December Volunteering

This weekend, I volunteered twice. The first was with One Brick at Holly Nights at Pennsbury Manor. This was my first One Brick event last year, and I had fun handing out hot cider to people who then went wassailing. This year, however, the split us up a bit and most of us were candle watchers. I was teamed up with someone else from One Brick and we spent about 2.5 hours walking through the kitchen house making sure people weren't too close to the candles and that the candles didn't need to be changed. (Pennsbury Manor is where William Penn lived, so there's not electricity, candles were the only way to see.) Not as good as last year, I have to say, but I still had fun.

Then, a mere 12 hours after I finished at Holly Nights, I was at St. James School for their community work day. St. James School is a private school for low income middle schoolers. They're in their second year and are opening a classroom a year. Right now they have fifth and sixth graders. It'll eventually be fifth through eighth. They had a pipe burst earlier in the week and it leaked onto their donated books that they hadn't sorted yet. So, we went through the books and threw out (I know, I was sad, too) the books that weren't salvageable. It was actually pretty quick work, so we were then tasked with sorting by what books would be good for middle schoolers. A lot of people seemed to just drop off old books of theirs, happy to get rid of them, without a thought for the audience. We had books that were for much younger children, books for adults, and encyclopedias from 1985. A word to the wise, children aren't going to be helped by books that think the USSR is a world power. I know throwing out books is hard, but no one wants those.