Natick Students Work Hard on Community Service Trips

For the past four years Natick High School (NHS) students have been going on community service trips throughout the country to offer relief in areas that have been ravaged by natural disasters. Some areas Natick has traveled to include New Orleans, Louisiana; Staten Island; and Rockaway, New York. The Rockaway trip this past summer (June 26 to July 1) included 25 student volunteers and five coordinators. On all the trips, the student volunteers work hard and open up their minds to new ways of thinking.
To find out more about the community service trip program, I talked to NHS’s video production teacher and staff member for the volunteer trips, Marjorie Roberson. She told me that the average day for the Rockaway trip started at 8 a.m. and ended at 3:30 p.m. The volunteers arrived at a house that had been heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy. The group of volunteers was split apart to accomplish different tasks, such as painting, cleaning and building. Once the students were done working, they would head back to a nearby church where they were staying for the week. Each night a different group of students would cook dinner for the rest of the volunteers.
Some people might wonder why a bunch of teens would choose to do volunteer work during their breaks. To find out why, I talked to NHS student volunteer Tommy Quirk. Quirk was on the Rockaway trip, and when I asked him why he chose to go, he told me, “I guess I just wanted to help out people that were affected by a terrible hurricane and experience life outside of Natick.”
On some of the trips, the volunteers attended workshops about the culture and poverty around the area they are visiting. In New Orleans, the students had a lesson on why certain neighborhoods were affected harder than others, which was due to the history of residents not having the same opportunity as others to have their homes built with lasting materials.
Aside from learning about the area, Ms. Roberson thinks that the volunteers on these trips also learn valuable life skills, such as sharing and caring about and respecting other people and their feelings. An important skill she feels that the teens develop is understanding, such as why someone doesn’t rebuild their house or is homeless.
“You don’t really have any idea what it’s like,” Ms. Roberson said. “Why doesn’t everybody just have insurance like we do and why aren’t their houses rebuilt? You can sometimes going there with certain judgments about people, and why they live the way they live, and you really can’t because you go there and realize that this is beyond the scope of anything you can imagine. That your house is just going to be totally obliterated and nobody’s going to rebuild it.”
She said she doesn’t spend time grilling kids on what they are learning on the trip. She understands everyone learns different lessons and takes away different things, but they still take away something.
Ms. Roberson encourages interested teens to try out the volunteer trip. She told me, “It’s an amazing experience; it takes you outside your Natick world. It’s a great time to hang out with friends in an area that’s new to you; aside from being a lot of work, the feeling of helping someone while having fun is great.”
The next community service trip will be this April break (April 17 to 23) to the South Appalachia area of West Virginia, an area that has been hit hard by poverty due to the decline of the coal mining industry.