SERVES Recap

by staff writer Jo Jungerman

Oh the memories.

When I think back on our week in Yakima, the first thing that comes to mind is an image of eight or nine people sitting around a table throwing little plastic cups back and forth. The “cup game” usually played after lunch on a full stomach, is a deceptively addicting game that can be played for hours on end. The object of the cup game is simple: Just throw your cup so it lands on top of the stack of cups set in the middle of the table. It’s harder than it sounds, but once you make it, you’re hooked. I think it took me about half an hour before I got my first successful landing, but, man, what a feeling.

The second image that comes to mind is Zara wearing my fuzzy polar bear hat. And my gloves. This prompted a trip to Target to buy more hats. Speaking of shopping malls, it seems that the only thing there is to do in Yakima (besides going to conferences) is go shopping. On our trip, we hit up not only Target, but Best Buy and Walmart as well. Come to think of it, one of my favorite things to do in Yakima is now go to Walmart and play the “play till you win” game that they have in the foyer, the one where you put in a dollar and you have to move the claw and drop it on the prize you want, grab it and move it back to the chute before it falls out. Jon and I won two big bouncy balls, one of them for free because the previous player had given up; we played on his dollar.

Another thing I remember about Yakima is raking all those leaves. Julie, Suzie, Stephanie, Rachel, Sonja, Kelsi and I participated in a service project with a chore services group on Wednesday afternoon. We drove to guy’s house and raked up his yard and dumped the leaves into his truck and were finished in about 15 minutes. Our driver from the chore services had expected us to take longer so she had to call her boss and ask for another job. We ended up driving to a mobile home park and raking up pretty much every single leaf in the park. We certainly felt accomplished after this. The only downside to the afternoon was having to deal with one very confused old man yelling at us from inside his mobile home: “What the !@#% are those girls doing in our yard??!” Luckily his wife was able to explain to him who we were and that we were raking his yard. He came outside and thanked us and tried to explain that brain doesn’t work properly because he has some sort of pulmonary disease. The he let us go in his house and look at his parrots.