Today was the first day of Winterim. I think it was a pretty good start to the month. Before the start of Winterim, I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought this course was only going to be community service- just students going out to a different site everyday and working. My understanding of the definition of service-learning, though, changed over the course of the morning- and the rest of the day.
At around 9 a.m. a speaker from the Ability Center came to talk to us for a while. His name was Dan Wilkins. He was a great and engaging speaker. His stories of disability were emotional, personal, and quite touching. His talk made me want to completely change the way people viewed disabled people. Also, I think I was able to connect with him a little more on a personal level because I could relate his experiences back to my own somehow. In the afternoon, we spent about two hours at the Gift and Kind Shop, where we sorted/folded clothes and shoes and organized them into categories. I was able to take away a few things from this. From sorting and folding the piles of clothes, I was shown that poverty can hit not only adults, but their entire families too. It also showed me that there really is compassion out there in the community- I could see that from the massive amounts of donations the Shop had to go through.
All in all, today was a nice start to Winterim. I hope we get speakers more like Dan- I really touched by him. I’m curious to find out what and where my inspiration for my service-learning project comes from.
By Asma Elgamal
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