April 2022

April: 9 hours

CCANO Food Bank: 3 hours

Card Project: 2 hours

FQF Green Team: 4 hours

Spring Cumulative: 12 hours 

With one final blog post, the semester is over! It has been an eventful year, to say the least, but even with everything going on it feels like it went by in a flash. With our final exams and presentations all slowing down by the end of the semester, there was much more time available to take on community service. For the month of April, I took part in a few different community service opportunities to wrap up the year.

First of all, I once again participated in the class card project, which was an overall great opportunity to not only participate in community service but spend some time doing it alongside many of my peers in the program. 

I also volunteered with the Green Team at French Quarter Fest for an afternoon, which was a great experience! As someone not from New Orleans originally, I had not expected French Quarter Fest to be such a huge event for the city so soon after Mardi Gras. As part of the Green Team, I was involved in helping keep the festival free of litter in my assigned zone, as well as helping festival attendees sort their trash appropriately. FQF had instituted a system that was sorting trash into recyclables and composting, in order to minimize the amount of waste going to landfills. While I wasn't able to experience the festival on the day of my shift, I was able to get an idea of where everything was during my shift, and I made sure to make it out to French Quarter Fest the following day. 

I once again volunteered with CCANO as a food packer to round out the year. I had previously worked packing food with CCANO, but it had previously been working with the senior food packing program. This time around, I was at the CCANO Food Pantry in Metairie; to my surprise, most of those we were providing service to (as well as all of the volunteers working with me) were primarily Spanish speakers. This was especially great for me since I had spent so much time over the course of the year trying to volunteer as an interpreter, but unfortunately, opportunities were limited. 

That being said, I am going to be volunteering as an interpreter with CCANO, working with a newly-hired case manager, as well as providing interpretation support to the Immigration & Refugee Services legal team. While I was not able to get this started before the end of the program and get involved with this as a long-term project over the course of the year (as I had hoped to do), I'm glad that I finally have the opportunity to move forward with this!

Despite all the challenges and circumstances that we've had to deal with this semester, it still feels strange to go, but I would still call my year in New Orleans at Tulane a resounding successe I have returned back home to Tennessee to resume my work there, so I'll be returning to New Orleans for our graduation ceremony. With the program over, there is still even more work to be done in preparing for the MCAT and applying for medical school! 


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