Home Away From Home
There is no doubt that the trip has been a way for us to give back to our larger community, to bond with each other, and to use the last bit of our winter break to do more than binge watch the last of our Netflix shows. It’s also a really fun time exploring a part of the country I’ve never been to. Whether it has been people watching at Walmart or speaking to local volunteers at the Habitat Restore, Vero Beach has been consistently interesting, hilarious and already a comfortable home for us. However, while I’ve enjoyed exploring here, my favorite memory so far has been outside of a chain store. We gathered outside of a Panera Bread on Wednesday for our daily evening meeting, and decided that we really needed to speak about the Habitat homes that we were working on, about the organization as a whole and the families that we were working with. We sat as Molly, one of our really great chaperones, read out loud some general Habitat facts and figures. We weren’t able to get past the second fact before breaking off until a dozen more conversations. By the time we had finished I knew much more about our trip and hopeful impact, and more importantly more about my peers and chaperones than I expected to. We covered family topics, socioeconomic relationships at Babson and beyond, and the impacts of our work here. I know that I left that conversation feeling much more comfortable with both the work we were doing, and the knowledge that I would be returning to campus with people who truly cared about each other and the community that we were building together both in Vero Beach and in Wellesley, Mass.
-Vero Beach, Florida Habitat for Humanity Trip Participant