My Community Service Experience

Before I even knew community service was a requirement, i volunteered to go help on a day out with autistic children. The plan was that the kids and parents were going to meet the volunteers at a local bowling alley for a couple of games. The main point of this outing was to help the kids bowl, and get them away from their parents a little. The point was that WE should be the ones helping the kids, and let the parents sit back and relax. This was my first time dealing with autistic children so it was a handful at first. They don’t really have a regard for the right and wrong thing to do so they just do whatever they feel like, which ended up being annoying and cute at the same time. All the volunteers got assigned to a child and my child was a girl named Alyssa who was 5 years old. She was really cute, but i could tell right away that she wasn’t going to be easy to handle. She wanted to stay with her mother for the most part and didn’t really respond to me when I tried to talk to her. Finally, by the end of the game, I got her to take my hand and we bowled a pretty good shot together. Volunteering with autistic kids was a great experience. It helped me learn a lot about the disease but opened my eyes to the fact that just because a child is sick, doesn’t mean they’re not a child. They still like to laugh and play just like any other healthy kid. I’m really glad i volunteered my time to doing it.