Wednesday, March 27, 2013

03/27: D.C. helps back


Today Wednesday March 27, we went to two different sites. First we went to Bread for the City then we went to Catholic Charities. 
*Bread for the City is an organization that helps anyone who needs a helping hand by providing them with multiple services such as providing clothes, food, medical care, dental care, etc. Here we helped organized the donated clothes into bags, help bag food in the food pantry, got a tour of the building and ate lunch.
At this site I saw how many youths and working adults would take their time into to help someone we needed help. Also they did not discriminate and label someone experiencing homelessness as homeless but as someone who just needs help and that they were willing to help them.
*After we took the Metro bus to Catholic Charities where we help clean the house. There are six people who lives in the house. Each of the people that lives in the house have their own room and they paid a portion of the cost to live there because they have some kind of mental disability. Although we did not get the time to meet them it was nice to know that we can help by cleaning the common living of their for home for them. 
       After the homeless challenge I had a lot of negative thoughts towards D.C.'s role in not doing much about their issue with people experiencing homelessness. However after going to a few sites in D.C. that 
help people who are experiencing homelessness and reflecting on the people that I already knew who take their time and help people who are homeless, I saw that even if D.C. have a greater amount of people who are experiencing homelessness, they also take the time to help each other, give back and probably has one of the biggest support communities. Concluding our day we had an awesome group reflection about language and a good amount of us talked about how the media creates a lot of stereotypes as we were growing up but how now we see and face reality and hope to be the change we want to see, like our amazing Catalyst trip motto. And a few of us went to get ice cream. Hehe. Unfortunately I was not one of them, but it's okay I had some yesterday. 

Pa Xiong V.
2013 D.C. Catalyst Trip Team Awesome Sauce :) 

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