Hello from Southern California!

Well last time I wrote in here we were well into our Round 1 project at the Oregon Garden! Well after a few days in Sacramento and two glorious weeks at home with family and friends, I'm in a completely opposite place for my team's Round 2 project... Southern California! We're working with the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition (CVHC) spending our 7 weeks here helping to build houses for low-income families. With the beautiful weather, abundant sunshine, friendly people (even if most of them only speak Spanish), gorgeous views of the San Bernardino and Santa Rosa Mountains, comfortable living space, and fantastic site supervisors, it's been a great project so far!

We got here on Wednesday evening of last week and spent some time getting settled into our apartment and divvying up the bedrooms. Our one-story apartment complex looks like a little resort, replete with palm trees, lush green grass, and gorgeous views of the mountains (and sunrise and sunset!). As you enter our square apartment, you'll enter an octagonal common room. We have our dining table, some stools, a couch and a TV in there. Directly ahead is the kitchen, which is separated from the common room by a countertop (where the stools are lined up). At 3 and 9 o'clock are our two bathrooms, and at 130, 430, 730 and 1030 are the bedrooms! Because of NCCC's no-mixing-of-different-genders policy, the 6 women on the team sleep 3 to a bedroom and the 4 men sleep 2 to a bedroom. As compensation though, we let the women have the beds and two of us guys sleep on cots!

On Thursday morning, our project sponsor (one of the women who works with CVHC) came to our apartment and gave us a little tour of the area. There are three towns that we spend most of our time in:

Mecca, CA is the town where we live. It isn't really a "town," persay. It's more like an area. The "downtown" area is a collection of various buildings with a library and post office and a market and a few random stores, but other than that, it's a really rural area. We don't even live in the downtown area... we're about a 5 minute drive out. But it's really nice that we're out a ways, because the area is quite peaceful and quiet.

Coachella, CA is where we work each day. It's about a 20 minute drive from Mecca, and is a considerably larger town. In fact, whereas Mecca has about 5,000 residents (spread over lots of farmland), Coachella has about 40,000 inhabitants. We work in a partially completed residential development, where some of the houses are already done and moved into but most are still under construction.

Indio, CA is where the CVHC office is. I get our mail there, print, fax and copy things, and occasionally go there to send and receive e-mails. It's usually just me that goes there, actually, now that I think about it. It's about a 10-15 minute drive from our work site Coachella and is about 25 minutes from our housing site in Mecca.

Our work schedule for this Round is Tuesday through Saturday. We leave our apartment at 6:40am each day and arrive at the worksite around 7am.

On Tuesday through Friday, we work from 7 to 11 and then take a siesta from 11am to 2pm. We spend the time relaxing and having lunch. During siesta on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday we also have physical training (PT). On Tuesdays we have circuit workouts, Wednesdays are running days, and Fridays we watch P90X, this insane workout video that is impossibly hard but indescribably satisfying! Then, at 2pm we go back to work and work until 5pm, when we return home for the night.

On Saturdays, instead of siesta, we take a one hour lunch from 10am to 11am. Then we work from 11am to 2:30pm. We have Sundays and Mondays off!

One of the best things about our schedule is that we leave in the morning just as the sun is coming up, and we go back home just as the sun is going down. So during our drive there and back, we are treated with the most gorgeous sunrises and sunsets!

Today marks the end of our first full week of work (we worked Friday and Saturday of last week), so I've gotten a pretty good impression of the type of work we'll be doing.

Each day, there are different projects we have worked on. Some people in the group will go to a house to paint the walls and ceilings and landscape the outside. Others will work on the frames of houses drilling in self-driving screws into the aluminum studs. Others still will be on ladders drilling smaller self-driving screws into metal door and window frames on the outside of houses. The rest of the team will be on top of the roofs of houses putting 22.5" blocks between the trusses at the very ridge of the roof and also nailing in the plywood at the very edge of the roof. I gotta say, that last one is hands down my favorite... despite my formerly crippling fear of heights!

When we arrive at the worksite in the morning it is actually pretty cold... maybe in the low 50s. We wear our hoodies when we go to work in the morning. Then when we return to the apartment for siesta, it's probably in the low 70s and we have long since shed our hoodies and are in our t-shirts, driving with the windows down. Then when we return to work it's still hot but by the time we leave to go home at the end of the day it's starting to get cool!

OH, I almost forgot! On Tuesday through Friday, in the afternoon instead of going back to the Coachella worksite, two people from the team go to the Afterschool Technology Center at the apartment complex, where they spend the afternoon with little kids playing with them, helping to facilitate games, and helping them with their homework. We have a cycle for who goes when, and I haven't had my turn yet, but from what I hear, it's a lot of fun!

Hmm... what else is there? Our few hours at night (5:30pm to 10pm or so since we go to bed around then) are spent cooking dinner (3 people on the team like to cook and take care of this every night), making phone calls, watching movies, eating dinner, and just taking time for ourselves. For me, I typically spend the time chatting with people on my team, reading one of the many books I brought, journaling, and doing paperwork! I am hoping that I will also be able to start incorporating time to blog in there and also time to write letters to other Team Leaders. Oh, and also time to write e-mails to friends and call family to let them know how the SoCal life is going! Just not enough time in a day! Haha.

Okay, well I'm at Starbucks right now and the team member who drove me here has to leave so I guess it's time to wrap up this entry. Til next time I am at Starbucks, I guess! Since this is where I go to get internet, haha.

More to come soon!