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.