VanVu

Entry for March 7th, 2009

00:30 am, we arrived at our Motel- Baymont Inn & Suites, which was right at the opposite side of the Macy’s and Rivergate Malls. The motel’s outside looked exactly like a normal one in my country (Vietnam). It has 3 floors; each floor has 18 rooms and each room has 2 big beds. The facilities here are not too bad. It can be considered as the 2-star hotel in Vietnam (in the scale of 5). The first thing that we did was lying down on the absolutely comfortable beds and relaxing for a while before taking a hot shower. 3:30 in the morning, I was still awake and tried to finish the 12th episode of my favorite movie called “Full house”. I went to bed around 4:30 and woke up around 6:00. We separated into two teams. Team number one had Jesse Call as their leader and team number two had Alex. I was in team number two, which would work in the Nashville Rescue Mission today.

8:00, we were at Nashville Rescue Mission. All the guys working there were so nice with us. They greeted us as if we were the center’s real members: “Hello West Virginia!!! (…) Are you guys at Concord? (…) We really appreciate your willingness to donate your precious spring break time here to help the homeless people (…)”. Only a few minutes, the environment turned out that it was absolutely not the conversation between the “homeowner” and the “guesses”, but the warm and intimate environment between the perennial colleagues. Today we worked with a guy called Willy. He was extremely nice. We went down to the basement by a special kind of elevator, which could contain a large number of people. I have never seen that one before (but on the television).Our first job was breaking down all the cardboard boxes and put them in a big green cart. After that, we had to separate the shoes boxes and organized them according to their shoes sizes. I was so glad that we started to work together and get to know each other, at least was the others’ names. We talked and chatted with ease: “Hey! What’s your name? (…) Are you tired? (…) Let me help you! (…)”. The teamwork spirit was brought into play. I took out my shyness and started to get acquainted with the other teammates and knew how to take care as well as helping each other. In my opinion, it was the extremely easy way for me to keep pace with a lot of strange people in such a short time.

11:30, we stopped working and went upstairs to eat. The foods here were not as good as I thought. It was the first time that I ate something which was much more terrible than the foods in our schools’ cafeteria. I actually couldn’t eat anything but popcorn. I couldn’t even want to imagine how our dinner would look like since we were still going to have dinner here. The other people seemed having the same idea with me. With a almost-having-nothing stomach, we had to wear the nylon hats, gloves and aprons for serving in the kitchen. Our job was cleaning the table in the dining room after the guesses have done their meals. It was not actually a hard work. We were just so interested in wearing those things on and taking pictures. We definitely looked like the real waiters and waitresses.

After lunch, we came back to the basement and continued working until 3:00pm. The work only was folding the blankets and put them up on the pallets, let them ready to be moved and distributed to the homeless people. 4:00, we had a dinner and came back to the Baymont motel around 5:00. I had some Vietnamese friends in Nashville. We hanged out together, eating another dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant (because we couldn’t eat anything in the shelter at all), and driving around the Nashville downtown to enjoy the gorgeous night sights. The downtown was so crowed since 8 o’clock. We couldn’t find any spare parking lot. The bars were all filled up with thousands of people. After two round trips in the downtown and having no place to park our car, we ended up with coming back to our motel and playing cards. I did not go to bed until the clock jumped up to the number “4:00”. It was enough for a long and hard-working day!