Workday 3: City Park Botanic Garden

Today we woke up, ate a quick breakfast, and drove right to City Park, in the heart of New Orleans. City Park is larger than Central Park in New York, and it is a place of comfort and relaxation for the people of this city. They once had a staff of 385, but now they less than one hundred employees. This would be a small number in good times, but they are now left to deal with the devastation that was done by Katrina. They rely mainly on volunteers. We worked in the beautiful Botanic Gardens today. It is an area that was overgrown with weeds and needed a great deal of maintenance. Our crew persevered through the intense heat, and, in just three hours, we managed to do the work that it would take three employees four days to complete. The park employees were incredibly grateful; they couldn't believe that a group of students from Chicago were willing to spend their first days of summer vacation sweating in a garden. Many visitors to the park actually stopped to thank us for our hard work, and the kids should be very proud!