An Excellent, Emotional Service Project
Today, January 19, 2019, I undertook a rather large community service project in Oakland. This project, above all others, was one I found very meaningful because it is relevant to something I am very interested in: music.
Above all else, congratulations to Jordan of my troop of Scouts for organizing and carrying out this project. For the rank of Eagle Scout, it is mandatory that each candidate plan and execute a massive service project from scratch. His project will have a huge impact on a local middle school that will only increase throughout time.
Essentially, this project was to revitalize the music room and general music program at a local middle school. An itemized list of everything I helped do was as follows: we were going to repair every music stand in a school of 600 students, clean gum off the carpets (a gross job), clean the cabinets, repaint the doors to existing cabinets to make them nicer, and build two new shelves from scratch, each designed for a different purpose-- one for storing sheet music, the other for large instruments such as a trombone.
I started off working on the music stands. In order to clean off the music stands, we would need to disassemble them entirely, then hammer some of their components to make them ideal for storing sheet music, sand them, wipe them off, prime them, repaint them, and then tediously reassemble nearly 100 music stands by hand. The worst part of this by far was repainting the music stands. We used spray paint to do this and the unhealthy dust lingered and annoyed everyone who helped with the project. I worked on wiping down the music stands. Eventually, once somebody else and I had wiped down every disassembled music stand in the entire building, I turned to other smaller tasks, including stirring paint, painting the doors to cabinets to make them nicer, and scrubbing gunk in the cabinets.
After roughly three hours and ten minutes, mealtime had arrived. As I usually do while volunteering for projects, I intentionally tried to eat my lunch as quickly as was safe so that I could return to lunch as quickly as possible. As such, my entire lunch was one slice of pizza. We ordered ten whole pizzas for roughly 40 people who stayed through lunch, so at least 400 slices, if not more, and I ate just one, not even touching the soft drinks, chips, or fruits that were there. I ate the slice and quickly returned to work.
Suddenly, a massive exodus occurred. Most of the people there left shortly before or after the lunch break, leaving the few who remained, including me, to complete the second half of the project. We let the music stands dry for some time to make the reassembly process easier, so instead, I turned to help assemble the two shelves for the next hour.
When it became time to reassemble the music stands, I started and immediately ended up with black fragments of paint all over my hands, a problem that I quickly circumvented by wearing work gloves that made any sort of dexterity task much more difficult. This was a dexterity task. We should all appreciate the music stands that we see everywhere-- in schools, orchestras, and recording studios-- because assembling them is an extremely tedious process. Even with 10-14 people helping at times, it still took almost an hour to resurrect the music stands, returning to their glory after we applied the new layer of paint. The process of reassembling a single music stand required perfectly aligning two gold rings with a central circle, then attaching a round plate to a screw, pushing the screw through (much easier said than done), including the other gold ring, then reapplying another round plate, using a nut to secure the other plate, and tightening the nut. This was very annoying.
Nevertheless, after hours of work, we completed the project. The shelves look more amazing than words can describe while also being practical for their design. We finished at roughly 2:20, and cleanup prevented me from departing until 3:15. For context, I started at 8:35-- it took me 400 minutes to complete this project. Yet I really enjoyed this. The school's music teacher seemed overjoyed by my work and I am so happy about the way this turned out.
Congratulations Jordan!
NH
Above all else, congratulations to Jordan of my troop of Scouts for organizing and carrying out this project. For the rank of Eagle Scout, it is mandatory that each candidate plan and execute a massive service project from scratch. His project will have a huge impact on a local middle school that will only increase throughout time.
Essentially, this project was to revitalize the music room and general music program at a local middle school. An itemized list of everything I helped do was as follows: we were going to repair every music stand in a school of 600 students, clean gum off the carpets (a gross job), clean the cabinets, repaint the doors to existing cabinets to make them nicer, and build two new shelves from scratch, each designed for a different purpose-- one for storing sheet music, the other for large instruments such as a trombone.
I started off working on the music stands. In order to clean off the music stands, we would need to disassemble them entirely, then hammer some of their components to make them ideal for storing sheet music, sand them, wipe them off, prime them, repaint them, and then tediously reassemble nearly 100 music stands by hand. The worst part of this by far was repainting the music stands. We used spray paint to do this and the unhealthy dust lingered and annoyed everyone who helped with the project. I worked on wiping down the music stands. Eventually, once somebody else and I had wiped down every disassembled music stand in the entire building, I turned to other smaller tasks, including stirring paint, painting the doors to cabinets to make them nicer, and scrubbing gunk in the cabinets.
After roughly three hours and ten minutes, mealtime had arrived. As I usually do while volunteering for projects, I intentionally tried to eat my lunch as quickly as was safe so that I could return to lunch as quickly as possible. As such, my entire lunch was one slice of pizza. We ordered ten whole pizzas for roughly 40 people who stayed through lunch, so at least 400 slices, if not more, and I ate just one, not even touching the soft drinks, chips, or fruits that were there. I ate the slice and quickly returned to work.
Suddenly, a massive exodus occurred. Most of the people there left shortly before or after the lunch break, leaving the few who remained, including me, to complete the second half of the project. We let the music stands dry for some time to make the reassembly process easier, so instead, I turned to help assemble the two shelves for the next hour.
When it became time to reassemble the music stands, I started and immediately ended up with black fragments of paint all over my hands, a problem that I quickly circumvented by wearing work gloves that made any sort of dexterity task much more difficult. This was a dexterity task. We should all appreciate the music stands that we see everywhere-- in schools, orchestras, and recording studios-- because assembling them is an extremely tedious process. Even with 10-14 people helping at times, it still took almost an hour to resurrect the music stands, returning to their glory after we applied the new layer of paint. The process of reassembling a single music stand required perfectly aligning two gold rings with a central circle, then attaching a round plate to a screw, pushing the screw through (much easier said than done), including the other gold ring, then reapplying another round plate, using a nut to secure the other plate, and tightening the nut. This was very annoying.
Nevertheless, after hours of work, we completed the project. The shelves look more amazing than words can describe while also being practical for their design. We finished at roughly 2:20, and cleanup prevented me from departing until 3:15. For context, I started at 8:35-- it took me 400 minutes to complete this project. Yet I really enjoyed this. The school's music teacher seemed overjoyed by my work and I am so happy about the way this turned out.
Congratulations Jordan!
NH
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