Camp Mendocino! (Written Monday, September 27, 2010)

Well, I realize I didn’t post last night, but to my credit, it was a pretty busy day! Yesterday we left Sacramento and drove 4 hours to Camp Mendocino, a camp for the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Francisco. It’s located deep in the woods way north of San Fran (and Sac). It’s actually quite beautiful here… although it can get kinda creepy at night since it seems like horror movies always happen in the woods in the middle of nowhere late at night, haha.

What are we doing here? Well it’s me and the other Team Leaders here at Mendocino, and we are on a “mini-SPIKE” project. SPIKEs are projects that we will go on with our teams this year that take us away from Sacramento. They are usually 6-8 weeks long. Mendocino is a “mini-SPIKE” for us TLs because we are only here for 4 days (until Thursday), and it is a preview of sorts for how real SPIKEs are going to play out.

We got here yesterday and had a big campfire last night with all 35 TLs sitting around it and just hanging out. Oh, and there’s no internet here… so I’m typing this on my laptop on Microsoft Word. There’s limited electricity here, and since we’re staying in open air cabins (which means that there’s no door and no windows… only flimsy mosquito netting over the openings) there is no place for me to plug in my laptop. Or recharge my camera batteries. So we’ll see how this plays out, haha.

Anyway! So we our work here at Mendocino consists of 3 projects: trail maintenance, firewood, and bathroom demolition. We’re organized into our 4 units (Blue, Silver, Gold and Green) and each unit was on a different task. My unit (Green) did firewood today. It was pretty sweet, albeit TIRING. We split wood (I used an axe to split logs for the first time today!), carried the wood over to a wood shed, and then stacked the wood inside the shed. It was a good team activity and we did it all day, so it definitely pushed us physically. The other units did the other two projects, with Blue and Silver doing trail maintenance (which they said was really tiring since the trail was on a steep incline) and Gold doing the bathroom demolition. I think my unit will have a chance to do the other two projects in the coming days so I am excited to get more experience doing this outdoorsy work!

Right now most of the other TLs are sitting around a campfire on the womens’ side of camp (our camps are split with the men in one set of cabins on one side of the dining hall, and the women in the other set of cabins on the other side of the dining hall). I was thinking about joining them (right now I’m in the dining hall, where we had dinner a little bit ago), but after talking to a fellow TL who is sitting here at a table with me, I’ve decided I’m going to hang out here in the dining hall for a little bit longer because we both need to work on our ILPs (Individual Learning Plans… it’s definitely been a challenge to learn the myriad 3-letter acronyms ubiquitous in NCCC).

So I think I’m going to call it a night for this post. I’m going to work on my ILP (which basically outlines our goals for the year) and then walk over to join the other TLs by the campfire (although there are 7 of us here in the dining hall, a good fifth of the group).

It’s lights out at 10pm and then curfew at 11pm, to make sure we get a full night’s sleep in order to be up and running (literally) for PT (physical training) tomorrow morning at 6am. And then it’ll be breakfast at 8 and then at 9 it’ll be a long day of more work. I’m guessing tomorrow Green and Gold will be doing the trail work, which I’m pretty excited about. It’s a 2 mile hike uphill to get to the place we’ll be working at, and then we’ll hike back down for lunch at noon and then at 1 hike back up to do more work on the trail. And then hike back down before dinner, which starts at 5pm.

I’ll write more on life here at Camp Mendocino tomorrow! It’s quite beautiful here, and I’ve been taking pictures, so hopefully I’ll be able to include some pictures with these posts when I get back to society and internet. ;-)