Poland Service Project

My next trip was to Poland on a Service Project with Club Beyond. There a bunch of Club Beyond groups from all over Europe came together to help out the Polish in various projects. Bitburg's assignment was to build benches and double bass stands for a small music school right around Katowice. I've never had so much fun doing work in my life!!




Here I am on the first day outside of the club building making a "wow" face. Well, the sign looks like it says WoW from far away, but it really is WDW... oh well, it was still funny!This is my small group and leader. They were a wonderful bunch of girls and I love them to death, we made very strong, lasting friendships in that very short week!

We even had our little own dance :P

Here we are having some fun in the city on a special tour from the 11th class students of the music school:We never knew this, but I guess posing in front of mannequins at the mall is a very American thing to do. We found this out when we tried to get our Polish friends to pose with us, their reply was "Polish don't do that"

Three billy goats gruff!

The tour of the city was really special because we were the only group who got to go :D

We were able to see what Polish life really was outside of the music school. The city was very old and very beautiful. We could, however, see how much World War II had destroyed the place and how it is still effecting people to this day. Most fo the building were very run down from poverty and some ruined and abandoned. Away from the older buildings, you could see how they were trying to rebuild. Most of the land was empty lots but in random spots gas stations and stores and churches were built. They even had a mall as you saw earlier. You should have seen how excited they were when we mentioned that the mall was just like the ones in America!

The Catholic group coming back from church.

Before the actual work started, our Youth Leader took us to Auschwitz, the biggest of Hitler's concentration camps. He said, "I hope this will remind us all of why we need to value ourselves and others. When we forget Genesis 1:27 ("So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.") we are doomed to devalue those around us and become capable of destroying lives. May we never forget."

Dale was a wonderful speaker, his insight helped us to open up our eyes to our own dignity and the dignity of others. In the words of my small group leader, we were blessed to have him with us that week.

The next day, began work. Here's our group climbing up the hill to the park where we were to build the benches, the music school is the buildings to the left. Here's my group digging holes for the posts of the benches.

While digging we found a bunch of obstructions, mostly rocks, but also lots of debree like wire and cement, we even found the knob for a 1940's oven.

Us four girls were working all alone at the bottom of the hill. Some of the obstructions were very hard to remove and required the help of one of the boys who were all working up the hill.

Lifting bags of cement to fill up the holes and hold up the posts of the benches. Mixing the cement was the Polish kids second favorite part to watch; their first favorite was laughing while we attempted to dig holes :P That was our favorite part too.

Don't get me wrong, we could tell that the kids at the school were genuinely excited for us to be there and grateful to know that we cared. I was actually wrong, their favorite part seemed to be when we would talk to them and share our lifestyles while learning about theirs.

One of the other things we did as part of the service project was getting to know the Polish kids by interacting with the kids our age and helping the younger ones with their English.

This is me with a few girls from the 11th class. I answered all sorts of questions about american sports and past times, about the classes we take and they were very excited to learn more about prom!

The girls loved how tall Deion is!

Every once in a while we would take a break from the hard work and start crafting our message box for our group and writing notes to the other groups at the work site.

The notes were meant to encourage the other members of the service project. It was a fun way to get to know eachother. It was always fun to get a note from someone, sometimes they made you laugh and sometimes they were very sweet.

Here's my group painting the finished benches.

With the work almost done, each group had a turn to have some quiet time to finish their devotionals.

Lauren having some fun painting benches!

Up next is more pictures of us interacting with the Polish:

Here are some friends I made while teaching them how to play baseball and basketball! They were very excited on the last day when I gave them the bats and balls :)Here are the music students gathered around DG as he played his guitar and sang. As you can see most of the kids around him were girls :P

The boys liked talking with him though and enjoyed trying to learn the songs on his guitar. Remember, all these kids are already amazing musicians!

I didn't get to go, but Lauren, Libby and Kelsey weretaken by one of their Polish friends to hear and concert from the stars of the music school. It turns out the trumbone players are like the "jocks", these guys are being "scouted" by colleges around the world!

Our last day was a Saturday. Here we all our with some of our Polish friends who decided to come see us for the last time instead of going home for the weekend. This was a really special, but very sad day. None of us wanted to leave, me least of all, I wanted to stay and go to school here to play my violin all day like they get to! :(((

Lastly, I'd like to give a very big thank you out to everyone who donated money to Lauren and I. Without you guys, we would have never have gotten to have this wonderful experience!!