Reflections from Life After AmeriCorps

Well it's been quite a while since I posted last. About four months, I guess. Funnily enough, it has also been several months since I finished my term of service with AmeriCorps. I've visited this blog a few times since AmeriCorps ended and just haven't sat down and taken the time to write anything.

To summarize what has happened since my last post:

My team and I finished our Round 4 project with Sierra Nevada Journeys in Portola, CA. We spent the last two weeks of the project being camp counselors for the most awesome 7-14 year olds ever. It was a really great time. It was also a really great way to wrap up our year of adventures.

On July 13th, we returned from Portola, CA to Sacramento. It was a day I had dreamed of many, many times during my year in AmeriCorps. All of the hardships and struggles I experienced during the year would always make me think of how much I looked forward to the final return to Sacramento. It was quite surreal.

We had a week of final transition, and on July 21st, we had NCCC Pacific Region Class XVII graduation. All of the Corps Members left that day. It was actually a bit weird... seeing the "family" you've spent every waking minute of the past 10 months with all depart, not knowing if you'll ever see them again. But that last sentence really makes it sound a lot more bittersweet than it was... I'm not gonna lie, I was really excited to see everyone go. There were many teary-eyed goodbyes, but it was a fitting way to end such a crazy year.

Once the Corps Members were gone, I was surprised to find that I wasn't quite as excited to be with the Team Leaders during that last week as I thought I would be. I expected it would be like TLT all over again, but it wasn't. The excitement of TLT came from the newness of it all... the fact that we were getting to know the 34 other people who would be our closest friends for the year... the fact that we were anxiously anticipating the arrival of the teams we would be spending the next 10 months with. I think during that last week, we were all just ready to go.

Not to say it wasn't fun. It definitely was. Had lots of great times. It was a great way to spend one last week with the other Team Leaders.

On July 29th, all of us Team Leaders departed campus for the last time. This time it wasn't to go out on another SPIKE adventure... this time it was to go home. For some of us, anyway. For some of us... like myself and Mikey... there was an epic 3 week roadtrip ahead!!

After we left Sacramento, I went on a whirlwind tour with three friends (Mikey, Chris D and Laura) of San Francisco, Yosemite, Sacramento (just a stop here... we dropped off Laura at the airport), Crater Lake, Portland (we dropped off Chris D here), Mount Rainier, Seattle, Olympic National Park, the 101 Coastal Highway, Redwoods, and finally the East Bay. My final week on the West Coast was spent hanging out with Mikey at his g-ma's house in the East Bay suburbs.

Then on August 20, I flew back to the East Coast from California, to return home. It was the first time since leaving for college that I was home with no end date in sight.

...

However, fate wouldn't have that. Two days after I got back, one of my mentors from my undergrad called me to ask if I would be interested in applying for what was unequivocally my dream job. Like, LITERALLY. It was the entire reason I went into student affairs in the first place. Happy to say, a week and a half after receiving that call, I was offered the job, and on September 12th, I started my first day of work as the Interim Assistant Director of Sophomore Initiatives at Loyola University Maryland.

So that, my friends, is the next adventure. It's no AmeriCorps, for sure... I'm not exploring mountains and canyons and old growth forests, but it's MUCH more enjoyable and fulfilling, and I actually really enjoy the company of everyone I work with. Long story short, I love it. It rocks. It is amazing. I feel very much at home there. And I think it's really where I belong right now.

I've had the opportunity to share my experience in AmeriCorps with many people who have been curious. People have asked me if I liked AmeriCorps, and I don't even have to think about the answer. I didn't like it at all. I definitely didn't love it. It was the most miserable experience I've ever had. I have never felt so depressed, so challenged, so unhappy before. I felt so incredibly out of place, for so many reasons. It made me question who I was, what I knew, what I believed in. So no, I did not like it at all.

However, I always tell them that I'm glad I did it. And I can say that very authentically. AmeriCorps is often billed as the "toughest job you'll ever love," and I can say quite honestly that was not the case for me. While it was indeed very tough in many ways, both expected and unexpected, I did not love it one bit. But I did appreciate it. And when I was seriously quitting during Round 2 (something I debated over every single day), I knew that if I quit, I would never be able to look back on my time in AmeriCorps positively. However, I really felt that if I stuck it through, if I endured and persevered, I would look back on the experience and appreciate how I had been challenged. And that, I am happy to say, is exactly what happened.

AmeriCorps was one of those experiences that was never enjoyable at the time and that challenged me to such an extent that I felt like I didn't know who I was. But sometimes you need your beliefs and identity broken apart in order to be put back together in a more cohesive, stronger way. And I am a much more authentic, much stronger person now. I have never felt so at peace with myself, and I can say without doubt that it is because I went through those tumultuous 11 months in AmeriCorps. People say they have bad days... well you know, the average person's bad day doesn't even compare with my average day in AmeriCorps. The average person gets to go home at the end of work, they get to spend time with people that care about them, they get to do things for fun, they have a semblance of freedom. I could do none of that. All I had to look forward to at the end of a really tough, challenging day of unfulfilling work was returning back to a cramped living space with a team that hated each other and didn't ever listen to me. I look back on the experience, and it is simply not possible to be unhappy with my life today.

So I've taken a lot out of AmeriCorps. A lot of it was not what I was expecting to take out of it... I thought it would be fun and fulfilling, and it was neither. But it was an incredibly strengthening experience, and I am an incredibly stronger person now. AmeriCorps was not what I wanted, but it was, in retrospect, what I needed. Plus, I got to travel to some of the most amazing places, meet so many different types of people from all different walks of life, and got to experience so many things that I never would have experienced had I not done AmeriCorps. So when I look back on AmeriCorps, it is not with resentment but appreciation that I remember it.

...

So in conclusion, my year of AmeriCorps was the most challenging experience I have ever had. But it is through challenge that we grow, and I have grown so much from what I've been through. I'm a completely different person (once again... this seems to be a recurring theme for me), and I really like who I am. I'm unapologetically myself, and I live life the way I want to live it. My Life After AmeriCorps is one of pure authenticity, and I have never before felt so at peace.

This is me now, much more grown up.

Does the post-AmeriCorps Chris look any older than the pre-AmeriCorps Chris in the upper right hand corner of the site?

Either way, I was still mistaken for a freshman by a lady at the library the other day.

Guess some things never change. ;-)

Round 4

Hellllooo from South Lake Tahoe! I'm currently sitting in the corner of a local coffee shop using their internet while sipping a Mexican hot cocoa. Dan and I are down here because we went to the Renaissance Faire yesterday (which was a blast). We're going to spend our Sunday hanging out in South Lake Tahoe and maybe going to the REI in Reno.

This touristy town isn't where our project is, even though that would definitely have been pretty sweet! Our fourth and FINAL project is 2 hours north of here in Portola, CA... a tiny little town about 45 miles NW of Reno. We're working at Grizzly Creek Ranch, an environmental education camp, doing infrastructure improvement. What does "infrastructure improvement" entail? Well, it means we do pretty much everything from cleaning out cabins and helping to prepare meals in the dining hall to setting up the camp's tepee village and constructing new challenge course elements. Pretty sweet deal all in all, and the staff at the camp are super chill. It's a cool final project we think.

It's definitely been the most adventurous of our projects. We're living out in the woods in the Sierra Nevadas. We live in tents. And we're experiencing the wintry-est weather we've experienced all year! We've gotten more snow and rain than sunshine, and it's been colder than its been warm.

The weather is just a little ironic: in the winter we got summer weather, and now that it's summer we're getting winter weather! As a recap, we were in the Coachella Valley in January and February where it got into the 80s during the day, and now we're in the Sierra Nevadas where it reaches the 20s at night. Crazytown.

I have to say though, sleeping in a tent when it's freezing rain or snowing is a pretty cool experience. It makes me feel like a legit outdoorsman. The view from my tent is beautiful. In the fact, the entire place is beautiful. And despite the inherent discomfort of living out of a tent, it's an experience I'm going to look back on and appreciate. I mean, if anything, I won't be complaining about my living situation ever again! So all in all, good stuff.

Plus, we do have a lot of modern conveniences, so I can't claim that we're total BAMFs out here in the woods. We have access to electricity and laundry at the camp, use the bathrooms in the pool house to shower and brush our teeth, get wireless internet--albeit extremely slow wireless internet--in the lodge and are fed three times a day in the dining hall, so we don't have to tackle the adventure of trying to cook over a campfire (which unfortunately we aren't allowed to have because of the risk of wildfire).

The town of Portola is a little place of about 2300 residents, and they have the requisite amenities such as two gas stations, a hospital, a library, an overpriced local grocery, a handful of restaurants, and... not too much else, unfortunately. Plus, in line with its small town nature, Portola closes shop around 5pm, so we aren't able to do much after work (which, coincidentally, ends at 5pm every day). Portola and the surrounding area do have a smattering of great hikes, however, so it's a great place to be outdoorsy.

To get to all of the major services we have to travel to Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World. It's about an hour's drive, but that's where we find the airport, car rental, Greyhound station, and anything that is in any way franchised or a chain. We have to get approval to travel there, however, because it's outside of our 25 mile driving radius.

Well, it looks like Dan is wrapping up here in the coffeeshop, so I guess I better wrap up this post. We're currently about to start Week 4 of our 8 week long project, which means we're almost halfway done! And being done is without a doubt at the top of my Most Wanted Things in Life Right Now list. ;-)

Photos from Round 3

 

The 3 MONTH UPDATE!!

Just kidding. Such a thing would be WAY too daunting to even attempt, so I'm not going to!

But it's been forever since I wrote anything in here, and I'm kinda kicking myself for it because so much has happened since the middle of Round 2!!

To start, we're a little over a week from the end of Round 3. That's right, it's been an entire ROUND since I last posted about life on here.


Here's a brief summary of the happenings in my life lately:

- The 2nd half of Round 2 was quite the tumultuous time period! Work was long, life was (unfortunately) terribly dull, leading my team was often like playing parent to a family of 9 19-24 year old children, and I felt so discouraged that each day was a struggle. I debated daily whether or not to up and leave AmeriCorps because I was so miserable at times, but in the end, I stayed. And I'm glad I did.

- Transition (the week between projects) was great. I got to see all of my Team Leader friends (many of whom I had talked to on the phone during Round 2 for support and to commiserate about the struggles of being a Team Leader). I went to San Francisco with two of them the first weekend of transition, and that was absolutely fantastic. Such a great time.

- Round 3 started March 8, and after saying goodbye to all of the other Team Leaders who left for Spike (off-campus projects), I delved into our third project with my team. This Round, we've been working at the Community Collaborative Charter School (CCCS for short), helping to facilitate a service-learning graduation requirement for the seniors and mentor them through everyday interaction. The school is just down the street from campus, so it's a 5-10 minute walk.

- After initial confusion as to what our role working with the students would be, we settled into the project, which consisted of us doing service projects with the students over a 6 week period. Each project was one week long, so we ended up doing 6 different projects: building wood duck boxes, sorting and delivering furniture donations to needy households, doing grounds maintenance for a riding therapy program, building a community garden and painting a mural, weeding the mulched areas at a city park, and spending three days and nights at a camp doing camp and trail work.

- The project has had its ups and downs... we're the first NCCC team the CCCS has ever worked with, so we were figuring out a lot of the kinks and logistical challenges the majority of our time with them. It was a bit frustrating at times because we would show up at the worksite and no students would show up, or we would be ready to work and there would be no tools or no one there to tell us what to do. Some projects were great of course (like the furniture delivery and the community garden), but the bad egg projects somewhat tainted the whole experience.

- This week and next, we're working with the Sacramento City Parks and Recreation Department, weeding various city parks around Sacramento. It's pretty much filler work, but if you can get over the realization of futility you have when you acknowledge the fact that the weeds you're spending hours and hours pulling will grow right back after a few weeks, it can be pretty relaxing. Just pop in some earbuds and tune in to the music and enjoy the sunshine and revel in the beauty of the park after you've just weeded it. Unfortunately my team doesn't see it quite as optimistically as I do, so as the Team Leader I'm forced to deal with their whining and constant "do we HAVE to work a full day today?" (the answer is yes) and "can we just leave work early today?" (the answer is no). Oh the joys of being a Team Leader.

- Our next transition period starts in a week and a half, and I am super excited to see all of the other Team Leaders again! Hooray! I have been absolutely blessed to have some of my favorite TL friends here on campus with me (especially my friend Mikey), and that has been the sole reason I have retained my sanity throughout this Round.

- On May 16, we ship out to Portola, CA for our fourth and FINAL project: working at Grizzly Creek Ranch Camp for the environmental education organization Sierra Nevada Journeys. We'll be spending two months doing camp and trail maintenance and environmentally educating the campers. Should be a good time. And apparently the food is delicious. We'll be treating ourselves to the dining hall delicacies three times a day. Yum yum. :-)

So that is my NCCC update for the moment. Now, that wasn't too bad at all. I'm left wondering now how in the past (almost) three months, I haven't found the twenty minutes to sit down and type an update like this. I guess that will remain a mystery!! Wow, and if I don't update again for three months, I'll be writing the update about the END OF AMERICORPS. That's nuts. According to the countdown calendar on my Dashboard, Graduation is a mere 85 days away! So close! Yet so far!


Other updates in my life:

- I'm training for the San Francisco Marathon! It's happening July 31st and if I don't step up my training it's going to be kicking my butt instead of the other way around. The camp we'll be spending Round 4 at is at 5000 ft and is considerably hilly with 1500 acres of land and tons of hiking trails, so I guess I'm fortunate to be living there, since that's where I'll be doing the most important parts of marathon training. Wish me luck!!

- I spent this past Spring Break down in the monster of a city that is LA, hanging out with my good friend Laura (another TL). Got to tour Venice Beach, spend the afternoon in Hollywood walking the Walk of Fame, driving through Beverly Hills and staring in disbelief at the small palaces that people there call homes, running along the Redondo, Hermosa and Manhattan Beaches, hiking to the Hollywood sign (well, more like hiking to a spot near the Hollywood sign since it's illegal to get close to it), driving down Rodeo Drive, and spending the late afternoon/evening hanging out in Santa Monica.

- After AmeriCorps (and after the SF Marathon), Mikey, Laura and I are taking two and a half weeks to tour 6 different National Parks: Yosemite, Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands and the Grand Canyon. In that order! It will be a pretty epic roadtrip, and I'm really excited. It's pretty much what's getting me through AmeriCorps right now, haha.

- And as for Life After AmeriCorps plans... well, my plan is to move back home and chill with the fam, veg out with some video games, and after I'm thoroughly bored from the uneventfulness of my life (which will probably be after about a week), I'll start looking for a part-time job in the area, which would allow me to spend time with the fam (the real reason I'm going home), make money, and have some semblance of purpose in life. And hopefully that will tide me over into a full-time career track job somewhere exciting like Colorado. But that's over a year down the road, and my path changes more often than that. ;-)

So... there it is! Life update. Funnily enough, I actually DID end up doing a 3+ month update. Not really that thorough, but it works. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but the brevity of this post really made it difficult for me to find pictures to accurately represent what was being written about! I'll put pictures up soon, in a different post. With captions. :-D

Ciao for now.

The First Week of Our Second Half of Round 2... We're More Than Halfway Done!

Soo this past week marked the start of the second half of our 7-week project. And with that, we as of now only have 2 and a half weeks left here in the Coachella Valley! How time flies.

My supervisor Jeanine and the Unit Support Leader Maureen came on Tuesday and Wednesday this past week to visit us for their midsite visit. The UL and STL visit all of the teams in the Unit around the middle of the project to see how things are going and see what can be improved for future teams. They first went to Alpaugh, CA, about five hours north of us, then drove down to visit us, then continued on to Agua Caliente, about two hours south of us, and finally ended up in Julian, CA, about thirty minutes from Agua Caliente. Then they drove back up to Sacramento! So it was quite the roadtrip for them!

This past week, we spent most of our time up on the roofs of houses, hammering in nails through the plywood sheets into the trusses to secure them to the roof. It is about 1100 to 1300 nails per roof, so since we worked on 7-8 roofs, we hammered in around 10,000 of those little guys over the course of this past week!! We are getting pretty expert at our hammering, haha.


We also do PT three times a week, and this Friday, we did P90X yoga. It was pretty intense!! My legs are still recovering from some of those warrior poses, haha. But it was fantastic. I can't wait to do it again. :-)

This weekend, some of the women on the team were going to go to San Diego to spend the weekend there. They were so excited... but at the last minute, they weren't able to get a rental car and so ended up staying here in the Coachella Valley for the weekend. It was an EPIC bummer. :-( So as consolation, I treated the team out to some froyo (or frozen yogurt, for those of you not familiar with the team) and that helped to raise the mood a bit.

Yesterday, we went to the Sunday Farmer's Market in La Quinta, an absolutely beautiful area. It's a pretty affluent area with gorgeous residential areas, plentiful shopping opportunities, and gorgeous views of the mountains. It's quite an alarming disparity between La Quinta and Mecca... La Quinta (and neighboring Indian Wells) is one of the most affluent cities in the United States, and Mecca is one of the poorest! And they are only thirty minutes apart. In fact, most of the people in La Quinta have probably never even heard of Mecca. Which, if you've ever done a privilege walk, just reinforces the concept of everyone looking at the privileged and paying little to no attention at the underprivileged.

But anyway. We went to La Quinta and enjoyed the sights and sounds of the Farmer's Market. The weather, as always, was absolutely gorgeous, and there were lots of fresh fruit and vegetable stands. There was even a live musician there playing on the keyboard and singing some 80s songs. I spent an hour there lying on the grass writing letters to other Team Leaders while the people on my team went and got some produce for this upcoming week.

After the Farmer's Market, we went grocery shopping at the WinCo in Indio, and the startling change in demographic once again did not go unnoticed. Whereas in La Quinta, the VAST majority of people walking around are Caucasian and clearly inhabit the upper echelons of the American socioeconomic strati, the people in Indio, Coachella, and Mecca are almost all Hispanic and are from lower income brackets. Why such a correlation between skin color and level of income? Just food for thought.

ANYWAY. Haha enough social justice talk. I guess it just means that I miss all of the social justice conversations we enjoyed (and sometimes didn't enjoy) in SAHE. I wish I had some good old SAHE folks to talk social justice to nowadays!! But alas, I guess I'll have to settle for my team, haha.

Today Maddy, Carly, Kayla and I went to La Quinta again to go on a hike. We hiked a 2.5 mile trail (5 miles total) from this place called "The Cove" to "The Lake." The Cove was really just a parking lot, and unfortunately, while we were expecting a crystal clear lake nestled in a mountain forest (which in retrospect makes no sense at all because that's not what the landscape looks like around here, haha), we discovered that said Lake was really just a glorified reservoir. A little bit of a bummer, but at least we passed by a beautiful golf course on the way. Haha, whereas hiking Ladder Canyon and the Grotto the past few weeks made us feel like we were miles from any other human being, hiking to the Lake made us feel like we never left civilization. If anything, we went from one part of town to another. It was like a walk in the park!!

My favorite part of the hike, though, was running on that golf course. The grass was so lush and green... it felt delightful under my feet!! No wonder people say that golf courses make the best cross country courses!!

Whew, I can tell I am getting really hungry because I can tell my writing is getting really cranky, haha. Dan and I are at Starbucks right using the internet and I came here to look at some Life After AmeriCorps opportunities. I still am not sure what I'm going to do after I finish this term of service as a Team Leader. Lots of opportunities, lots of options. But it's that paralyzingly large number of choices that makes picking only a few so difficult!! At this point, I don't really know what I want to do afterwards, but I think the time has come to devote some significant energy to discerning that important path. :-)

Til next time! I think it's time for Dan and I go to to dinner.

Sitting Here in McDonald's

Haha, so I'm sitting here in McDonald's, munching on my Large Fries and mooching their wireless. Lots happened this past week! We had our midsite visit, a good week of work, and uh yeah that's actually about it haha. I learned a few new tricks with my poi! I also ordered some new ones on the internet... they are glow in the dark LED poi that apparently look quite epic. I was slightly deceived because they cost about 30 pounds which in my mind, was something close to 30 dollars because I for some foolish reason though the pound was the rough equivalent of the Euro. I really doubt I'll be making that mistake again anytime soon!

Right now the superbowl is going on, but I've got lots of work to do that requires the internet, so instead of watching it with the few people on my team who are watching the game over the at the sports bar across the parking lot, I'm sitting here eating my 500 calories of golden fried goodness.

But anyway. Back to work! I'll write more tomorrow when I spend the day at Starbucks. :-)

Sitting Here in Starbucks

So right now I'm sitting in the Starbucks about 5 min from our apartment (driving), where I go whenever I want to use the internet. They have wireless here and unfortunately we don't have any at our apartment!

Right now, Maddy, Carly and Kayla are in Ladder Canyon on a hike, and I decided not to go with them because I've got a bunch of things to take care of. E-mails, paperwork, uploading pictures, blogging, and so  on and so on. The rest of the team is back at the apartment just relaxing.

Whenever I come here to Starbucks, I get the same tall Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate for $2.95 and sit in the same chair in the corner of the cafe. I've become such a regular the people here pretty much all recognize me (it might also have to do with the fact that I'm probably the only person who walks in with a buff on my head all the time). Here's a picture of me right now:

My hair is getting pretty out of control long! I think I'll need a haircut sometime soon. Actually, I really need one right now but it's a chore to drive to someplace to get my hair cut since everywhere is pretty far!

The girls will probably be back from their hike in an hour or so and will pick me up here on their way back to the apartment. Then I need to drive to Indio to drop off our SPIKE mail at the UPS store there before 4pm. Then the team and I will drive to the WinCo in Indio to go grocery shopping for the week, then we'll come back, make dinner, and then tonight have our team meeting.

Then tomorrow it's back to work again. Jeanine, my supervisor is coming tomorrow and will be visiting us tomorrow and Wednesday. Oh, which reminds me, we need to do midsite evaluations of our project tonight! There's a form for this, much like there's a form for everything in NCCC.

I gotta say, I'm not particularly excited to get back to work again tomorrow. I guess my life can be viewed in one of two ways:

It can be AWESOME because I am Team Leading a group of eight 19-24 year olds who come from all different backgrounds... we're in Southern California helping to construct 30+ houses for low-income families... we don't have to pay any rent or pay any money for food... we get to travel a bit and experience a lifestyle we've never experienced before (at least I haven't, haha)... we get to meet lots of cool people and see lots of new places... and at the end of the day, what we do is helping people.

It can be TEDIOUS because I spend 40+ hours each work hammering in nails, drilling in screws, rolling paint on walls... I come back to the apartment and still have to spend every waking minute of every day with the same 8 people... my life is pretty much dictated to me by AmeriCorps NCCC because there are so many policies and so much paperwork... I don't really meet that many new people on projects and only see my friends during the few days we are back on campus for transition... yeah I'm helping people, but I'm not really changing anybody's life in this program... and probably worst of all, I am ALWAYS emotionally drained, grumpy, moody and not really all that happy with day to day life.

So depending on which side of the bed I wake up on, my days can be great or they can be awful. Lately they've been more of the latter, unfortunately, and I struggle with the fact that I'm not even halfway through the experience yet!! So we'll see how life continues from here.

The Southwest Arts Festival!

Written Sunday, January 30, 2011:

Well, I didn’t wake up early enough to have alone time in the morning, but I guess that’s okay because I spent a good amount of time alone last night after everyone else went to bed.

Today we had an AWESOME time at the Indio Arts and Music Festival! We volunteered there from 8am until 6pm. There were artists from all over the country, and we were “artist ambassadors” whose responsibilities included watching over artists’ booths if they needed to go to the bathroom or leave their booth for any reason, getting lunch or coffee for them, and just doing random things to make their experience at the festival a good one. At least, that’s what it was in theory. While we DID actually do those things, most of our time there was spent wandering around the festival, looking at the beautiful pieces of art (paintings, sculptures, photographs, clothes… all sorts of stuff!) and chatting with these interesting people.

We wore these bright (almost neon) green shirts that had VOLUNTEER in big lettering on the back and got flagged down by artists whenever they needed something. They also had these little red flags that they placed in the ground in front of their tent if they needed anything (each artist had a small tent and they were arranged in a grid-like pattern). For volunteering, we got our super stylish neon green shirts (just kidding… they aren’t really all that stylish at all and unfortunately are all Larges), free admission to the festival (normally $10), a free $12 lunch voucher, a free festival poster (which they were selling for $35… we were able to get the poster artist to sign it too!), and got a bunch of other little perks like free date shakes. The date shakes are a specialty in this area and were pretty delicious… they were kind of like milkshakes but date-flavored, haha.

My favorite part about the experience today though was just getting to walk around, see and appreciate the diverse array of beautiful art, and chat with all of the different artists. The art was so incredible… it was kind of like being in a museum, except the artist was RIGHT THERE and you could talk to them and have them tell you about individual pieces and ask them about what inspired them to make their art.

There was one couple there who created art out of recycled junk, and it was pretty incredible because every piece they made had a story behind it and it was all interesting to look at. One of the pieces had a layer of broken glass on it, and the wife explained that they had found the glass when they were in the mountains of Oregon, trying to get through a pass. They weren’t sure if they were going to be able to drive through, so at one point they parked their car and walked a quarter mile ahead to scout out the road and came across the broken glass on the road. The wife decided to bring it back with them and they incorporated it into this particular piece! It was really cool because to anyone else, it would have been just junk… just trash on the road... but they were able to turn it into something beautiful.

And I guess that’s part of the reason why I think art can be so incredible. Through art, artists can share the beauty they see in their mind with other people, leading others to appreciate something that might have otherwise been mundane or uninteresting. Through the work of an artist, a blank canvas and some paint can be transformed into a breathtaking landscape, a stunning portrait, or an emotion-invoking scene.

One of my favorite tents was that of a photographer who had photographed various landscapes, particularly in the Southwest region. There were pictures of the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Antelope Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Death Valley, Yosemite, Canyonlands, and a lot of others. While all of the aforementioned places have been photographed innumerable times, the thing that really struck me with these particular photographs was the unbelievable level of detail each picture had. From afar, you could appreciate the beauty of the scene, but as you came right up to the picture, you could see the tiny pebbles in the foreground or the subtle colors and textures of the bluffs and buttes on the horizon. They were some of the most vivid and realistic photographs I’d ever seen! Each one was an adventure… you could explore the picture and all of the minute details it contained. There was so much to see in each picture and it was like you were discovering little things in each photograph that maybe you hadn’t noticed before. Even trying to write about it right now, I simply can’t convey the ineffable beauty of these pictures with words!

So in short, the festival was a lot of fun. Even though it was a ten hour day, it was a blast. And what a great way to enjoy the festival by being a volunteer. We got a lot of stuff for free, got to meet lots of super interesting people, got to see lots of incredible art, and got the appreciation of so many people who were really grateful for what we were doing. It was just fantastic!

Tomorrow (Monday) the team and I are going on a hike in Ladder Canyon, a 15-20 minute drive from our apartment. It’s a pretty fun hike, one that Maddy and I did last Sunday. So it should be fun! And then in the afternoon we’re just going to have a little bit of downtime and then go grocery shopping for the week. I’ll probably also do laundry tomorrow and take care of a few errands. Then on Tuesday my supervisor Jeanine is coming for our midsite visit to see how things are going here in the Coachella Valley. So she’ll be with us Tuesday for dinner and then will visit us at work Wednesday.

Can’t believe we’ve been here in Southern California for almost a month already! How time flies. And it’s especially weird to think that this is ONLY month 5 of 11 for me. We’re not even halfway done yet!!

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Written Saturday, January 29, 2011:

The team is typically split up between different work sites during the week, and this week we were split between the roofing site, where we spend our day on top of the roofs of houses hammering in nails, and the painting site, where we spend our day inside a repossessed house repainting all of the walls and ceilings an off-white color. The third site we have been going to since coming to the Coachella Valley has been the framing site, where we spend all day drilling self-driving screws into plywood on the frames of houses.

I spent most of my time this week at the roofing site, which out of the three is the one I enjoy the most. While initially, it was a little scary climbing up to the roof of the houses on a rickety ladder, I’ve since gotten used to the height (which really isn’t very high at all… these are one-story houses, haha), and the view from the houses is spectacular! We can see tops of houses and buildings in the surrounding area as well as the mountains on all sides of us. And since we are in Southern California, the weather is always gorgeous. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be doing this type of work in the cold rain!! Good thing we aren’t in Oregon anymore, haha.

At the roofing site this week, we spent pretty much the entire time hammering nails into the plywood boards on the roof. I did the calculation today, and there are about 1100 nails per roof. And that’s for the small houses. For the larger ones, it is probably closer to 1300! And we’ve worked on seven houses this week. So all in all, that’s A LOT of nails, and needless to say, I’ve become pretty proficient with using a hammer. :-)

There are three tough parts to working at the roofing site.

First, like all of the sites, you are there ALL DAY. That means 4 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon of nothing but hammering in nails. It gets a bit tedious after a while…

Second, finding a decent position to hammer in nails can be tricky. Some of us crouch down. Others sit down. Either way, after seven hours of hammering, no matter what position you are in, some part of your body is going to be sore (other than your arms, which are obviously sore!). Personally, I like to crouch down when I hammer, and it is an intense workout for my calves.

Third, while most of the nails behave, every once in a while (or quite often, depending on your luck), you get that disobedient nail that bends when you hit it. And that is the worst. An instant demoralizer. And when you’re hammering in 500+ nails over the course of a work day, those little bent nails add up and become one big frustrating situation. Add to that the fact that when you hammer in nails through the plywood, sometimes they miss the truss and you have to pry them back out, it can be a pretty tough job not only physically, but mentally and emotionally!!

Despite these qualms, I really enjoy the roofing site. Our site supervisor there, Fernando, is this super friendly, jovial guy who always has a smile on his face and is quick to laugh. He’s pretty laid back too, so you don’t feel like you are constantly being evaluated by your proficiency at hammering in nail after nail all day long!

I spent an afternoon or two this week at the painting site, and whereas the roofing site gives you a great view of the surrounding parts of the valley, the painting site gives you a great view of the room you are painting in. And even though the room usually has a window, the window often looks out on a fence, which isn’t quite as picturesque as the Santa Rosa mountains, haha.

At the painting site, we take rollers and brushes and cover up already painted walls. Unlike at the roofing site, we only work on one house at a time at the painting site, and the houses we work at are repossessed by the bank and are given over to CVHC for remodeling. So we tear out all of the carpet around the house, cover up the tile with carpet mats (so they don’t get paint on them), and use rollers and brushes to cover all of the walls in the house with off-white paint. Two coats of paint if the walls were any color other than white.

As the roofing site has made me pretty good at hammering, the painting site has made me pretty good with using a roller and to a lesser extent, a brush (the brush is easier so there wasn’t really all that much room for improvement at the beginning). When you’re using the roller, sometimes it’s tough because it leaves behind lines of paint on the wall (kind of like a lawnmower leaves behind lines of grass trimmings on the lawn), and you need to roll over them to make them blend in. Haha, the first time I tried rolling the paint, it came out looking terrible! But I found that if I roll over an area of the wall twice it works out pretty well. I push hard into the wall with the roller the first time to get the paint down, then when I roll back over it again, I do so with a light touch so that the roller spreads the paint to make it all blend together. That probably doesn’t make sense to anybody reading this who isn’t familiar with painting, but basically the gist of the story is that I’ve gotten much better at painting!

One challenging part about the painting site is that we have to paint the ceilings. This is invariably a tedious job because while it’s not very difficult or challenging to do, I am bent backwards most of the time, looking up at the ceiling and pushing the roller up into the ceiling at an awkward angle. And it’s at this point that I always get a lot of paint on my clothes and myself, because the paint drips down from the ceiling onto me!

Our supervisor at the painting site is Guillermo, although we call him Willie. He’s a very friendly guy, like Fernando. Whereas Fernando works with us and a lot of other people on the multiple houses, Willie is by himself in the house unless we’re there, so we keep him good company. He doesn’t take a siesta in the middle of the day like everybody else, so he works straight from 7am until 4pm, taking a short break for lunch in the middle of the day.

On Wednesday and Friday of this week, I went to the Afterschool Kids Club in our apartment complex. It is something two of the people on the team do each afternoon (we rotate through so it’s a different pair each day). It was so much fun! Basically, the whole team works at the work sites in Coachella (either roofing, framing or painting) from 7am to 11am and then takes siesta from 11am to 2pm. Then the team goes back to the work sites from 2pm until 5pm. Except for the two Afterschool Kids Club people. They go to the Afterschool Kids Club from 3pm to 6pm and help the kids with their homework, read books with them, and play games and do activities with them.

Depending on how much you like kids, it can be fantastic or it can be a nightmare! For me, I haven’t spent that much time around kids the past 6 years since I left for college, and the first hour of the first day I went was a little awkward. After that, though, it was such a blast!! The kids are great fun and even though they know our names, they always call us “Mister” or “Miss” when they’re addressing us and refer to us as “The Mister” or “The Miss” when they’re talking about us amongst themselves. It’s pretty funny and pretty cute. I’m looking forward to seeing them all again when it’s my turn to go at the end of this week. I even know a lot of their names already! There’s Carlos, Leon, Dennis, Bianca, Angel, Giovanni, Andrew, Abelene, Kwan, Amanda, Ashley, Cesar… and a bunch of other kids. Haha, there are probably about 20 or 30 kids that go each day, so it’s a lot!!

Anyway… that has been what we’ve been up to this week. This Sunday we’re going to be working at the Indio Arts and Music Festival as an Independent Service Project. The team is pretty excited! And then on Monday we’re going to hike in Ladder Canyon, a pretty sweet hike Maddy and I did last weekend. You go through a winding slot canyon and eventually emerge on top of these rocky hills and you can see for miles and miles and miles in every direction. It’s awesome.

Okay, well, it’s 10pm, and that means I wanted to be in bed an hour ago. I want to wake up early so that I can enjoy some peace and quiet time before anybody else wakes up. But we’ll see if that happens, because I think everyone else is already asleep!!

And on another note, today is Day 150 of being in AmeriCorps NCCC! Pretty nuts, eh?

Hello Weekend!

So I’m sitting here at the fold-out dining room table in the common room of our apartment. The front (and only) door is open as well as the kitchen window and since they are on opposite sides of the apartment, there is a small but warm breeze flowing through. It’s quite comfy right now, actually! It’s a little hazy outside, making the sun cast that pale yellow glow instead of the golden glow it casts on clear days.

Right now half of my team is in Palm Springs hanging out (it’s about an hour away) and the other 5 of us are here at the apartment. Two of the women here just got back from the Sunday morning farmer’s market in La Quinta (a bit past Indio, maybe 25-30 minutes away?) where they bought some fresh fruits and veggies! And now they’re going to go out to lay on the grass and read… something I’m seriously considering doing as well, haha. It’s a pretty laidback day today (even though it’s a Sunday, our work schedule is Tues through Sat, so this is our first day of the weekend), and the four other people here just threw their dirty clothes in the laundry. The rest of the team should be back sometime late this afternoon and tonight we’re going to be having Thai curry for dinner! Yum!

I just got done a marathon session with paperwork and e-mails. Haha, okay maybe calling it a “marathon session” is exaggerating… it was more like 3 hours or so. I wrote my Weekly Progress Report (WPR), which is a multipage document where I put down what we did each day of the week, calculate how many hours my team worked this week (this past week it was 474 hours between all ten of us). I also compiled all of my receipts from purchases made so far this Round using the govie card (we have about $3000 for the team’s food for the 7 weeks we are here) and was happy to discover that we are a little bit under budget so we can relax when it comes to spending money on groceries tomorrow during our weekly trip to the WinCo grocery store in Indio. One thing I’ve discovered is that having sufficient food for a team of 10 hungry individuals is a MUST!

I guess I haven’t really talked too much about my team, huh? Well here’s a little summary, which now that I’m thinking about it isn’t going to tell you very much about the group or the people in it, haha. But at least from now on I can use names when I’m talking about stuff! From oldest to youngest:

Me: I’m the Team Leader! I’m 24 and am from outside Philadelphia, even though I spent the past two years in Colorado for grad school and the four years before that in Baltimore for college.

Carly: Okay, so maybe Carly should have come first because she is actually a few months older than me, but anyway, she is 24 and is from Indiana. She spent some time in Bolivia and Hawaii the past few years and after AmeriCorps is planning on backpacking in Asia with her older sister. She likes to practice yoga regularly and is a strong advocate for sustainability.

Dan: Dan is 23 and is from Los Angeles. He did a few years at the University of Arizona at Tucson, but even though he has earned more credits than is needed to graduate, because he switched from engineering to education, he still has a little more coursework to do. He knows a lot of famous people (or knows people who know them) and comes from a pretty affluent background.

Kayla: Kayla is 23 and is from upstate New York. She is our unofficial team mom and is the person who takes charge of cooking all of our delicious meals! She is an avid vegetarian and has the most amusing and contagious laugh out of everyone on the team.

Maddy: Maddy is 22 and is from Minnesota! She went to school at Macalester where she also played soccer. She is a really outdoorsy individual, and enjoys hiking, backpacking, camping, snowshoeing, skiing, and pretty much any other outdoor, active activity! She’s one of the biggest go-getters on the team and is always the first to get things rolling when something needs to get done.

Arielle: A lot of us call her REL because R.E.L. is how her name is pronounced! She is 22 and is originally from Pittsburgh, where she went to school. Her family recently moved to Baltimore a few months ago, and now she lives in Towson, practically next to Loyola (where I went to college)! She was accepted into the Peace Corps but turned them down to do 10 months with AmeriCorps NCCC! She was just accepted at the University of Pennsylvania for grad school following AmeriCorps and will start her master’s program in social work this Fall.

Fremeira: Free is 21 and is from Baltimore. She lives a little ways from Arielle and is not too far from Loyola, either. Free has a quick laugh and enjoys spending time by herself, as she aptly calls herself “free-spirited” Free. She did a year in college before taking on a full time job and plans on returning to school after AmeriCorps with her Education Award and being the first in her family to get a college degree.

Jordan: Jordan is 20 and is from Maryland, but really close to Washington, DC. He comes from a pretty crazy place, with drugs and gangs and violence all over the place. So he is really enjoying the relative peace of AmeriCorps. He has a jembe that he bought in Oregon and plays his cherished drum here in Southern California constantly, and if not drumming on his jembe, he is drumming on something else or is beatboxing. After AmeriCorps, he wants to go into the music industry in some capacity.

Terrae: Terrae turned 20 when we were in Oregon and is from Kentucky. When we first met him, he was disconcertingly quiet and wouldn’t look at anyone. He was always texting or had his headphones in. Well, we have since gotten him out of his shell! Now he jokes around with the team and since he is a fan of dancing, he will bust out some crazy dance moves every once in a while. He still always has his headphones in or is texting on his phone, but he has become much more part of the group than he was when we first met him. He is working on finishing up his GED.

Samantha: Sam just turned 19 last weekend and is from the Jersey Shore. She was a cheerleader in high school and is definitely the “girl” of the group. She has a quick smile and snorts when she laughs and is basically just really easy to like. This is her first time away from home, and she is definitely and understandably the person who is most homesick most often in our group. After AmeriCorps she is going to start college and although she has a deferred enrollment at a school in Virginia, she is seriously considering staying out here in California to go to school because she loves it out here!

Whew!! Well, that’s my team. They’re a pretty awesome bunch. They’re a really diverse group and they didn’t click immediately at the beginning, but everyone has gotten along pretty well and is generally very respectful of everyone else. It’s kind of interesting because while I think I’m a really outgoing person, my team isn’t really all that outgoing and outspoken. In fact, we’re probably one of the quieter teams. We’re not the most energetic and we’re not the most enthusiastic, and that was something that initially I struggled with. I’ve come to realize, however, that as a team of such different individuals, we have come together pretty well and overall are a good team. When we go out to eat or spend any time together in our regular clothes, you’ll see the a myriad of different clothing styles! Haha we’re a motley assortment of people who probably would never have spent any time with each other outside of AmeriCorps but now we’re all coming together as a cohesive team.

Okay, that’s all for now! Til tomorrow. :-)