March 30th- April 3rd: road trip back to Sacramento from Baton Rouge (with overnights in San Antonio, TX, El Paso, TX, Flagstaff, AZ and Henderson, NV)
April 6th-9th: Transition in Sacramento (including a day of Life After AmeriCorps workshops on things like resume building and job fairs)
April 10th- 13th: AmeriCorps NCCC Spring break! We get Friday and Monday off and I'll be spending my break in San Francisco visiting family, friends and a prospective school for next year. I'll also try and get some Independent Service Project hours out of the way on Monday.
April 14th: One last day of transition, consisting of briefings. Briefings are the meetings in which we, as a team, present what we know about our project and the community we'll be serving to some AmeriCorps NCCC staff members. This is so that they can see that we have prepared ourselves well and also so that they can answer any questions we might have.
And, finally, on April 15th Green 5 will depart from McClellan Air Force Base and head to southern California for our third project!
What are we doing in So-Cal, you ask? Well, we'll be working at camp Cedar Crest, an environmental education camp run by the Orange County school district. We'll be working with 5th and 6th graders as counselor/instructors. Our job will be to act as camp counselors to groups of students while, at the same time, teaching them a set science curriculum based on their age. A typical week's schedule will include several hikes (both day and night), skits and presentations on topics from astronomy to forest ecology. But more on that later, I have so much to update you about!
Here are myself and my teammate Katie working on siding at the Women's' Build. In Baton Rouge every measure is taken to ensure the safety of volunteers on the work site.
From back to front we have Abe, myself, Katie and Bailey on our first day at the Restore! We organized approximately a million (okay, maybe not) windows by size and then priced them by the square foot. It was really neat to see a section of the store that was so disorganized become so neat and easy to navigate after our hard work was complete. We also were able to help several customers find what they needed by pointing out our newly updated organization system.
These beautiful buildings are the University Presbyterian Church which was our home for eight fantastic weeks! We lived on the top floor of the building on the left, the one on the right was home to a day school for pre-school aged children.
For many people Tuesday, February 24th passed uneventfully, but not in the state of Louisiana, that's for sure!
The 24th was Fat Tuesday, more commonly known as Mardi Gras. A few of my friends and I were able to make it down to New Orleans for the festivities, to the right is a photo of just one of the incredible floats we saw! I had always heard that Mardi Gras was a huge deal in the southern part of our country but I could have never understood just how huge without having been a part of it. Schools closed, buses run on different schedules and just about everyone walks around in a state of celebratory euphoria (be it alcohol or excitementinduced varies from person to person).
NCCC gives every member 3 personal days which can be taken at any point in the year as long as an absence won't drastically impact the work of the team. I took advantage of my days to fly home for a weekend in mid-Marc
h to see Anything Goes, the musical at my old high school in which my younger brother had a role and my younger sister stage managed. The afternoon before I left was a fantastic way to say goodbye to Louisiana for a few days! My team spent it at Alligator Bayou Tours in Baton Rouge. We were shown all sorts of gators as well as other native Bayou wildlife. Our tour guides were fantastic and told us all about how the levee system changed the natural landscape and environmental cycles in Louisiana as well as about how important it is to preserve the existing Bayou lands. Our team was also informed that they day after our tour the men who liquidated their million dollar roofing company to save the lands that they now give educational tours on were due in court to fight for the rights to continue to use their land for educational purposes. The history is quite complicated but, information about the case can be found here. And please, excuse the strange look on my face but.... give me some credit, will you? When was the last time you held a gator?Whew. That was about the fastest recap of the past month and a half that I could have possibly done. Over the next few days I'll try to expand on a few of the subjects I touched on, including a reflection on the close of our second project which signifies the half-way point in my term of service as well as my last few days serving on the Gulf Coast. I also have lots of updating to do about our road trip! We were able to see the Alamo and the Riverwalk in San Antonio, the US-Mexico border in El Paso, the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam on the way to Nevada and, finally, the Vegas Strip and, on top of all that, some of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen.
gators, mountains and love
--Walker
