The Greenhouse

I'm sitting at our exceptionally large living room table, listening to jazz on the provided house MP3 speakers, as three others from the team cook dinner, two others are on the front porch, and the other two are taking showers. (Yes, separately... We have two bathrooms)

After a long but productive day of work and PT, I've decided that its blog-time. Have a gander at where we're living:

Behold, the Greenhouse. Only in New Orleans (and perhaps others), where housing color-coding laws don't exist will you see an NCCC team living in something like this. We moved in this past Saturday, and the 9 of us have made ourselves home already, gearing up for six weeks of residing together.


In theory, housing of our size with two bedrooms for 8 people might not sound like a picnic. But it's luxury for Badger 6, and we're loving it so far. We've got a great porch to relax at or escape to. We're about a 10-minute walk to the French Quarter, and the bywater is about 10 minutes the other way. The warehouse for Rebuilding Together is next door to us. And we've got air conditioning, so sometimes its debatable whether or not visiting any of these places is necessary.

But in all seriousness, we've got it made this round. This seems to be an organization that's very serious about what they do, and we've all felt uber productive this week joining their crew. I think we'll be accomplishing a lot this round, but you know us... Badger 6 usually does that anyway.

Orientation

Up and running here at Rebuilding Together. We've moved into our convenient and comfortable lime green house with air conditioning and wi-fi, and we've experienced a couple of days of work.

Monday was our Orientation with Rebuilding Together. It was pretty extensive; we learned a lot about the history the organization, the staff, about the architecture of the houses in New Orleans, as well as New Orleans in general. We learned that we'd be working in various neighborhoods, led by an AmeriCorps Direct employee who works at the organization.

The past few days were enjoyable, and I'll blog on that a bit more when I have a moment. But I'm off for work right now. We're meeting at the warehouse (located next door) at 7:30 to load up the vehicles and head over to our house to finish painting. Ta ta for now.

City of Jazz

Look at Chris and Chloe. They're so excited. Why?

Because this is right before we broke out the trumpets to celebrate the news! We're off to New Orleans for our fourth and final round in AmeriCorps NCCC! It’s been a full circle of sorts; we started out our NCCC experience in St. Bernard, LA, about 45 minutes away from the city. We’ve learned that we’ll now be residing in the city itself in what is known as the “Green House”, simply because it is painted bright green. Our housing also happens to be located above the main offices of our project, which happens to be…. (drumroll)

….Rebuilding Together! This non-profit, similar to our project first round, has a mission to rebuild homes, with an emphasis on elderly and disabled homeowners. This time, we’ll be living and working with the New Orleans community, rebuilding various houses. It seems we’ll be doing some exterior work on houses this time around as well.

Furthermore, it seems that Badger 6 will be taking a break from leading volunteers for our final round, as this project focuses more on us just working. It’s welcome change. As leading volunteers has in a way become “a forte of Badger 6” as Chris put it the other day (we’ve done it every round, if you include our couple of volunteer days with Parks and People during Round 2), we are excited to be able to focus on getting things done ourselves. Having the opportunity to teach and manage volunteers for so long has been incredibly fulfilling, but there’s definitely something to be said about being able to just get to work and know that the job will get done efficiently since we’re all already trained as N-Trips.

We move in tomorrow to our house... Yes, all 9 of us will be living together alone in one house for the first time. No other volunteers, or NCCC teams, just Badger 6, in one big, lime-green house, in New Orleans, a 10-minute walk from the French Quarter. I also hear there is air-conditioning and wi-fi, so hey, I’m sold and spoiled, which works for me.

Final Transition

This week is marking our last transition in between projects. All of the Corps, like other transitions, comes together to live back at the village and we participate in meetings, give presentations, and prepare for the next project, which in this case is our final project.

Badger 1 organized this transition’s community meeting. Awhile back, during first transition, Badger 6 put on a pretty stellar community meeting involving a great performance of our theme song “Don’t Stop Us Now”, so I feel as though Badger 1 had a lot to live up to. Yet, they did. They went above and beyond, and put on one helluva meeting that was entertaining and creative, involving a recap of Summer of Service, a primal reading of the AmeriCorps pledge, and an epic skit by Tana and Austin, two talented Badger 1 members who received a standing ovation. The team asked me to emcee their team member introductions as they entered the stage, which was exciting. I hope I did them justice.

Awards were given out at the end of the meeting. I received Corps Member of the Round for the Badger Unit. Wooo! Rar! And then the meeting came to end and we began a campus-wide game of “Assassins” that entailed pulling another Corps member’s name out of a bag and finding and tagging them with a clothespin for at least 30 seconds without them knowing. The results of this game would be tallied during Amerilympics later in the week. I didn’t last long, as I lost the game before I even got back to the village after the meeting. I’ll have to be more on my game next time.

The rest of the week was a lot of meetings and hanging out with the rest of Corps, which included a unit meeting with all of the Badgers that included an extension of the previous day's games. There was a pie-eating contest of sorts, except the objective really involved finding all of the swedish fish hidden inside. I suppose only the pictures can do justice.
It was nice seeing everyone, because our teams haven't been together since May. Everybody looks different. You can tell, not just physically, that people have really grown and been through a lot in the past 8 months, even more than they have during longer periods of time in their lives. We’ve reached the final stretch, a scary thought that I’ll put on the back burner for now. Wonder what’s next?

Amerilympics!

I walked back to my house as the sun was setting, covered in mustard, pudding, and BBQ sauce. I walked in the door to greet my housemates, all of whom were graffitied with similar and various other condiments. I contemplated what just happened, what we just did, and how the day had begun on much different note, on a much dryer note.

This morning started like any other morning during a transition. We got up early to get ready, clean our house, make breakfast, and head over to B15 (Building 15, the main offices and conference rooms.) We had a few meetings here and there, in addition to a roundtable on our last project in our clean black and white formals. We all had a few errands to run, and some specialty role tasks we needed to complete. Nothing too out of the ordinary.

4PM rolled around. Let the games BEGIN. Today marked the first annual Amerilympics! It was a campus-wide competition among all three units: the Badgers, the Wolves, and the Ravens, in addition to Team Green (the TLs and staff). The games were held mainly in the South Field of the village. We all had respective colored T-shirts for each unit, and we played everything from Everyone’s It Tag, Tug of War, Kickball, to Ultimate Frisbee, Tape Tag, Capture the Flag, and the final Relay. The games were a blast. If you didn’t play, you rooted your team on, and much of the day was tournament style games.

Some events were a bit more out of the ordinary than others. One included finding puzzle pieces in kids’ pool filled with pudding and other unknown substances, which ultimately turned into a wrestling match for many of the Corps members, especially among our Badger 1 friends. Another game of Capture the Flag essentially encompassed the entire village, which made things tiring and nearly impossible to find the “flags”. It was fun nonetheless. A game of Human Battleship commenced, which entailed water guns and the use of condiments to mix things up a bit. For many it was funny, to others it wasn’t. For everyone, it was messy. The games ended with a relay at the end which included running charades, 5-person legged race, a slip and slide, and a pushing of a 15-passenger van over the finish line.

So the results? Not so much in our favor. The Badgers came in fourth out of four, but I think it’s fair to say we had the most fun out of all of the team, and were by far the messiest. So what if we didn’t make it on the board? We had our pudding-filled kiddie-pool that provided endless amounts of laughs even in between events.

The 4-hour event came to a close, the award ceremony commenced, and the Wolves were given their Golden Goose Award. I hear that the main organizer of the events received an e-mail from the Denver NCC Campus about an interest in starting the games there. I hope, for their sake, they have sufficient laundry facilities.

New York Times Article

The full-round fire composite team here at Perry Point was featured in the New York Times! For the entirety of the third round, this team was out on the trails and headed up to Maine for a bit for a burn, and a story was done on their experience. Head to the following link to check out the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/us/07land.html?_r=2

In other news: Team Swass... I believe that's what our team name came to become by the end of the week of firefighting. More pictures from last week!

Burn Baby Burn

Now onto this past week, which was absolutely a blast. The six SOS firefighters all teamed up this past week with our amazing composite team leader Liz on a project in Southern Virginia around Suffolk. Expecting to be camping outside for a week, we were surprised to find out we'd have the option of staying in the crew house of the Wildlife headquarters.

The week was incredible, not only because of a stellar team, but because of everything we did while there. There was a chance we'd be heading up to Maine halfway through the week to do a prescribed burn. However, weather wasn't in our favor. Fortunately enough, though, we were able to have a prescribed burn right there, which was incredible. It is something we had been hoping for all year, and I'm so glad I was able to have that opportunity.


Much of the week we worked on various projects, like rebuilding boardwalks at the Great Dismal Swamp and in Virginia Beach and clearing trails. But our burn on Wednesday was definitely the highlight, working on 4 acres and getting the true wildland firefighter experience. All of us have never sweat like that in our lives. We were completely, and I mean literally, soaked through all of our layers, through to our fire uniform. It was hot hot hot, but I suppose that is what to expect when you're walking through fire.


The house we stayed at was convenient and comfortable. I actually had my own room and large bed, something I haven't experienced in a long time; it almost felt lonely, but only almost. We cooked and ate together at the end of the day, and there was even a TV, which took a few moments to get the hang of. Of course, there were several occasions where we'd turn it on, zone out, or start watching the ever-so-uplifting news, causing us to turn it off and find something else to do. It's a strange experience after being on the go all year, and now having access to television. We realized we weren't missing out on anything.

Anyway, incredible week. I got some amazing experience, was able to clear up some brush and slash and create a safer environment for the trees, and I'm going to miss it. Who knows, maybe they'll deploy us again in the final two months. In any case, I'm glad I was able to have been able to do it at least once.

Pictures are included, but I plan to blog a bit more on this. My digital camera filled up, so I ended up having to purchase a disposable to catch photos from the actual burn. Keep a look out for that coming soon!

Meeting President Obama

What an incredible couple of weeks! About a week and a half ago was the anniversary of 9/11, which as we all know now has become the National Day of Remembrance and Service. Because of this, those of us at the point drove into DC for various projects.

A couple of Corps members and I joined the STLs (Support Team Leaders) in DC for a day project with Habitat for Humanity, helping build a house for a family. We found out when we arrived that the President and First Lady would be coming by the house. Here's the article: http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/newsroom/photos_press_detail.asp?tbl_pr_id=1511

I ended up working around the entrance to the house where we were cleaning windows, and the buzz began, and Obama entered through where we were working to take a tour of the house. He and Michelle came through, I shook his hand, mine smudged with window dirt and windex, at which point I felt a little bad, but then got over fairly quickly. I wasn't sure if I should continue working or just flat out stare and watch as they continued to tour the house. But everyone else was doing it.

All in all, very exciting! We got a great picture with them, which I've included above. Yes, he is that tall in person. And by the way, the camera really does add a few pounds.

Back in (Fire) Gear

What a break! Visited the 'rents for a week and a half, had some much-needed relaxation, caught up everything I needed to, but I'm glad to be back. As great as it was to get back to Boston for a short time, there's only so much sitting back I can do, and I'm ready to hit the ground rolling once again.

Got in late last night, and we've begun our first day of our Firefighter mini-project here in the Cecil County Area at a local trail. Today was filled with a good amount of clearing the trail and hauling freshly cut lumber, courtesy of the two sawyer-trained Corps members who have joined our team, our objective being to make the trail wider and safer.


It was quite a workout, especially dragging the trees off of the trail and into the woods, but it was certainly a pleasant change, at least for me, having gotten so accustomed to working as a crew leader and leading tutors in the classroom: less work on the body, more on the brain. Especially after such a laid back break, this was the perfect kick-start to the project. We'll be on this trail for the rest of the week. Our second week we'll starting a fire project in Virginia, and we'll where things go from there.

It's good to be back. We've got a great fire team, 6 fire fighters and 2 sawyers, and Drew, my Badger 6 team leader, happens to be our composite TL for this mini-project. I'm now at the Cecil Country Library, exhausted, after a full day and an intense day of soccer with the rest of the fire team. It feels good to be back in action.