Volunteering and Travel
Many people just slide through life without purpose. Some days it’s nice to be completely absent minded and just exist. That can be a life. As we get older, and less self centered, we have realized that helping others helps us be ‘centered’ and find a purpose to our lives.
Before we started living full time on the road, we donated unneeded stuff to ministries. Dropped clothing off at places that resale and claim to help the less fortunate. We have helped churches build, helped teach children, given hugs to kids that thought themselves unloved.
Along the way we wanted to help somewhere. Not sure where to get involved while traveling, we put this idea to the side and sorta forgot about it for a while. Being mobile in our home state, we saw the people in homeless camps. We saw the people with dogs that would rather feed their pup than eat. An idea formed and was put in place. We started carrying blessing bags. We handed these out and helped one person at a time. It was a great addition to our travels but did not fill the void we had in our purpose.
One of the YouTube creators we follow posted about a seRV project that they started with a friend. Finding Our Someday had teamed up with Paws For Love and Lippert and created a way for the RV community to get together and make a difference in the communities that we enjoy being in. THIS sounded like something we would like to be a part of. Of course everything that was being done was way out side of our travel areas and dates, so we missed a few of the original meetups. (More about seRV on their website here.)
That was OK. It did give us a chance to do a bit more research and see how they are actually affecting the communities being volunteered in.
Then a line was said in a video. It went something like this… there will be a…blah blah blah…in Ocala, FL. Our ears perked up because that was only an hour up the road from where we were parked in the dates they gave.
Location looked good. Dates looked good. Now, do we trust and like the organizations that were to be helped?
This is where we knew we wanted to help. The organizations were: Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs, Interfaith Emergency Services, Silver Springs State Park
When signing up, of course, our son defiantly wanted to help with the dogs. Everyone would help at the springs.
On the day of the seRV event a dozen or so large trucks and families lined up in the parking lot to head to the Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs. Check out their website here for more information. We participated in 3 different things at this organization. Location clean up, dog distraction training, and dog interaction training. Our favorite of course was interaction training.
Cleaning was of course, cleaning. It is needed everywhere and sometimes gets neglected while other more important things are being done.
Dog distraction training had many of us using everyday items like walkers, buggies, and loud toys moving around the dog. This helps them learn to not get distracted in busy and noisy situations. When the dog is needed to perform a task, they need to know when to pay total attention to their ward.
Interaction training let the dog be a dog in the field. People were interacting like a normal non-working dog. This included playing fetch and running around playing around some obstacles.
Second contact day we all grouped together and helped out at Silver Springs State Park. This day was a lot of pulling weeds, cleaning up trails, window cleaning, and trash picking up. All the RV’ers gladly helped out in the state park because these are some of the protected outdoors areas that we enjoy using. Silver Springs is known for their glass bottom boat rides and a troop of monkeys out in the woods. Check out the Silver Springs State park website.
Getting to share experiences helping good organizations gives all of us a warm fuzzy feeling. What has been your favorite organization to lend a helping hand? Use the comments below to give ideas to others.
Websites:
seRV with a Purpose: https://servwithpurpose.com/
Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs: https://www.medicalservicedogs.org/
Silver Springs State Park: https://www.floridastateparks.org/silversprings
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