It was dreary outside. The temperature dropped 10 degrees, it was half sprinkling with odd bursts of wind and the sky was a hazy gray. It didn’t seem like a good day to spend a few hours outside raking leaves.

But the thing is, you don’t do community service because it’s easy or convenient, you do it because it’s necessary. Granted, our job wasn’t backbreaking or particularly hard, just tedious- but tedious and important. Our job was to re-beautify a neglected GIAC area, something necessary for the community; we had to clean up a dirty area and weed the gardens, just so the outside can match the inside, and make kids feel a little bit better about going there after school.

I think the best part was the last 10 minutes- when the director of GIAC talked to us about why Into the Streets even exists and how important it was that we were there. She thanked us for spending our Sunday afternoon raking leaves and reminded us that the center overworks itself in a lot of ways- there are a lot of needs in the community that need to be met and a lot of the small things, like fall maintenance, get overlooked. And that’s where we come in. It’s our job to help in any way we can.