Volunteering Stories: Part 2

Today was the scavenger's hunt. At first, I was thinking that it was going to be very lame. What high schoolers participated in a scavenger hunt? Then I thought more about it, and I realized that at least it was an interesting way to get to know the hospital. So I became a little more excited about it. Who knows? Maybe it was going to be fun. So I went with a happy heart, expecting the worst yet hoping for the best. When I got there, we first did a tour in three separate groups. Sadly, my siblings got to be in the same group, but I was in a different one. Also, a girl I knew from my tutoring place was at Milford's, which was a big surprise. I saw this kid a couple of times at my tutor's place, and here we met again! Well, we didn't even talk much anyways (we were never close in the first place), and I quickly got over her. The tour itself wasn't great, as the tour guide didn't take us to a lot of different places. She was very nice but very by-the-book, meaning that we couldn't take any shortcuts. That got annoying really quickly. Also, every kid in my group except for this one kid was antisocial, making the whole tour silent and awkward.

After the tour, we were separated into pairs to start our scavenger hunt. I got paired with the one social kid in my group, which, looking back now, was probably the best possibility for me. Being an antisocial kid, having another antisocial partner would have been awful. The scavenger hunt itself was what I originally expected it to be: tedious and boring. The hospital is so confusing, and there is no map to guide you. All we had was a cheat sheet telling you the location of each department. But the bad part was, they were notated by which elevator and floor they were in, meaning that we had to look all around the elevator to try and find the specific department. Also, we had to look for the items in a specific order which had you walk all across the hospital. By the end of it, I was exhausted and was ready to quit. Did the scavenger hunt help me learn more about Milford's? Yeah. But could there have been a better way of introducing new volunteers like myself to the hospital? Absolutely.