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This Columbus Day long-weekend four members of DeSales University took an alternative fall break with DSW. Three students, Tim, Helen and Meg, and a member of the University Service Learning team, Latoya, served in a variety of ways over the four days. They helped in the rehab of the parish hall, made and served lunches, participated at New Visions Day shelter, visited Oblate Mickey McGrath’s studio in South Camden, and toured Hopeworks back on our block. All this work and the touring encourages the people of Camden and gives volunteers insight into big urban issues. It also gives opportunity to get beyond “issues” to the level of people meeting people in Christian service.
This group from DSU initiated a project that will be taken up the last week in October. Campbell’s Soup has had a long association with this city. The soup factories that used to employ wave after |
wave of new Americans and whose aromas filled downtown air are now gone, but Campbell’s headquarters remains in Camden. They are sponsoring a service week this October for employees and neighborhoods. Our State Street area will benefit from this involvement.
One of the projects involves painting the boarded-up windows of abandoned buildings on our street. The DSU Salesian Service team contributed to this by working on a prototype by painting a house’s broken-down porch and adding color to the boards over the windows. We painted Salesian good thoughts to offer the positive, good-sense vision of St. Francis de Sales to our environment. This project does not fix the problem of these buildings---but the bright, clean color and uplifting words make a difference.
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