Volunteering with Style

Hello there, fellow Vinceremos lovers!

Vinceremos is a wonderful place to learn new things and get volunteer hours. J I’ve been volunteering there to get community service hours for my college. One beautiful afternoon, I was volunteering with my friend, and we had some exciting adventures at Vinceremos. We helped out with the horses and the riders as usual, but there was some down-time for chores. First, that afternoon, we went around and checked the waters in the different paddocks. My jaw dropped though when I saw two lambs with their mother in one of the paddocks! They were real and soft and ba-a-ed, and I got to hold one! Vinceremos is so educational because I had seen sheep and lambs in movies, but I had never been so close to one. Its nose was pink and soft. Joy electrified all my senses when I knelt on green grass and held that lamb in the warm sunshine.

However, that was not our only adventure. Later, it was dinner time for the horses, and my friend and I were feeding the ones in the temporary stalls underneath the covered arena. Each horse has its own bucket so we decided the line the buckets up in front of the stall doors (not a good idea). That way, we thought, we could just feed the horses all at once. So…my friend and I are going to each stall and feeding each horse. She was at one end of the row of stalls, and I was walking back to the other end when I saw something that made me frown. I thought, “Why can I see a horse’s head and shoulders?” I called back to my friend, “Uh…I think we have a problem.” Trouble (of course that would be the horse’s name) had knocked the stall door open (somehow) to get to the feed bucket standing outside! I didn’t want to spook him so I walked calmly over and picked up the feed bucket. He followed me right into the stall. I was like, “Yes!” It was so funny. I yelled back to my friend, “All right. We’re good.” She hadn’t even realized what was going on. Then I was walking back towards her to finish feeding the other horses when I saw that Tilly had gotten a little excited too. Somehow, that horse had managed to wrap sticky fly tape all up in her mane. She must have been trying to get to her feed bucket too and the fly tape was probably hanging on the stall wall. My jaw was hanging open again. I was like, “What? You too?” I went into the stall and tried to get the tape off of her head (me, who knows next to nothing about horses). It was stuck…really stuck. I had to get another volunteer to help me, but my word, once she got it off, that horse’s hair looked so funny. According to one volunteer (who shall not be named), Tilly’s hair already looks funny, but with all that sticky residue in it, it looked like an ‘80s afro’. 

So that was our eventful afternoon. Life can be funny sometimes, and I really enjoy having some of those laughs at Vinceremos. It’s my favorite place to volunteer, and I plan on getting a lot more hours there. Thank you, Vinceremos!

Heather R. Lawrence