4/27/13
Great Alley Clean-Up 2013
Location: Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis
Time: 7:30am-12noon (4.5 hours of service)
This community service activity was by far the most strenuous and physically demanding activity I did over the entire course of the semester. It didn’t require a constant input of demanding work, but over a period of 3-4 hours needless to say I was beat once finished. For this task I was placed into a team of 8 individuals (this included Alex Felt, who is also in our class as well). We were given alleys near Butler’s campus to pick up trash and clean in any way that we could. Since we were the largest group we were given two alleys and a connector. Each alley ran approximately from 43rd street, nearly to 38th street and were located near Graceland and Capitol.
Alex and I went to tackle a small, approximately 1-2 block portion of an alley. Little did we know, we actually picked the alley with the most trash and bigger items and it was quite a task. By the time we were done with just that small area, the rest of the alleys had been cleaned and the rest of the group had caught up with us. Our group had also shrunk from 8 people to 6 people total as two gentlemen seemed to disappear and leave us quite early in the day.
To clean our alley, 6 or 7 giant yellow trash bags were used. We filled up 3 or 4 of the bags with soggy, wet, moldy cardboard boxes filled with articles of clothing, diapers, marco’s pizza boxes, barbies, etc. Everything was trash and there was lots of it. Alex and I started the morning off strong with good, positive go-get-em’ attitudes but it didn’t take long before a cloud of doubt that we hadn’t made any progress settled over our heads and around 9:30 we took a small break and came back refreshed.
Overall, after walking down a completed alley you can easily notice the difference in the level of cleanliness. We had one gentlemen exit his house to thank us for our services and it made us feel appreciated even when it felt like we weren’t making much progress in reducing the amount of trash in that alley, let alone the entire universe. The point being, even if we were only making a difference for one or two people it still made at least somewhat of a difference and that is what mattered.