What Does Service Mean to Me? 

DEAL Reflection Activity

Service to me is more then just community service, it is something that you can can do to improve not only your community, but also to improve yourself and learn about yourself as a person. Its not a focus on improvement of just one thing, but multiple different areas at the same time. You improve on yourself, your community, and the ones around you. Service learning is important to me because I want to learn about who I am, and what I can do, but also enjoy doing. I want to learn how I can improve the area around me, through a way that I can enjoy and would get passionate about doing, and possibly learn some new things along the way.

Project FIRE Reflection

I participated in the Project FIRE service that takes place at the Methodist church on the Western Carolina campus. The project helps chop firewood for elderly people that could not chop it for themselves over the winter. In North Carolina, there are nearly 341,800 elderly individuals that live alone and may need assistance, especially when it comes to hard labor-intensive activities, such as chopping wood. While participating in this service, I mostly helped use the wood splitter, and carry wood logs over to the splitter. I learned about the impact just small thing scan have on the community, as well as the knowledge of learning how to use a wood splitter for work in the future.

I had a lot of fun being able to do something new and interesting and being able to work with other people in order to do something good for others. I believe my CURE goals of bettering myself as a person were really taken into effect, as I do feel I came out of it with something new, an enjoyment for taking time to help others. While I do not believe it will have much of an academic impact, I do believe that it helped me want to get more involved in the future, and even after I graduate from Western Carolina.

 In the future, I could use the people skills as well as the wood chopping skills to help other in my community back home, or other skills I have picked up in the honors college here, to improve the place I am going to call home for the better. I could implement them by allowing myself time to volunteer for more projects or maybe the same service in the next semesters. Later on, I would like to try some of the other services as well, in order to fully learn about the community at Western Carolina.