Below is an essay on the students’ experience with the Eastside Catholic and AmeriCorps volunteer projects, written by eighth graders Shreya Tewari and Sarah Bundy.

Getting 40 eighth grade students to work together as a team to help others isn’t the easiest task in the world. Especially when it’s the students who are in charge of everything!

Our eighth grade class spent our last week of school designing our own community service projects, and we are here to relate our experiences during our week of service learning.

It all began with our first lesson at school with the AmeriCorps volunteers.

We started our service learning journey by discovering the meaning of community, and understanding global needs.

This is how we gradually came to understand local needs and how they pertain to our own community and our own personal lives and it was this idea that inspired us to plan our own community service projects.

Creating our own projects was not easy and it took a lot of group cooperation.

So, to kick start our service learning sessions with the AmeriCorps volunteers, we, as an eighth grade class went on a retreat on March 10, 2009.

We drove up to a nearby farm in Carnation and helped Farmer John and his family with flood recovery.

It was amazing to see how much damage had been done and how much garbage had piled up by their home.

Our class helped by picking up trash and loose wood that had drifted onto their property, we planted potatoes, tomatoes, you name it, so that he would have a solid start to his new crop season.

After our eighth grade retreat was over, we had to plan our own projects.

First, we had to pick a subject.

With so many to choose from, our group decided to stray from the path and pick a project that isn’t touched upon very often.

We decided to plan a day working at the Snoqualmie Tribal Trails on the local Native American Reservation to restore their trails and natural ecological systems.

It took a while to sort out the logistics of the project, what to wear, what tools and equipment we needed, when we could go, transportation, safety, medical needs of our classmates, and of course, food, but after days of planning and all that discussion, everything worked out for the most part.

The one thing we left out was directions.

Now, it sounds like it would be obvious, and we definitely tried, but how is it our fault if MapQuest is wrong?

Well, because of MapQuest, our awesome and patient bus driver ended up driving us around the Snoqualmie Casino for 20 minutes while trying to figure out the directions.

Anyway, once we reached the trails, we got started clearing out invasive plants that weren’t natural to the area while making sure to preserve the plants that were native to the trails.

We also cleared out blocking stumps and plants from the part of the trail that didn’t have a path yet.

And then the work really started. Once the existing trail was clear, it had to be smoothed and mulched, while a whole new section of it had to be blazed afresh! A few of our group members even carved stairs right into a steep section of the ground!

None of us ever knew how much work it took to make these trails into the smooth, easy-to-walk-on ones we see on hikes and such.

It was definitely worth it though, to see the faces of the people living around the trail and those of our contacts at the trail who organized this work for us.

Our second project that we chose was to help with hunger in our community. We rode up to Northwest Harvest Food Bank and helped them cut corn, package the corn, make boxes, and then pack the packaged corn in the boxes. After only a few hours of work, we were able to clean and pack enough food to feed 1,236 families in our community. All while wearing some very fun aprons and hair nets, might I add.

If there is one thing that I could say we learned most from our whole service learning experience, it would be that giving service, even if you don’t necessarily want to, is something that makes you feel good about yourself.

It is impossible for me not to smile thinking about how appreciative Farmer John and his wife and children were. Or how many native plants we were able to preserve at the trails. Or just thinking about the number of families we were able to feed after just a few hours of work.

We all learned that keeping a positive attitude and working hard to help in any way that you can, can often be the best way for us to help our community and these service learning project week was certainly one unforgettable experience.

Shreya Tewari and Sarah Bundy have both just finished eighth grade at Eastside Catholic and will be moving to ninth in the fall.