February, 11, 2009Bingo

For our sorority we have to do a certain number of hours for community service and once a year, usually at the beginning we get together and talk about what we want to do to get ideas for yourself and give ideas to the other girls too. It is nice to actually hear what other people are doing so that we can get out there and spread ourselves out and all try something new each semester.

Well I thought that churches had free bingo, or that everyone just played online bingo, but apparently you can pay (and people really do) to go and play bingo and that community center every week. Well these bingo places need volunteers so we decided to team up and go for a few weeks and help out. It actually ended up being really fun. We got to hang out with the older people (and it was always the same people every week) and talk to them and see how they got into bingo in the first place.

The last week though we decided to do something fun for everyone and taught them to play online bingo (most of them hadn't even used a computer before in their life). We had everyone meet on our schools computer lab and we showed them the internet bingo sites and got them started and even had to teach some of them how to use the mouse.

There really did though have a great time playing the bingo online instead of calling out the numbers. I do think though that it was a little frustrating for them at times and I think they are kind of relieved to be back at the community center playing their regular old bingo. I do think it is funny though how one woman pointed out that she liked the online bingo more, but the fact that it didn't involve other people turned her off to it. They all seemed to like interacting with each other in the regular bingo much more than just sitting at the computer and playing by themselves.

By over all it was fun to get to hang out with them and teach them something new. I know even though most of them will never play online bingo again, they really did enjoy spending time with us and learning something new from us too. Maybe next time we go back to bingo to volunteer it'll all be online!

Posted by Renee @ 8:53 AM