Friday August 17th

Today I started training for my position at PCC.  This school year I'm working with their student government to be the events coordinator for the Rock Creek Campus. Today it was an in-service training with all the other campuses and their student leaders. It was nice to meet new people and I was excited to get to know who I was working with better. We started out the day doing leadership games with all the other campuses. In the afternoon each student group from each campus did their own service project. Our supervisor Mandy had arranged for our group from Rock Creek to spend the afternoon scrubbing tombstones at the Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland. I found out that Mandy did tours there, being that the cemetery was also an  historic site. We spent some time learning about the history of the place, learning that the families such as Burnside, Hawthorne, and Lovejoy  were buried there, finding out that people held their liquor in tombstones during the prohibition era.It was interesting to learn a little bit about Portland's past, before getting started.
Our group ended up scrubbing about 8 tombstones that day, and it was nice to see the engravings on the stone after all the moss was gone. We had a passerby, thank us for the job we were doing that day.
                 After cleaning up, Mandy had us regroup before heading back. After learning all those stories about the people that were buried there, and seeing the sayings and words on the tombstones, she told us that are actions and  what we do  make us. What type of mark are we going to make in the world? How are people going to see us when we are gone? Every little thing we do has an effect somehow, either on someone else's life, the environment, etc. I see it as a ripple effect. If we are mindful and think before we act, it can help us to leave a positive mark instead of a negative one.