In a three-day service trip to the Blazers House, a community program in downtown Los Angeles, Waves workers cleaned up a house and garden.
By Jovita McCloud
Staff Writer
A three-day weekend of “service” doesn’t compete easily with prospects of Vegas trips, camping, hiking, or UCLA parties, but many students spent last week’s long weekend doing just that: serving others.
Not only did they go to serve, but they also came back with colorful stories of Halloween costume hunting, digging through old rusty tools and getting to know each other and those in the community they went to serve.
Nineteen Pepperdine students participated in the service project in inner-city Los Angeles to help out a children’s community program called Blazers House.
The event was organized by Campus Ministry and was one of two service projects offered during the long weekend, the other being San Felipe.
The students worked with people from the Metro Church of Christ to clean up the inside and outside of Blazers House facilities. They raked, sorted, trashed and organized.
“It was so much work to do,” junior Katrina Wills said.
Senior Angela Yee helped organize boxes of old Halloween costumes.
“We tried on costumes and had a really good time,” Yee said. “We cleaned up a garden, which made us hot, sweaty and dirty.”
Sophomore Juana Diego spent her service time in a small, dusty basement that she said could only fit about four people.
“The next day I could barely talk,” Diego said. “When I woke up I had dust in my lungs.”
Wills agreed that dust covered the attic, their workspace.
“(It was) old rusty, dusty stuff,” Wills said of the situation in the basement of the Blazers House facilities before the group organized it. Wills spent four hours in an attic full of boxes organizing costumes.
The students’ work paid off. They finished their jobs and stayed the night with various families from the Metro Church of Christ.
“They were so nice,” Wills said of the Metro Church of Christ families. “They fed us and we were able to take a shower.”
Most of the people tended to agree that one of the highlights of the trip was working with the group from Metro Church of Christ. The groups enjoyed each other while working together on the trip.
Wills described the Metro group as “very dynamic” and welcoming people.
Yee said that afterwards the families of the students said if they ever wanted to go to the Metro Church of Christ that they had a place to stay. Some students will probably take the families up on that offer.
“Hopefully we can do this every year,” said junior Melissa Jordan, who was in charge of organizing the project.
Jordan is a social work minor and hopes to work in the inner city one day.
When Jordan heard that an inner city mission trip was being offered the same weekend as San Felipe she immediately knew which one she wanted to participate in.
“My heart is in inner city mission. I need to do that,” Jordan said.
Jordan said that this was an opportunity for the students to give back to their community.
“We live in L.A.,” Jordan said. “We don’t need to go so far away to help people.”
In the future, Jordan said she would like an inner city service project to continue to be offered alongside the San Felipe trip.
“They go to San Felipe every semester. So we can do this every semester,” said Jordan.
With a combination of students eager to serve, successful projects like Blazers House and determined leaders like Jordan, inner-city missions appear to have a great future at Pepperdine.
November 06, 2003