This last saturday, January 5th, I had my first shift as a High School Volunteer for the Seattle Aquarium.
Scary as hell.
I’d gone through a grand total of three trainings mind you…but three was definitely not enough for me to feel prepared. I waved my nifty little badge to open the door to get in, I walked inside and stepped onto the sanitizing pad, I signed in on one of the fancy sign-in computer, I walked upstairs to the teen lounge with the amazing view from pier 59, I took a deep breath and it was time to get to work.
The Seattle Aquarium was just finishing up with their winter event known as “Fishtival,” So all of us teen voluteers were helping out with the special events taking place. It was bird day so we were in charge of running the bird related activities for the kids. I actually ended up having a really amazing time and got used to everything really quickly. Little children are amazing in their differences. You start to notice how each one of them have their own little quirks. There was this one activity where we were pretending to be birds hunting for food. It involves using various kitchen utinsils to fish out plastic bugs buried in this huge tub of rice. The point is to teach kids about how different birds have different beaks that can get different types of food. But give kids some rice and platic bugs and trust me–they really could care less about the lesson behind it. I had one little girl inform me that birds were icky for eating bugs. But yet she couldn’t stop picking up the bugs with the tongs. Then there were little kids that would just kick and scream when their parents made them leave to see the rest of the aquarium. That rice is just way too much fun. It was interesting though to see how each kid handled his or herself though. I know that everybody has a tendancy to kind of lump kids behavior into a certain stereotype…but as i quickly learned. They’re all very different.
I did a bunch of other stuff too…like pass out binoculars made from toilet paper tubes and colorful string so kids(and adults) could go birdwatching. I also passed out prizes for finding all of the birds at the aquarium. It’s fun to see peoples faces when you tell them you can keep something like crappy toilet paper role binoculars. They get sooo excited…it’s like they’ve won the lottery. I think I should just randomly give people toilet paper rolls on a day to day basis. Because that happiness was the coolest thing to experience. I don’t think it would have the same effect outside of the aquarium though :[
I got to talk about oil too, and it's harmful effects on our marine environment. That was really disheartening...people just don't seem to care. Little kids would seem intrigued but then their parents would yawn or sound bored and you could tell that they really didn't care. The little kids would then pick up on that and would start to seem really apathetic as well. And in my head I was just sooo disgusted by how people were reacting to what I was saying and it made me really sad.
Despite that, I had such a wonderful time. I can't even believe that I'm doing this, it's crazy. The atmosphere is so amazing and the people around me have such spirit and it's obvious they all want to be there just as much as me. There were definitely a few exceptions but for the most part, we were all just there doing something good, having a good time doing it.
I'm excited for the rest of this year!! It's gonna be fun :]
