Freshmen volunteer for local charities

The sight that greeted the group of freshmen volunteering in the small garden behind Boxcar Books and Community Center was not a pretty one.

Grass and weeds crawled up trunks of small trees and sneaked their way onto the edges of the parking lot. The ground the freshmen were to mulch was not even visible.
Maren Pink, a Boxcar volunteer overseeing the yard work, pulled a small — but sharp — scythe out of her car. “Who knows how to use one of these?” she asked.

Ben Wittman, a psychology major from Evansville, stepped forward, raising his hand to offer his expertise. Pink handed him the tool, and he examined it closely.

“I think this is something you really just learn by doing,” he said, before chopping his way through the waist-high brush.

These students were just one part of the 11 groups of volunteers for New Student Service Day, the annual day of community service organized by the Office of First Year Experience. A total of 195 freshmen volunteered this year.

Some of the new students were sent to work at the Bloomington Playwrights Project, others at the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. Group seven was assigned to help at Boxcar Books, a volunteer-run, not-for-profit bookstore that is only a 15-minute walk from campus.

At the store, Boxcar Volunteer Coordinator Taylor Dean explained what work needed to be done. The focus would be on the gardens, she said, particularly the area behind the store that was desperately in need of weeding and mulching.

“It’s really just an unused space right now,” Dean said. “We’d like to put benches and plant berry bushes — make it a wildlife habitat for local animals like birds and rabbits. Just make it useful for folks and conducive for animal living.”

Most students asked to work outside, but five of them, including South Dakota native Mike Digatono, stayed indoors to help organize the bookshelves.

Dean told the freshmen to pick a section of books they were most interested in, so they fanned out to browse the selection before making a decision. Digatono wandered over to the magazine shelf and picked up a copy of a feminist magazine titled “Bitch,” looking at the title with a look of mild surprise and amusement.

A few feet away from Digatono, another freshman, Tayler Glover of Cicero, Ind. — the only volunteer of group seven who hoped she would get assigned to Boxcar Books — browsed the religion and philosophy section.

“I came in here yesterday,” she said, explaining why she hoped to do her service work at the store. “I really like how they are fine talking about different topics. I come from a pretty conservative place, but I’m interested in different kinds of philosophy and religion. I just like learning.”

Soon the book organizers had all picked a section to work on. Music by the band Wilco played over the store’s speakers, while the volunteers verified books were in alphabetical order and were placed on the correct shelf. Digatono had joined Glover at the philosophy and religion section, and each took a different shelf. Glover occasionally took a break from the organizing to read the backs of books on topics like liberalism.

Within an hour and a half of the students’ arrival at Boxcar, the weeds and out-of-control grass in the back were nonexistent. Some volunteers placed sliced-up cardboard boxes on the barren ground in preparation for laying down the mulch.
Having traded in his scythe for a shovel, Wittman stood near his classmates at the pile of mulch. The group discussed senior pranks and skip days, with the conversation eventually falling on bomb threats in high school.

“You know,” he said, leaning on his shovel. “I think every American kid has been through a bomb threat.” Nods of agreement from each freshman spread around the mulch pile.

By the time the store opened at 11 a.m., the volunteers’ work was done. Both the front and back garden areas had been transformed, and many shelves inside the store were reorganized.

“It was really difficult to get out of bed this morning,” Digatono said, reflecting on the day. “But it was totally worth it.”