“It’s ridiculous, the highlight of my academic career,” Spencer Cagle, junior in economics and Alternative Fall Break Tuscaloosa member, said.
    
Fall Break 2011 went a little differently for a fortunate few UT students who were chosen via interview process to participate in this year’s Alternative Fall Break. TeamVols hosts both alternative break trips annually and allows students to donate their time, usually spent resting, to the less fortunate. The students are never told the location of their trip until weeks after they have been selected. This ensures a team of true Volunteers, who wish nothing but to serve others to the best of their abilities. Once the interview process is complete, the remaining students are sectioned off into hand-picked groups, each routed to separate locations in need of assistance.
    
As many are aware, earlier this spring Alabama was hit hard with its share of natural disasters, leaving many of its resident’s homeless, without schools and at the mercy of its surrounding states in their quest for restoration. TeamVols selected one volunteer group to help make a difference in the heart of the destruction, Tuscaloosa.
   
 The Tuscaloosa team, more affectionately known as the VOLstars, started their service on Sept. 29, volunteering at Lloyd Wood Middle School. The middle school is playing host to a group of elementary students from Holt Elementary’s afterschool program, whose previous location was destroyed in the tornados. The VOLstars spent the remainder of their day finger-painting, singing songs and, most importantly, bringing joy to the faces of children who have had their daily lives and routines uprooted from beneath them. Lloyd is just one of many schools trying to deal with the overcrowding issue seen all over southern Alabama.
    
On the final day of September the VOLstars worked with Brush of Kindness, a service group under Habitat for Humanity’s housing umbrella. This section provides fresh coats of paint and household restorations for people in less fortunate neighborhoods.
    
“The fresh coats of paint made a huge difference, but you look around and see all the other destroyed houses and it makes you sad to know you can’t help them all,” Melissa Mullins, undecided sophomore, said.
    
The community really responded to the volunteers’ work, according to participants. Many of the residents even stopped and commended the work. As the volunteers worked on two adjacent houses in a neighborhood, one woman remarked that no one ever does anything about the damage here and thanked the volunteers.
    
“People’s houses and what they look like are a real sense of pride with people and I am glad we could restore just the smallest bit of that pride to the people here,” Anna Freels, junior in nursing and Team Leader, said.
    
Later on that night they were given a tour of University of Alabama by student and Brushes of Kindness helper, Hannah Stephens.
    
“It was pitiful to see how bad of shape they were in, even after five months,” Tucker Hunley, undecided freshman, said. “Most people don’t realize how close to the university this actually was … what if this had been UT? How would we react to it?”
    
Stephens explained to the group exactly what she saw that day and told stories of the friends she lost and the lives that were saved. She feels that the tragedy, though it brought forth much suffering, also connected the students like nothing but tragedy can. She said that even though school was dismissed several weeks early, nearly the whole student body refused to go home, and instead stayed to help clean the streets and nurse the wounded.
    
The final day of the trip was split into two parts, starting with volunteering at the Forrest Lake Baptist Church and ending with the Tuscaloosa volunteer center warehouse. The church had become a place of refuge after the storm, hosting and nursing people daily for five months. It was just now able to begin functioning as simply a church again. The members told stories of food shortages and miracles that seem to happen — every time they were nearly out of a supply, a person would find them and give them just what they needed.
    
Most remarkable, however, was even in their time of tragedy they were still focused solely on what they could do for someone else, even going as far as surprising the VOLstars with a full-course, home-cooked meal just for being there to help move some furniture around and clean up.
   
 The volunteer center was no different. Home to some secret Volunteer fans, affectionate older men, who spend their time collecting goods to give out to the poor for free, never ceased in offering them what they wanted from the piles of necessities they were supposed to be bagging.
    
As the trip drew to a close TeamVols Coordinator Kate Humphrey summed up the feelings of all.
    
“In a troubling world it’s refreshing to find someone who still has time to be kind, someone who still has the faith to believe that the more you give the more you receive,” Humphrey said.
    
This term applies not only to the citizens of Alabama but to the Tennessee students as well. The examples set by the students not only at home but around our country really allow the world to see what it means to be a volunteer.