Obama's Day of Service: Toddler-Style

President-Elect Obama, as most of you no doubt know, called for a day of service today, and Darcy and I answered the call! Friends of ours through our Meetup group announced that they were going to help clean up some dunes near the Las Vegas airport, so we decided to join them. Darcy and Freyja helped a lot -- by carrying small trash bags for a hundred feet or so and losing most of the small pieces of trash they put in them. Good work, toddlers! The rest of the time, they played in the sand or, in Darcy's case, followed dogs.

After all that work, they were tuckered out, so they took a well-earned rest in the shade of a creosote bush. It was a pretty warm day and due to an exploding juice box that left a sticky lake in my backpack, we weren't carrying water with us.

Their rest was interupted by the arrival of these three dogs -- the same dogs Darcy had been following earlier in the adventure. Darcy wanted to pet them and invite licks, but Freyja wasn't quite so sure. Along with our two big and two small bags of trash, the group collected a few truck-loads! As we left, the organizer of the clean-up told us that they're in the process of turning that little dunes area into a nature reserve/center, so this was a good first step.

While the turnout (over twenty people came out to just this one of several service projects in Las Vegas) was encouraging, we also saw signs of the bad economy. We left a pile of "trash" that was pretty clearly someone's home, complete with a blowup mattress and cooler. We refrained from collecting the empty bottles and such that were scattered under the same thorn bush to avoid an invasion of what little privacy someone living in a park has. I can't imagine that Las Vegas is a very friendly place to be homeless. Probably the soon-to-be-nature-center would have preferred that we remove that, but it didn't feel in keeping with the spirit of Obama's inauguration or Dr. King's holiday.