Area Day of Service

Like I mentioned a few days ago, Saturday April 25th was the Area Day of Service. Church members, community members, and civic organizations worked toge3ther to provide service all throughout 11 southern states. Projects ranged from trash pick up, building a Habitat for Humanity home, stocking food banks, blood drives, making quilts for nursing homes, and lots of other wonderful projects. In our area, about 50 church congregations in Northeast Florida coordinated with the American Red Cross to deliver packets of emergency preparedness information within the local community.

The week before the day of service, the youth in our ward stuffed 2200 bags with the emergency preparedness information that was provided by the Red Cross.

The morning of the 25th, lots of volunteers showed up at the church building to be given the map of their delivery route and their stack of packets to deliver.

Here are the Shaws waiting to receive their instructions before heading out.

The lady sitting in the middle is Sister Wilson. She is 75 years old and she is now the chorister in primary. She is just the cutest lady. Watching her do all the little hand motions and songs with the kids is one of my favorite parts of each Sunday.

After receiving their assigned routes and packets, everyone went out in groups of two or three to deliver the information.

My assignment for the day was to entertain the kids while their parents delivered the emergency preparedness packets. We did a few activities like looking through a 72 hour kit to see what goes into it and playing lots of games and dancing and even making our own trail mix. They even got into the spirit of service by making beautiful cards to send to our military men and women serving overseas.

Even Layton wanted to help out and make a card :)

We also had people working behind the scenes preparing food for both breakfast and lunch.

Everyone was so happy about what they had accomplished and had a wonderful time.

By the end of our 4 hour shift we were all pretty pooped and were glad to get to take a rest when our shift was over and the afternoon shift of workers began.

It really was wonderful what all the volunteers in Northeast Florida accomplished. The representative from the Red Cross told us that what all of the volunteers from the church did in ONE day whould have taken them 4 months to accomplish using their usual staff of volunteers. Makes me want to go out and help them more!