Sometimes i’ll lie awake at night, just staring at my ceiling. 

How was today successful? 

Did I make a difference today? 

My brain will fill up with worries and fears that I wasn’t good enough for the day I was blessed with. People can watch all the documentaries, biographies, and speeches about being world changers; but nothing changes until action is taken. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who wanted to change my world for the better, and that started in 8th grade at my middle school. 

When you’d drive right near Richmond Elementary School in Lisbon a couple years ago, you’d see a very rough looking, dirty, and not taken care of peace garden. What a terrible first impression people would see of the school. I wanted to take matters into my own hands. So I found one more girl who wanted to help and we went to the principal. He gave us 30 minutes before the final school bell rang to work on the garden everyday. That was just enough time. 

Both of our last class of the day was Spanish, so we went to our spanish teacher and asked him about it. He loved the idea. So, 50% of class would be spanish, and 50% would be peace garden club. Everyone wanted to join in too, so that was overwhemingly helpful. I would bring out a speaker and would blast some fun music too. We all would weed, paint benches, added a tree swing, added a book library and bought a bird bath/bird houses. It was a lot of fun when we had extra hands to help work. After a lot of hard work and time, the peace garden was actually looking presentable. 

After some more time, we started to plant food. We planted pumpkins, strawberries, tomatoes, and wild flowers. It looked so beautiful. Once we finished planting, everyday everyone would help keep up with weeds. Our school began to get a lot of compliments from parents who never even knew we had a garden before.