2 Christmas Service Activity in Rome

Activity: Organizing/Cleaning clothes for the Needy + Wrapping gifts for needy children
Type: Service
Supervisor: Marco Morrica (Cousin)
Hours: 5 hours a day X 3 days : 15 hours



This Christmas I travelled to Rome to spend Christmas eve with some of my family who lives there. Upon arrival, my cousin Marco - currently doing medicine studies - told me he was going to give a hand to a community who helps the needy. Christmas being a time of giving and receiving, I decided I needed to do a little more giving, especially for those less fortunate, and I therefore asked Marco if I could go along with him. We went to Trastevere (an area of Rome) and arrived in a small building where he introduced me to the community of helpers. Despite the language barrier (my Italian is a bit rusty), I was able to communicate and understand them and I quickly began helping them remove used clothes out of boxes, folding them, and placing them in the right area. Later on, once all the clothes were organized, the needy people of Rome who lacked clothes for themselves or their children could come to this storage unit and take whatever fit them and would help them through the cold winter. I've never been a big fan of folding clothes and am quite terrible at keeping my closet organized at home, but knowing that my efforts would help others made me much more motivated and now I'm more keen on folding and organizing clothes (even my own!) This took approximately 3 hours before we moved on to the next service spot a 5 minute walk away, where we would be wrapping gifts for children who needed them. Organized my a fellow service community, their aim was to create different gift packages for both boys and girls, to wrap them, and then on Christmas day to hand them out to the less fortunate children. I felt this was a really beautiful initiative, especially during Christmas, and we sometimes tend to forget that not every child is as fortunate as we are/were as children and that it's important to give back for all the things we've had the luck to recieve in our lives. This activity took approximately 2.5 hours (rounded off to 2). Once we got home, I asked Marco how often he participated in these activities and he told me that he did them once every two days. Since I was in Rome for a week, I followed Marco two additional times to the communities to help them and would have enjoyed joining them in handing out the gifts on Christmas day but unfortunately I left Rome on that day. Despite this, it was a wonderful experience for the holiday season !