By:  Jayla Anderson

Today was a very emotional, captivating and eye opening experience. We started our day off with a morning mass at 9 a.m. I have never been to mass before, so I knew this would be a new view of church for me. I enjoyed how welcoming everyone was, and I felt that, even though I am not Catholic, I was comfortable to ask questions about things that I didn’t understand. It really helped me to understand more fully that although not everyone has the same faith traditions, we really are united by the grace of God. Afterwards, we got the opportunity to eat real Latino food– which was amazing. The greatest part about it was the all the money goes to fundraise for the school that is right across from the church. I didn’t get the chance unfortunately to talk to some of the local people around the neighborhood, but others did and they made wonderful connections and shared some of the things that they learned with our group so we could have a better understanding of the community.


Later, during our day, we went to volunteer at the Union Rescue Mission. This, from what I gathered in talking to some of the people, is a homeless facility that helps four different categories of people. These are those who have jobs but don’t have homes, families without housing, homeless women and homeless men. On the way to the mission we got to see true