March Blog: Semester Update

Monthly Community Service Hours: 5 Hours Cumulative Spring Semester Service Hours Completed: 11 Hours Hi everyone! The weather is getting hotter and the semester is coming to an end. We started off the month enjoying our Mardi Gras Break where I was able to volunteer with Second Harvest and also enjoy the Mardi Gras season. After break we started our last medical pharmacology and principle module on psychiatry. In this module we learned able antipsychotics, antidepressants, anxiolytic, CNS stimulated, hallucinogens, and most importantly toxidromes. Ending the module with toxidromes was great because we got to review some of the antidotes that we learned throughout the whole program. I appreciated this review and their pre-comprehensive final exam review that Dr. Clarkson gave last week to help prepare for our comprehensive final exam in a few weeks. Now that we have fewer classes, we have extra days to study for our final and wrap up our remaining service hours for the semester. Second Harvest’s Riley Foods Kitchen is a community kitchen that helps produce thousands of meals a week for after school Kids Cafe, disaster survivors, and multiple senior citizen homes. During Mardi Gras Break, I helped the kitchen make balanced meals to send out to many senior citizen homes in the Greater New Orleans Area. Starting the day, bright and early at 6:15am, the other volunteers and I put on our aprons, gloves, and hair nets and waited to be placed in an assembly line. Prior to our arrival, the kitchen staff prepared the food that were to be packed into trays. They prepared penne pasta, shrimp alfredo, peas and corn, and dinner rolls. Throughout the assembly line. Each person was given a role in order to fill the trays. My role was to unpack, separate, and place dinner rolls in each tray after it was filled with the alfredo pasta and before the vegetables were added. After each tray was filled, the kitchen staff loaded the trays into the food tray sealer and then were taken up by drivers to deliver them to their destination. We continued doing this in our second shift also. Our group of 25 volunteers were able to produce over 800 meals during both shifts. The frequent volunteers informed me that they hadn’t seen this many volunteers in months and I was grateful to be a part of it!