A Day of Service in December
On the day of Christmas Carols all of the Middle and Upper School boys participated in a variety of community service activities within the school and throughout our neighborhood. The boys who were at the church took a break from rehearsal to make holiday cards for the Church of the Heavenly Rest’s Prison and Reentry Ministry. Back at school, seventh graders divided into several small groups, and two of these groups spent time reading and playing with Kindergarten boys. Another group of seventh graders worked with Ms. Oshins to inventory and pack up the toys that had been collected during the drive before they were donated to New York Common Pantry. Yet another group of seventh graders prepared sandwiches to be delivered to New York Common Pantry. Meanwhile Middle School boys created customized holiday cards for City Meals on Wheels to be included in the meals that are delivered to elderly and homebound New Yorkers.
Eighth graders helped out in our immediate neighborhood by cleaning up trash. One group of eighth graders had a special opportunity to volunteer at New York Common Pantry, just a few blocks away from St. Bernard’s. Mr. Clements accompanied a group of students to NYCP and shared his impressions below.
The non-musical students and I were sent off for community service to the New York Common Pantry, half a mile up Fifth Avenue. I mention the distance because it was perishingly cold, in the teens, with a truly evil wind that seemed always to be in our faces. We were just six, five boys and me, and somehow enduring that weather bonded us even more than the usual homeroom-teacher-and-kids. They took me in, or I took them in, but by the time we got there, we had more in common than when we left, a perfect prelude to working together as equals.
We six were thrown into the assembly line with around ten equally raw volunteers from CBS—corporate or news or sports, I never found out—and for the next two and a half hours we all worked like animals, or, more accurately, like Burger King employees, shouting orders as we filled bags for the hungry. The CBS-ers, all in their 30s, were skeptical about eighth grade boys in blazers, but as we chopped away at the task, barriers melted, and young women with terrifying eye-liner and fashionable clothing were calling my guys by their first names, as we yelled “bananas,” “two cranberry sauces,” “mashed potatoes, onions, canned corn,” at each other.
The deal with the pantry is this: in a blocky building on 109th Street enormous amounts of donated food are trucked in, stored in the basement, and sorted into portion sizes. A can is a can, but onions are packed into two-pound bags, bananas five-to-a-bag, and so forth. All this at high speed by people who usually gaze at spread sheets or write for social media. Also in the basement, the needy line up in front of a whiteboard that shows the day’s fare. Volunteers with iPads take their names and what they want. The basement volunteers push “send” and upstairs a printer spews out little shopping lists. These are grabbed by, well, Charles D. (see picture), who rushes into the big food room with a couple of plastic bags crowing out what he needs for his client. Three or four minutes later, the mother or father is out the door with bags of good and nutritious food. It has the organization of an anthill, and it works. We had a really great morning, the hungry were fed, the boys learned a lot about New Yorkers who don’t live in fancy apartments, and a bunch of yuppies from CBS saw what an intelligent adolescent can do. Win, win, win.
By Mr. Clements, Grade VIII Teacher
