As our minivan passed the “You are now leaving Washington D.C.” sign, the only thought my mind could process after a week such as this was how much fresher the air smelled than the air myself and my fellow Alternative Spring Breakers were to return to in Jersey. Spring Break has made me a traitor to the state of my residency, for I do confess that I fell in love with the side of Washington D.C. that they had warned me about.
Why do I start this post at said numbing conclusion of the trip? Because how does one begin to tell a love story? How does one determine the moment a group of people are transformed from merely such to an emotionally-knit family? How does one describe the realization that the very place we came to enact positive change upon simultaneously enacted positivity upon us? Chronology will help with this, I suppose.
So we arrive at the hostel, and automatically begin to take pictures (13 people on the trip, guess how many cameras/camera phones), automatically channeling our inner tourists and stopping random people and shoving our flash devices into their hands.
After food shopping, washing up, making our first family dinner (which was absolutely delicious), we sat down for our pre-service reflection (which, now that I think about it, is kind of an oxymoron … whoa). In this reflection, we were told to share our expectations for the week and share what we sought to accomplish. Of course, the general consensus was that we all wanted to give a hand at altering the horrible conditions of the homeless population in Washington D.C.
Never could we have fathomed how much more the experience had in store for us.
- Christina Kelly & Nikita Patel
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