This year’s Fall Festival hosted by the Milo Adventist Academy (at Days Creek, Ore.) Student Association featured typical fundraising booths operated by classes and organizations. But this year there was an addition: a worthy student booth made by students, for students — or, rather, for potential students.
Worthy student funds are usually solicited from outside sources to help students pay their bills. However, Milo students have been working together to help students who are waiting for enough money to come to an Adventist school.
Students jumped in to help raise funds using resources available at the academy. Sophomore Bible students picked apples from the old apple orchard and blackberries from the wild bushes growing around Milo. Groups of seniors baked the fruit into pies and made apple butter, dried apples and jam.
Darla Milam, student association sponsor and family consumer science teacher, gathered wood scraps from old building projects and, with her father, Dave Benton of Hood River, Ore., constructed cute boxes, each with a picture of Milo’s famed bridge wood-burned onto its slats.
Students sewed aprons, pillows and other items, while others from the IT department built wooden toys and puzzles.
All of these things were sold at the worthy student booth during the Fall Festival.
Melody Morgan, a sophomore, thought it was special to be able to "help out with something we usually aren’t able to help with ... helping other students come to Milo."
Trista Hoover, a sophomore, picked apples with a particular friend in mind — a friend who is attending public school while trying to raise money to come to Milo.
Laura Ross, a senior, remembers hearing about the Milo senior class of 2011 working to help each other get bills paid in order to graduate, and she thought this project brought the same concept of unity.
Working together for the purpose of helping others made this year’s Fall Festival not just a typical harvest party because, as Milam says, "we just decided to be the hands of God."
"And," Josh Bryan, a junior, "it feels good!"
