1. Everything will NOT go according to plan.
On the drive up to Springfield, our Vanderbilt-issued P-card decided to give us some trouble. After an hour of brainstorming at a gas station as to why our card was being declined, we discovered that the P-cards cannot be used anywhere that is considered a hotel. The gas station we’d made camp in doubled as a motel. When we finally paid for gas, I couldn’t get the cover off the tank and found myself cursing in the cold. Mere hours into the trip, I was wondering how everything was already falling to pieces. Three hours behind schedule, we made it to the church where we were staying.
Naturally, they had forgotten we were coming.
In the end, someone came to let us in and it all worked out. Everything that will go wrong, will go wrong on a trip like this. I was so grateful to have a co who logically talked through the options with me when I just wanted to throw my hands up in the air.
2. You can’t make everyone happy AKA I’m never having nine kids.
One of my favorite things about being a site leader was becoming a temporary mom to nine college students. I love taking care of people and filling that older sister/mom role for them. However, accommodating nine very different people proved challenging at times. I’d find myself thinking I’d managed to plan out the day very efficiently and then have two “babies” (as I liked to call them) ask if we could go to sleep earlier that night, or would there be time to shower, or tell me that dinner was going to take another hour to cook.
I would do my best to put ideas up to a vote with the group, but there were times when I had to put my foot down and enforce my leader privileges. Sometimes, being a mom means telling people what to do and just hoping they come to understand that you’re doing it in their best interest. Wow, now I sound like my own mom.
3. Prioritize your goals.
This is a lesson I first started to take in when I became a part of LEAPS this year. If you make a list of goals for yourself, whether academic or personal, rank them in regards to importance. This will help you determine which ones you want to spend more time on short-term versus long-term. For AWB, I did the same thing. I had a lot of goals and dreams for how I wanted this trip to go, but I had to pick my top three to guide me through the week.
When making the itinerary each day, I prioritized the amount of sleep my participants would be getting. When going about my day, I prioritized living in the moment and bonding with my group. Looking at my participants on the last night and realizing that I had helped foster friendships between them and encourage them to grow in this one week made everything worth it.
4. It’s the simple things in life.
The first day, I was following our service contact to another location, and my van made the oh-so-mature decision to jam out to the “High School Musical” soundtrack. We were soaring and flying down the streets of Springfield, truly feeling that we were all in this together until suddenly, we weren’t. We had totally lost sight of the car we were following! I had bopped myself to the top of the happy feels because I truly let myself be in-the-moment. Things were fabulous once again after we found the car and got back on track.
The simple things in life are what make us the happiest. The first night in Missouri, we managed to get a Papa John’s pizza order in 40 minutes before they closed. The cashier couldn’t give do the tax-exempt form for us without his manager there, but still decided to give us a discount. That simple act of kindness stood out to me as one of the best moments of the trip. Another moments that stood out were getting ice cream with Ellie (one of our service contacts and one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met), cheering on the champions playing basketball, and catching rolls at Lambert’s. One of my participants had an entire photo album on her phone of Krispy Kreme donuts, and I loved how genuinely excited she got at the prospect of donuts. That kind of happiness from such a simple thing is #goals.
5. Service doesn’t always look like service.
We all have different images of what service looks like. It might be people picking up trash on the side of the highway, mission trips to orphanages in Uganda, or packing lunches at a food bank. I used to think service was about big movements and actions that made big differences, until I started doing more work with nonprofit organizations. I began to realize that service can be anything from delivering mail and organizing a closet to playing basketball.
Service is anything that helps another person or organization. My service this year was organizing and planning this trip all semester and then actually leading it. Giving back to the AWB organization as a whole was something I felt strongly about after having such a great time last year in Brownsville, Texas. Actually being able to do that – and nurture the good experiences of new babies – was an honor.
6. When one door closes, another opens.
After returning from Texas last spring, I wanted to be more involved with AWB and to continue diving into the service world. I applied to be the Social Media/Publicity Chair for AWBoard and felt surprisingly confident that I would receive the position, since I was running three separate social media accounts at the time for varying organizations. When I didn’t get it, it really hurt, since I thought I had the right experience and motivation to fill the role.
However, come September, I received an email from my AWBrownsville site leader, in which he revealed that he had recommended me to the AWBoard to be a site leader this year. It was crazy to think that someone saw the potential in me to go from a follower to a leader, especially after that crushing blow of not getting the board position. I told this story to my co on the trip, and all she had to say was, “Thank God you didn’t get it because then you wouldn’t have been my co.”
Being an AWB site leader was singlehandedly one of the best experiences I ever had at Vanderbilt. I don’t know what board would have been like, but I can’t imagine not having been a mom to nine amazing Vandy students in Missouri.