We spent today at the “Neighborhood Christian Center”. They have a mission each year to create a spring break experience for children in the community who can’t afford to go anywhere for spring break by travel. They are able to recreate that experience by simulating different locations around the world such as Italy, France, and others. This Spring, they wanted to simulate the experience of traveling to different locations throughout the U.S. like Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles.

Starting off the morning at the Neighborhood Christian Center we all worked on different things. A group of us worked on putting plaster on a Lincoln memorial statue to imitate marble. Another smaller group worked on building and taping boxes to be used in the statue replications. We made around 450 boxes. Another group of people took real branches and hot glued cherry blossoms on each branch to create miniature cherry blossom tress, just like the ones you could see while you are walking around D.C.  Four of us went to The Manna House where we helped the unhoused by providing daily necessities, showers, coffee and haircuts, we later met up with the rest of the group at lunch at “The Four Way” before returning to the Neighborhood Christian Center to finish our work.

For lunch we went to a local soul food restaurant called Four Way, located in one of the poorest zip codes in Tennessee. Some had chicken and catfish along with the restaurant’s classic southern sides. We had beans and cornbread and slaw and fries and mac and cheese and green beans fired chicken and baked chicken and sweet tea and half and half sweet tea and lemonade we had refills and met the owner. He told us about the famous people who ate there, like Kyrie Irving, Drake, Kevin Durant and Martin Luther King Jr. The Four Way restaurant was the last meal MLK had before his assassination.

In the afternoon we went back to the Neighborhood Christan Center and we continued our work prepping the gym. We spent the majority of the afternoon taping and repairing a giant flag that is supposed to be a part of the immersive experience. At the very end of the day, we finally put the flag up and watched our efforts turn into reality.

Tomorrow we will be going back to Junior Achievement and helping out run another BizTown field trip for kids. After we will head to the airport. Through our challenges and achievements, we have learned the importance of giving back to the communities around us. We learned to not make the situation about ourselves but rather about the people we  are serving. We hope to take away the kindness, gratitude and love that people poured into us back to the Regis community.