If I Could Save Time in a Bottle...

My first week back at Wilson from summer break brings mixed emotions. First and foremost, I feel at home nestled among these grand mountains. As I turned down the winding Warren Wilson Road, the Swannanoa River Valley stole my breath yet again.

However, this heart-warming homecoming also brings a new set of concerns as I adjust from a summer work schedule back to Wilson mode. As any Wilson student will tell you, time management skills are crucial on this campus. That life lesson was reinforced again this week.

My organizational proficiency was tested when I attempted to construct a schedule that accommodated not only my work and class schedule, but also allowed for me to become a Big Sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. This particular organization brings at risk youth on campus for mentoring during the week.

After modifying my classes, shifting my work schedule, and collaborating with the Service Learning Office, I realized that participating in the program would be impossible due to an interfering term class. While I am disappointed about this news, I look forward to next week’s service fair. The fair, hosted by the service-learning department, brings a plethora of organizations to campus to present various service opportunities. I am sure that I will be able to find a project that is both rewarding and feasible with my schedule.

Service Day

I guess someone in upper management read my blog about Work Day, because today I found myself in a very similar position in what I call Give A Religious Studies Major a Pitchfork (part 2).

Service Day is kind of like Work Day’s cousin that lives in the next town. While Work Day focuses on projects around campus (generally landscaping of our public spaces and trails), Service Day sends around four hundred new and returning students, faculty, staff, and miscellaneous helpers to sites in the greater Asheville community. It falls on the Friday of orientation week, and is the single most unifying event of that week. Nothing bonds you to your new friends, your new home, and even your professors quite like manual labor.

As a peer group leader this year, I am assigned to a group of fifteen freshmen, all in a first year seminar class focusing on the philosophy of Wilson’s triad. Basically I serve as their cheerleader, ringleader, campus compass, and friendly face while they try to figure out who and where they want to be for the next few years of their lives. It has been an incredibly rewarding role this past week, and so it was with great pleasure that I headed out with them, pitchfork in hand, to our site. We were working at Lake Tomahawk Park in Black Mountain, a few short miles from Wilson’s campus. We weeded endless flower beds, mulched everything that was even remotely mulchable, built picnic tables (it was surreal to see a pile of lumber in the morning transform into five fully assembled tables by the afternoon) and benches, hedged, and trimmed some bushes a nice lady on a bike asked us to trim.

Service Day this year included eight sites like ours (including several public parks, a dog park, and landscaping for a women’s correctional facility and an orphanage), tackled by a total of twenty-two freshman seminars and groups of transfer students. As with every large project that we take on as a community, I was reminded of exactly what a group of committed individuals can accomplish. With our large group and willingness to work we were able to take on tasks that would not have been possible with Black Mountain’s limited resources. My favorite part of Service Day are the smiles and gratitude of the citizens enjoying the park, proof of the positive relationship our college has with the community around us.

Michelle

Carolina Wildlife

Sometimes the things you love and care about the most can be the most frustrating bits of your life.

For me, this issue came to a head on a July day earlier this summer – the heat index in my hometown of Irmo, South Carolina was 110 that day, and I was weighing a crow. Well, making an effort to weigh a crow. My coworker was steadying a bucket on a Weight Watchers scale while I chased Maggie (the crow hero of this story) around a wooden and chicken wire enclosure. I got Maggie as far as into the bucket and we both put our hands over her, but it took only seconds for the wing flapping to tip everything (and everyone) over. Frustrated and overwhelmed, we prepared for try number two. In the back of my mind I knew that there were doves that needed to be tube-fed an hour ago, opossum bedding to be changed (for everyone’s sake), a bird that needed a wing wrap and six others on antibiotics, chimney swifts that needed to be exercised for their release the next day, someone was at the door with a new patient, and the timer was going off to feed the nestlings.

Wildlife rehabilitation rides that fine line between meaningful, important work and some of the most desperately comedic situations that you can encounter. I found myself painstakingly feeding tiny baby opossums every four hours while good ol’ boys ran them over daily, nursing turtles back to health after being weed-whacked, chasing ducks around the break room, consoling crying strangers leaving orphaned babies at our door, and raising six crows from nestlings while hunters devoted weekends to killing hundreds of their cousins. Often it felt like swimming up a waterfall, and I was starting to get bogged down in the repetition of feeding the same nestlings every thirty minutes and dealing with the same angry questions from the uninformed public.

An older coworker with lots of experience in wildlife rehab realized my frustration and gave me some advice that has slowed me down on many occasions since: Focus on the release. The crutch of your life is not in filling out paperwork, sixteen feedings of the same birds in one shift, studying for AP tests, packing boxes at a food bank, or begging peers to sign a petition. The value of any work or service is the “release” – the feeding of a hungry belly, the realization of a concept, the overturning of an unjust law, a grateful smile, and, yes, watching a bird that had no chance of survival before you took responsibility for him fly into the sunshine. Even if we can’t take back every wrong that has been inflicted on our furred, feathered, and scaled friends by the human race, the point is that someone notices, someone cares, and someone is making efforts to change the world for the better. www.carolinawildlife.org

Michelle

P.S. I am super SUPER excited to meet of our new freshmen and transfers next week! I’m a peer group leader and I’ll be around all orientation week, so I’m looking forward to saying hello to each of you!