Update from the District!

Hello fellow Awesomes,

It's finally time for team D.C. to update y'all on what we've been up to. We've been having so much fun at national days of service that we forgot to update the blog!

In honor of make a difference day, team D.C. booked it to the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in downtown Washington. We collaborated with a former NAF Team DC AmeriCorps member to help update library collections and facilitate the upcoming move that many DC library branches are undergoing.

The team was assigned to go down to "the cage". The cage is exactly that -- a dusty, dingy metal cage in the basement of the library that houses thousands of not-quite-shelf-ready articles. We spent hours in the cage re-labeling books and chatting it up with each other and some library employees. While the work was a tad mundane, it was awesome to be able to help the library out while conversing and bonding with team members!


We thought our Make A Difference Day Service was fun... but we had no idea how much fun was in store for us on World AIDS Day! The team traveled to Fairfax, VA -- the home of George Mason University -- to assist NOVAM (Northern Virginia AIDS Ministry) with their HIV testing event.

Some of us planted signs across campus, some of us heckled embarrassed college students into grabbing a few condoms, and some of us got to test and counsel George Mason University students. It was awesome! We helped NOVAM test a record number of people in one day.

Many panels of the AIDS quilt were on display. It was hard to see the memories that victims of AIDS have left behind; especially when I noticed on one panel, the person had been born the same year as me, but her life had been cut short in 1998. Even after one full year of service, acknowledging the full impact of this virus is very difficult.

Until next time,

xx

Team DC