Evansville, West Virginia

Transcription

The Venturers in crew 365 from Evansville, Indiana have traveled a long way to spend their spring break in the adventure playground that is the home of the Summit. While this break from academia is a great time for outdoor exploration, it's not the only thought on this Venturing crew's mind. Here at the New River Gorge, we're also doing some service projects. And what a great way to give back to the local community where we're playing and to help support scouting and it's efforts here in the West Virginia area. Our crew has divided into two groups and our group came to the New Salem Baptist Church. Doing all kinds of really cool work today. Cleaned out a big brush pile down the road here, probably a couple hundred feet. Got some more folks inside the church doing a bunch of cleaning on their bell tower as well. So the folks are treating us great and we're having a great time providing some good service to them. They are just so grateful that we're here and it has been such an amazing opportunity to get to meet these people and talk to these people. While this group was busy breathing new life into a historical church, the other group was hard at work revamping a playground for the children at a local daycare. Right now we are working on a volunteer project for this church and we're trying to bring up to standards this playground and right now we're trying to take up a big slab of concrete. Some places it's 16 inches thick, some places it's 12 inches thick. It's not really a great slab of concrete. You don't know what you're going to get into until you actually start hunking at it and hammering away. We've had to use a lot of teamwork here, especially today with the service project. We've been really working together as a group. I was apart of the one where we were redoing the playground. So seeing the little kids, they would cheer us on. When we would look over they would be clapping and cheering when we moved the playground or whenever we would remove a piece of concrete or anything like that. So being able to see them and see who we're helping and get their reactions was just a reward in itself. It's very rewarding. I feel so much better. The people here have been extremely appreciative. You can tell that they're excited that we're here and we are doing something extremely beneficial to them. Tomorrow we are going to be headed over to Burning Rock and we are going to be zip lining and ATVing. Stay tuned for the next installment of Adventures in Service where we'll get to see crew 365's hard work pay off as they're treated to an action packed day at a local adventure outfitter.