ELEVATE 2008

For 4 yrs now my church has does an event called Elevate, which allows the high school students to raise money for the youth group & give back to the community by doing community service.

Today we worked from 8AM-4PM doing all sorts of different projects... picking up trash, planting trees (170 of them to be exact!), washing cars, putting down mulch, picking up more trash...

My group's "assignment" was to go along the Fox River & pick up any & every piece of trash that we might see. My team was dropped off at our site & once we all got off the bus & were about to start working I looked over at my co-leader, Brandon, and asked, "Do we even have any trash bags??" haha turns out we were supposed to grab some before we left the church & neither of us did.... oops. So we ended up having to wait for someone to come & bring us trash bags- oh well.


*girls wondering where the trash bags are

Once we received our trash bags we went straight to work! & wow sadly there was a TON of trash! we quickly filled up all of our trash bags & yet again had to wait for someone to bring us more.

We found a lot of interesting things today! Things such as: candy wrappers, beer bottles, pop cans, several dead fish, dirty diapers, underwear, t-shirts, flip-flops, shoes, plastic grocery bags, a lei, an apple, couple banana peels, two tires, a basketball, a light, a computer mother board, a pillow, a dead heron, two live snakes, dead baby bird & squirrel, a duck's nest with 5 eggs inside, straws, pieces of styrofoam, a lawn chair, a bucket, McDonalds wrappers, plastic cups, fishing wire & hook, tupperware, plates, gloves & other articles of clothing... basically you name it, we found it.

I'm not gonna lie, it was a REALLY long day & it smelled & was pretty gross at times, but I had a blast hanging out & getting to know the people on my team. It also was neat to look back on what we had cleaned up & to see the improvement that was made & how much nicer the river looked without so much trash. It was definitely a dirty job & we were all covered in mud some way or the other but we had a fun time!! Giving back & serving others is ALWAYS a good time.


*as you can see we got a little messy