2008 Service Trip to New Orleans

As a sophomore, I’ve been around the university long enough to hear about the amazing Wake Forest connection. It’s spoken about by the alumni, by the faculty and by the older students as a revered creed to the Wake Forest body. It’s that case where you meet a stranger, only to find out that he or she graduated from the university two years before you, and you wind up joining him or her for dinner the next night. Or you happen to jokingly ask for enough money to get a plane ticket to go to the Orange Bowl since you’re studying abroad, and fellow Deacs raise enough money not only for the plane ticket, but for the ticket to the game as well. It’s this special connection that you make with fellow alumni that make Wake such a special experience both as a student and after you leave campus to head into the dreaded “Real World.” While I’ve heard about this connection, it’s not necessarily something that I had experienced first-hand until this evening.

As Amy briefly mentioned, we ate dinner at Mrs. Kathy Vogel’s house this evening. She’s the mother of a current senior at Wake Forest, but she and her husband did not attend the university themselves. That being said, her connection to Wake Forest, not even a first-hand experience, motivated her enough to not only generously pay for our entrance into the New Orleans aquarium and spend the whole afternoon with us there, but also lovingly open her house to us for dinner. With about 5 hours of notice, Mr. and Mrs. Vogel prepared an amazing dinner for us and entertained us for the majority of the night. I just can’t express enough how excellent it was for this couple to willingly open up their house to us with such little notice. We came to find out that while some of the group knew of her daughter, none seemed to express that they knew her well, and yet here we were sitting in their house chatting for hours about the history of New Orleans and, of course, about our beloved university. I just haven’t heard of many incidents like this at other universities that my friends attend. Clearly we’ve got something very unique and extraordinary at Wake that most universities cannot match. So thank you Vogel family, not only for the afternoon and dinner, but also for giving me my first quintessential example of the power and beauty of the Wake Forest link. You were perfects hosts.

I was in the City Park group today (the group Jermyn wasn’t in) and today we headed to the New Orleans Botanical Garden. We were teamed with a rather large group; Emory, High Point, and Salem State (Mass., not to be confused with our neighbors in Winston-Salem) were all represented at the gardens today.

Today was definitely a day where patience was essential. After getting a little lost on the way to the gardens and not having a good feel of the work that we were stepping into, we were greeted to the task of weeding the garden. It seemed a little trivial at first, but after a speech from the coordinator of volunteers for the city park system, the task was painted in a new light.

Lisa (the coordinator) explained while this work seemed little and insignificant, to the people of the area that live in the area, these little tasks could make the difference of the world. She also mentioned how, while there was more glamorous work (gutting houses), it was the little work that had to be done to make the community thrive altogether and the resources simply weren’t always available to have all the volunteers painting or rebuilding a house. So for the rest of the day, we worked on cleaning out weeds from the gardens, working with the other schools in a surprisingly somewhat organized system.

Overall, the experience definitely reminded me to look at the overall picture. Is my job to do whatever work that is personally pleasing at the end of the day or is it to do the work, even if it seems little, that helps out the community the most with the means we have?