Giving Back and Family

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Reflecting and giving back is what this blog is to be about tonight. On Monday we were given the amazing opportunity to volunteer our time and effort with the Angeli Del Bello. The Angeli Del Bello is an organization that was formed from the need to clean and save precious pieces of art after the Arno had flooded in November of 1966. When we arrived, it was a beautiful day to be outside and work. We were split up into three groups with only two groups doing different things. During our time with them, we were able to cover up some graffiti and help weed out a concrete divider that was between the side walk and the river. My particular group was tasked with sweeping the dirt away from the bench and wall as well as attempting to paint the wall after covering the graffiti. I say attempt because we had such a long wall to cover and we only had about half a gallon of paint to do the entire thing. So, we ended up just being the starting faze to that wall since we could only cover the graffiti and part of the wall.



I believe that we are given this community service opportunity during this course so that we can give back to the city that has given so much to us. This city gives us so many stories and so much history in every which way you turn. The great part of getting to volunteer with the Angeli Del Bello is that we get to be a part of the same organization that was called from all corners of the world to help Firenze when it flooded. To me it is almost surreal to think about.



Today we were able to have Dr. Sarti present a lecture about the typical modern day Italian family. Going into this lecture this morning I was not really sure what to expect. Being a Child Development major, I knew that this was something that I definitely wanted to pay attention to because it could benefit me in some way in the future if I ever had the opportunity to work with an Italian family.



We had the amazing Antonio as our interpreter because Dr. Sarti only spoke the very basic English words. It was a little bit harder to stay focused on this lecture than I thought it was going to be because Dr. Sarti would say what he needed to say about the slide of the PowerPoint he was on and then Antonio would translate what he had said. They both seemed to have the same lull in their voices, so it would take me a few seconds to realize that Antonio was speaking to us. And sometimes they would speak to each other to figure out the best English word to use to describe the Italian equivalent.



What I could gather from the lecture was that the Italian way was dying out and that had mainly started in the 80’s. During the 80’s the politics had a huge influence on parenting. Now, adults are waiting later in life – around age 35 to 45 – to have children. Dr. Sarti was explaining that the more people think about having children the scarier it is. The more time you have to go through all the possible situations that might or might not happen, the less likely they are to have children. They are scared to make a mistake and that leads to the children running over the parent and being little baby tyrants.



One thing that he said was that really made sense to me was about Nutella. He said that if a child was throwing a fit over the Nutella – because they were cut off – he would have the parent get rid of it completely. The child needs to recognize that Nutella is a treat to have and is not to be given out at all times because in large quantities it is bad for you. That had really stuck with me throughout that day today and I believe that the “Nutella” could be interchangeable with a lot of different things such as too much screen time or too much social media. Children need to learn at an early age that they can not do just anything that they want because it can be harmful to them and to those around them. In America I see too often a parent trying to scold their child by saying “oh you can’t have this any more because you’ve been bad” but when the child starts throwing a tantrum they give the child whatever they took away back to them so that the child doesn’t make a scene in a public setting.







Total steps for Monday was 11,871 steps and total steps for Tuesday was 10,369 steps.

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