and good old physical labor. 

   We worked along side 3 guys that were from the Pueblo, which was very cool to get to know them. The one rule on the pueblo is that photographs are not allowed to be taken, which seems very odd to us, but they did allow us to take pictures while we were working to document all of the hard work that we were doing. 

   After all of the hard work, they sent us to the senior center where they fed us a good lunch and showed us around the community center and the town church.

     One of the guys that I talked to told me about living in the Pueblo. He said, "It's a struggle because it is like living in two worlds." Many people within the pueblo have cell phones and cars, but they are also very tradition oriented. The cool thing was is that he called 6 different people his grandma, which just shows how close the entire community is. Very cool.

    After the tour, we were on our way to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We finally got there around 6 and got showered in the rec center before settling into our housing site for the night. This was the night that I got to sleep on a church pew instead of the floor. (Not a huge upgrade)

    We did a leadership activity that included sitting in a circle with our backs to the inside of the circle and keeping our eyes closed. 3 people at a time would go to the middle of the circle, and the narrator would list off different things that were good descriptors of people, Such as "I would trust this person with a secret" "This person is very friendly" or somethings like "I wish this person would open up more, or be more outgoing" When the narrator says something that the people in the middle think fit with someone still sitting, they tap them on the shoulder. This exercise was eye opening because it was a way for people to anonymously compliment you with things that aren't commonly just said out loud. This is one of my new favorite group activities. 

Day 5:

By this point on the trip, I had made some very close friends that I enjoyed spending time with. On day 5, we actually got to sleep in because we were going to volunteer at a nursing home. Instead of sleeping in, one of the guys and I decided to go for a run on campus. New Mexico weather was BEAUTIFUL as was the view during the run. 3.12 miles in 41 minutes was good enough for me to feel better about the fact that I had been eating nothing but fast food burgers and fries for a good part of the trip. I took a sink shower, (with minor flashbacks of Basic Training showers..) before I headed down to one of the biggest Barnes and Nobles that I had ever seen. New Mexico State University has a Barnes and Noble on campus!! (take a lesson UNL) 

   After getting coffee, we went back to the housing site, packed up our stuff and headed to the nursing home. The residents were getting ready to eat lunch, so we were sent away and we ended up going to a park with an absolutely beautiful view before returning to the nursing home.

    It took me a while to find someone I could connect with, but when I did, He was a World War II veteran who had served in the reserves for 30 years. He had enlisted straight out of high school, which would have put him at the age of about 92 or 93. He was in the Air Corps and worked as an air traffic control man for the military. He didn't have a lot of memories, but he said that the military was good to him, and that he was sure that it would be good for me. He thanked me for my service before he had to go because some of his family was at the home. COOLEST memory EVER! (Thanks Erik for putting that service learning project together (: )

   I spent the remainder of the time putting together a puzzle with a couple of the other students on the trip before heading to the bus to take off for Tuscon Arizona, which makes the trip 5 states in 5 days so far! (Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona!) Woo! 

     Arizona doesn't follow the rest of the country. They don't participate in day light savings times, which meant that we were two hours time difference from home. We were eating supper at about 9 pm Arizona time, and all I wanted to do was sleep. 

   This housing site had camping cots for us to sleep on which was a huge step up from the church pew. I slept like a baby that night. 

Day 6:

This day was set to volunteering at an organization in Tuscon, Arizona called Youth on their Own. Tuscon has a very high population of homeless teenagers. Their definition of homeless is that they don't have a permanent home, meaning many of them are house jumping, crashing on their friends couches until they run out of places to stay or pride to ask for a place to stay. Many times their last resort is sleeping in a park somewhere in town.  Youth on the Own, (YOTOs) purpose is to provide the necessary means to help the students find a job, have food and clothes, and make sure that they graduate high school. They give them a computer lab, school supplies, and depending on the students attendance at school and their grades, a monthly stipend to help out with some of the burden. Their goal is to get them to a place where they can stand on their feet and have a place to stay. 

The youngest participant in the program that they had when we were their was 12. That fact alone was humbling. 

   We spent the morning helping them make encouraging notes to be stapled to the stipends, cleaning up the outside of the building, and putting together little bags of travel sized shampoos, conditioners, and soap. The encouraging letters were so much fun to make! 

After leaving YOTO, we moved on to our destination city, PHOENIX, Arizona!! We spent the afternoon wondering around one of the Arizona State University campuses before heading to our hotel rooms for the next two nights! 

   After arriving at the hotel, we met up with the Oregon State University that had been doing the same thing we had all week. Tomorrow we would be working along side of them, but tonight we quickly changed into our swim suits and headed straight for the hot tub, where we managed to put 20 or more college students in a very small hot tub! Crowding aside, the hot water felt GREAT after a week of sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a bus seat, and doing some great hard work.

Day 7: 

   Then next day we spent volunteering with a program called Save the Family, which provides cheaper rentals for low income families, but mostly focuses on domestic violence victims, giving them a place to stay while they get back on their feet. We cleaned up two of the houses with OSU. We scrubbed, painted, and disinfected everything inside the houses. When the work was done, we had pizza in the park before heading off to downtown Phoenix to do some touristy stuff. 

   14 of us decided to go to the science museum, where we ended up talking the lady into a group rate because there were suppose to be 15 of us. This meant that instead of paying 17 bucks each, we paid 8. We spent about an hour and a half running around and playing with the different exhibits before heading to get supper at Fuego, a small mexican place in the downtown.

   After supper, we headed back to the bus where we went to the hotel to shower and get ready for the big celebration evening. We all got dressed up and spent the evening watching a slideshow of the trip and dancing the night away before returning to the hotel room to change and pack up all of our stuff. 

Day 8 and 9:

   We loaded the bus at 7:15 both mornings so we could be on the road and get back to Nebraska, where we could finish up the last 2 days of our spring break.
   The Pay It Forward tour has a tradition called 40 objects. This year it was 24 objects, but it is set up to where you get one thing that represents the experience or the group on the trip, and give it, with a specialized note to each person. Mine object was a candle and the note said "Each of us have our own light, but together we make the world a brighter place." On the back it had a special memory or note to each person!

These were a great way to end the trip as we pulled into Lincoln and unloaded the bus! It was such a great trip and I would recommend this kind of a trip to ANYONE. This is the best possible way that I could have spent my spring break and I can't wait to go again next year! Thank you to all who put the trip together!!

What better way to get ready for my happiness project than to give back to other communities and make some new friends!
Happiness project starts tomorrow! Be ready to follow!