Acción Solidaria

I want to start off by thanking Emily for thoroughly explaining how to use the accent marks (notice the title and its appropriate tilde).

You may be asking yourself what 'acción solidaria' is, well I was asking myself that same thing up until about yesterday afternoon when I was able to see first hand what exactly it is. Acción Solidaria is a community outreach. A chance for us to reach out into our community and help out with whatever we can.

This is done in many different ways. Some classmates are working closely with a nursing home, others are tutoring young children, others are mentoring troubled teenagers, and then there is the ONCE, which is my outreach. Organizacion National de Ciegos de España. Again in english Organization National of Blinds of Spain (perfect translation sounds funky but you get the picture). This is going to be where I will be helping out once a week on Mondays for the next few months with whatever I can. One of the men in charge gave me and the other person helping from our group a little synopsis of what we might encounter while helping out. It varies between simply going to the blind person's house and taking them to a doctors appointment, simply accompanying them to the park, taking them to listen to concerts, or even to play soccer! We are the eyes. Now I need to explain the last activity about playing soccer with blind people. Completely foreign to me on all cylinders. The only difference is that blind soccer consists of a ball that has a siren or beeping noise and on a smaller field. He told us that as the guides, we may be involved by either being blindfolded to level the playing field, or we may be the designated ones to direct the blinds to where the goal is. Either one of those sounds like a blast to do. 

I'm looking forward to seeing what lies a head of me with this ministry.