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Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” Some students at NS have found this saying to be true, as they have immersed themselves in serving their community.
Junior Lydia Madsen was recently crowned Miss Fairview last February and has big service plans for her platform Lend-A-Hand. Some of her projects include tutoring at the elementary schools, volunteering at the food bank, and helping out with a local art program for children.
“I really enjoy being out and about in the community,” Madsen said. “I like to be hands on at all the events that happen because I really love my town.” Madsen is excited for the opportunity to serve as Miss Fairview because she gets to go and do things that she wouldn’t have the chance to do otherwise.
Student body president and senior Diana Montano shares similar feelings about serving her school and community. Montano is a representative of Latinos in Action, a class as well as a club offered at NS. Latinos in Action is a program which aims to help out young students on their journey through school.
“Our big thing in Latinos in Action is service,” Montano said. “We just want to help out the future generation get to college and see that it is a possibility.” Montano has been a part of Latinos in Action since her middle school years where she fell in love with the program. She is not able to go to the elementary schools as much as she would like, because of her role as an SBO.
The Latinos in Action class goes every B-day to the Mt. Pleasant and Spring City elementary schools.
“At the elementary schools they pair us up with a kid who has low reading scores and we get to read with them for half an hour,” Montano said. “Whenever you see them pass their mark they had from the day before, they get so happy, even if they just passed it by one word. That one word is their motivation for the rest of the day and the week.”
Madsen has similar feelings as she tutors the Fairview elementary school kids.
“I just love kids in general,” Madsen said. “I just love being able to help them out with something that they may be struggling with.”
Anyone can agree that by helping others you are also helping yourself.
“There’s days where I’m really stressed out and having a hard time,” Madsen said. “But if I go and do service I forget about my problems, and I help lift the burden off of someone else’s back, which is really cool and it just makes me all around happy.”
National honors society treasurer and senior Gaby Reyes came up with a service project idea for the members of the national honors society which involves making blankets and animal paper plates for patients at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City.
“I remembered that in middle school we made blankets in Mrs. Hansen’s [class],” Reyes said. “I thought that would be cool to do.”
Reyes agrees with both Madsen and Montano that service is a way to show the community that they care. Reyes has learned that service is more than just words on a piece of paper.
“At first we were doing a lot of community service projects to make it look good for our sterling scholar portfolios,” Reyes said. “But now it’s just to give back to the community. They’ve done so much for us and so I feel like we need to do the same.”
