DP (Detroit Project) Day!!!

a few weeks ago, i had signed up to do voluntary work on a day called the detroit project day. until a day before the day had i received the letter of assignment. all i knew was that i would be assigned to a site named v3, but little did i know what would i do....

so here comes the day. we were supposed to meet in angell hall at 8.45 am. i woke up at 8, and after much of delay, i found myself missing the damned bus (again!). as a result, me and renjie had to run down to pierpont commons, hoping that we would be able to catch the missed bus. we were disappointed, and had to wait for another bus...but when we reached central campus, we noticed there were swarms of people coming from all sides of direction, heading towards the building. apparently...michigan time still applied. after standing in a line for a while, we were notified that we did not need to wait...we could just grab our t-shirts and go our bus. i got a medium size blue t-shirt, put it on, and yup, ready to start the exciting day.

as i was in group v3, renjie and i seperated as we went to search for our bus. after much trouble, i finally found my bus. upon aboarding it, i had to sign a paper (must be like some live-dead contract..haha), and was given a named tag. as there was already quite a number of people in the bus, i had to sit quite far back. after some moment of silence, conversations were started in the bus, and me too was able to engage in a small chat with an arizona girl (shawn, graduate student).

the bus left ann arbor quite late (9.30am) and we reached detroit (actually the place we went is not the city, i think it's a suburb of detroit). as our bus had members not only from v3, we splited into groups. earlier in the bus, i had known that my work would be related to setting up a library for a middle school. so there we went to a building (owned by blight what what, a charity-voluntary-work group) and gathered in a soup kitchen hall. as an ice-breaker, we played the link, and after hanging out for a short while, we were told that the truck with our books had arrived.

unloading the books was nothing a task, and upon receiving the books, we had to first divide them into fiction, non-fiction, and inappropriate books. then we had to label them. that was when i thought, oh gosh, books again!!!! (fyi, im a librarian) we worked in groups of 3, and we chatted while working. (some other groups play some naming game, say name a city starting with alphabet a-z)

lunch sucked. i just had a turkey sandwich and some pop. people from other groups came join for lunch too. there was a big crowd in the hall...and after that, it was in such a mess that we had to clean it up. cynthia, one of my senior was there too. cool and remote as usual (i mean to the juniors).

we continued our work after the cleaning up. then when it was around 2, we stopped. hopping in the same bus, we headed to a park and there, all the volunteers gathered together to hear speeches from 3 speakers (ended up having more than that). one of them, a black, was rather cool as he rap through his speech. (seriously) there too they gave out free t-shirts by throwing them out to the crowd. i manage to grab one :D, as my arms were fast and long enough..muahaha. it was quite a cold day, and we were quite impatient waiting for the speakers to finish their speeches (one of them was late...the senator)

the event was wrapped up with the speech of the lady senator, and we walked our way back to the buses. nothing much in the journey back, except i accidentally stepped on a pile of shit (shit!!!)