October 20, 2012 was indeed a great day as at least 380 people volunteered in Bonham as part of the Great Days of Service.

Some volunteers started arriving at the Family Life Center as early as 7:00 a.m. on Saturday. The First United Methodist Men went to work in the kitchen, making pancakes, bacon and coffee for the community volunteers who started arriving around 8:00 a.m. Other volunteers started getting ready to check-in volunteers and preparing supplies that would be needed for the day.

After enjoying breakfast and fellowship, pastors with the Fannin County Ministerial Alliance welcomed the community volunteers, prayed and commissioned the volunteers for the service they were about to perform. Great Days of Service coordinator Sandy Barber also welcomed the room full of volunteers. She expressed excitement about the wonderful turnout for the second annual event.

Barber participated in the Rachel’s Challenge Chain Reaction Day with the sophomores of Bonham High School earlier in the week. She said that Great Days of Service in Bonham was the result of a chain reaction that was started by a Facebook post from Heather Godbey in the summer of 2011.

Godbey stated that she wanted to do something positive in Bonham and wondered if any of her friends would join her. Within 48 hours, both of the women’s churches had agreed to the idea of Great Days of Service and the Ministerial Alliance had joined in too.

The community volunteers worked in four different project areas all morning before they returned to the Family Life Center to enjoy lunch prepared by volunteers from First Presbyerian and Holy Trinity Episcopal Churches.

Nearly half of the volunteers worked on community clean-up efforts at nine locations around Bonham. More than one hundred volunteers took weed-eaters, rakes, trash bags and other tools to Willow Wild Cemetery.

Other teams of volunteers donned bright orange, reflective vests and picked up trash and other debris at Powder Creek Park, Stephenson Park, Catron Park, Simpson Park, Civic Center and along Highways 121 and 82.

Other volunteers cleaned windows, disinfected toys and did other deep cleaning at the Fannin County Children’s Center. In all, 238 bags of trash were collected, as well as 120 lbs of metal. Three loads of branches and brush were hauled off in a pick-up truck and trailer.

The home improvement group worked on seven homes this year. Volunteers did yard work, cleaned gutters and did minor repairs on several homes. They scraped, caulked and painted one home. They built a deck and stairs for another home. Four men also worked for eight hours on Friday to start scraping and caulking the house that was painted.

The food drive volunteers collected sorted and distributed around 5,000 food items to five organizations in Bonham that feed hungry people from all over the county. Earlier in October, Brookshire’s Grocery Store and each campus of Bonham ISD conducted food drives. Other partners in the Great Days of Service effort also collected food. Many individual volunteers also brought in donations of food when they checked-in on Saturday morning. The five organizations receiving the food and $55 in monetary donations included the Fannin County Community Ministries, Basic Food Pantry, Manna House at Calvary Baptist, Fannin County Crisis Center and Boyd Baptist Church.

Other volunteers visited residents at six nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Dancers from the Bonham School of Dance, winners of the Fannin County Fair pageants and other community volunteers sang, danced and visited with the elderly and disabled at the VA, Clyde Cosper Texas State Veterans Home, Bonham Nursing Center, Woodmore Assisted Living Center, Hofmann MRAZ Care Home and Seven Oaks Nursing Center.

For more information about Great Days of Service go to www.gds-bonham.org or search for “Great Days of Service – Bonham” on Facebook.