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Health & Fitness

It's In Our Nature To Help

At this week's Green Up Clean Up we saw several examples of children volunteering to participate in the community park clean up. It was great!

We had a great Green Up Clean Up at Barry Park on Saturday.  Over 20 adults and children helped pull weeds, spread mulch, pick up trash and prune hedges and trees.  We were thrilled to have mulch and equipment from the City - although we wanted much more than we got, the mulch is definitely and improvement.  And Whole Foods donated apples and oranges to the hard workers.

What I found particiularly touching were the children who were at the park to play who decided that they would rather help with the clean up.  One mother was expecting to supervise her 2 year old on the playground while her husband helped out.   She was pleasantly surprised to find that her son was more interested in helping to spread mulch and pull weeds than he was interested in the playground equipment.  They both donned gloves helped the effort for almost 2 hours!

Two students from Medford High School came to help out to earn some of their required service hours. I checked in with them about an hour after they arrived and mentioned that perhaps the work was a little harder than some of their other options might have been.  Their response "It's hard, but it's worth it.  We live right around the corner, so this is our park too."

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My favorite was Johnny.  He appeared to be about 6 or 7 and pretty much on his own (I learned later that an older boy was keeping an eye on him).  He came over and started helping out with the mulch.   When I asked the children for volunteers to help use poker sticks to pick up trash, he stepped right up.   He was eager to learn how to use the pokers and to help clean  up near the basketball courts.  Eventually the boy who was with him came over and asked if he could help too.   When I told them that we had to wrap things up and put away the tools they wanted to know if we would be doing this again.  I told them we'd be at Cummings Park in two weeks, June 18 from 9-11am.  The younger one asked if I would write a note to his mother about the clean up so that she'd let him go!   I was thrilled to write them the note and they both said they'd be there!

It's great when parents bring their children out to service events, the way I do with my children.  However, when the children are the ones bringing their parents it let's me know that it is really in our nature to help others and reminds me of what is great in this world.

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Here are some of the up coming Clean Ups that you can participate in:

  • June 18th - 9-11 AM Cummings Park - Laura Brebreton
  • June 18th - 1:30-3:30 PM Roberts School Grounds - Jaeda Hamel
  • August 27th - Tufts Park
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