Junior business major Joseph Antos paints tiles for a playground at a local church. Courtesy: James Rohwer
Students were invited to serve the community through various projects as part of City Links, a local service experience, from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 1. Projects ranged from painting tiles at a church playground to cleaning and reorganizing clothes for a local church’s homeless ministry.
All resident advisors serving in residence life were required to attend and encourage their residents to go as well. Residents who chose to attend worked alongside their RAs at each site. Each of the approximately 500 students who attended received five university service credits to go toward their graduation requirement of 120.
One group, co-led by junior biblical studies major and University Village resident advisor Wesley Parker Reed, had a different serving experience than what was originally on the agenda. The group showed up to a house to help clean up brush damage after the wildfire to find that the family living there already had enough aid from other service groups. The family directed them further up the hill to an elderly couple who needed more help.
According to Reed, seven students from the original group walked up the hill to find one house surrounded by other torched buildings. This house was the only house in the area to make it through the fire, even though the brush around it had also burned.
The group found an elderly couple attempting to fill sandbags to help protect their house against potential mudslides or flooding now that the natural flood barrier of brush had burned away, Reed said.
Reed said the family was “so thankful for everything we had done. [The woman] said, ‘God had sent angels to them.'”
The family provided lunch for the group of seven students after several hours of work, and the students prayed over the family before they left.
“There was just a lot of redemption happening and it was overwhelming,” Reed said.