Days 9 through 11

Day 9 – Tuesday February 16, 2010

My first thought when I woke up this morning was, “Yup, my throat still hurts.” My second was, “I am so happy to be here right now.”

It’s true, I am a bit sick. Marissa’s throat hurt last week and she had a very mild fever by the time we went for physicals. Now Casey and I are both a bit sick. It’s okay; it’s a house thing. Fortunately, I just have a bit of a sore throat for now. I’m not too concerned.

We spent our day sitting in trainings. We walked over to 9H just past 8 because we needed to be there by 8:25 to start at 8:30. AmeriCorps is super into being on time (making your team late for a day of work is a moderate infraction), so there’s a chance I’ll be off rugby time and back on responsible real-world time by the end of these ten months. Training today was run by two American Red Cross disaster services instructors, Casey and Lloyd. They went over Red Cross principles and values in the morning and began mass care. After a nice long lunch break, they covered the more about mass care (providing food and shelter and the basics of bulk distribution). They then talked for a couple of hours about how to set up and run a disaster shelter. On Friday, the wolves will have a day of shelter simulations during which each of us will practice the role of shelter manager, learning to set up, run, and close down a disaster shelter. As for today, training lasted about 7 hours and people were quite tired by the end. All 210 of us were together in the theater behind 9H; we were encouraged to stand up rather than falling asleep if we felt ourselves fading and about 20 people were standing in the back at any given time during the afternoon session.

One of the most amusing moments occurred directly following one of our breaks. I got back to my seat and Jamie said, “Hey, did you notice we’re all sitting in pairs?” It turned out that our entire house had gravitated towards one another when we chose our seats that morning. Jamie and I were sitting together at one end of the fourth row with Maria and Rene directly in front of us. Rachel and Marissa were at the other end of the row in front of them and Casey and Jordanna were a few rows behind us. Even when we split up, we all managed to end up sitting together anyway. We’re mildly ridiculous.

After training, our pods met briefly and Melissa confirmed that we will be getting our teams tomorrow. Teams were originally going to be announced this evening, but the snow pushed back much of the schedule by a day, team reveal included. It’ll be exciting to learn who I’ll be spending the next 9 ½ months of my life with as my new family, but many of us are also a bit nervous because we’ll be learning who we’ll be spending almost every moment with for the next 9 ½ months. According to Melissa, even the TLs don’t find out teams until tomorrow night. Our UL Chris has chosen teams and now LaQuine (“luh-QWOHN”, the regional director) needs to look through and approve them before they become official. I don’t think many of us Wolf CMs have ever even met Chris; he just talked to each of our pod leaders about us for a few minutes while we got our physicals. We’ve heard that he mostly works to balance age, gender, and the like with secondary attention to personalities. It’ll be great to learn my new family. Things could change when firefighters are announced, but it’ll be nice to start to get to settle.

I walked back to the Village with Rene, Jamie, and Rachel after the pod meeting. We got back just before 5, so we made our assorted dinners shortly thereafter and settled in for a few hours. I’ve been writing for awhile and Jamie has requested a visit at the Wolf Den when it opens at 7 (her and Rachel’s pod needed to help clean it since TL Debra, their pod leader, is on duty tonight) so I’ll be going over there for a couple of hours now. After that, it’s early to bed before another big day of training tomorrow. Even though it was seven hours of sitting and taking notes, I’ve always found school energizing so I didn’t mind this training. I sometimes felt the objectives of the trainings weren’t expressed clearly, which made it a bit more difficult to feel motivated, but I did learn some new things. I also enjoyed the use of the term ‘client’ rather than ‘victim’ in referring to those directly affected by a disaster whom the Red Cross helps. As I learned during Outward Bound, survival rates increase when you stop thinking of yourself as a victim and instead focus on helping others and working towards recovery. Mental attitude can make a huge difference.

As usual, all’s wonderful here at the Point. I’m even more in love with my house and this program, but it does confirm that NCCC is the place for me.


Day 10 – Wednesday February 17, 2010

Today was Diversity Training Day. It was also me being sick day, though fortunately I didn’t have any trouble making it through the whole training. I did, however, spend most of the training standing on the side of the room rather than sitting because I was cold even with my long-sleeved shirt, sweatshirt, and vest on in the not-that-cold room. I’m guessing I have a fever, since Marissa did for a couple of days and I seem to have a slightly sped-up version of whatever she had.

Diversity Training went very well, other than the physical toll of being cold the entire time (and probably having a mild fever). Our coordinators, Jeff Birdsall and Ginlin Woo, were very engaging speakers. They did lots of interactive activities, including having us make pipe-cleaner sculptures to share important aspects of our culture with our table and leading us in a privilege walk. The privilege walk, one of the longest activities we did because it included a full hour of debrief, entailed listening to a statement read by the leaders then stepping forward or back as directed if you identified with the statement. I stepped forward, for example, for the statement, “Take a step forward if your parents have told you that you’re beautiful or strong or can do anything you want.” (That’s a paraphrase of one of many things they read us hours ago, of course.) At the end of the exercise, we were spread all through Minker Hall. I like that such a diversity of backgrounds have brought us all to this same class and campus of NCCC. Jeff and Gin did a great job helping us think about using that diversity positively as we head into the rest of this busy year.

After nearly nine hours of Diversity Training (well, the first half hour had been our UL Chris talking about the significance of disaster and the agencies through which NCCC responds (American Red Cross, Wildland Firefighting, and FEMA)), we were all tired but also full of nervous energy: it was Team Reveal time. The other units came to join us in Minker Hall, which was soon filled with grey-shirted CMs and green-shirted TLs, along with the three Unit Leaders. Every one of us CMs drew a slip of paper with another CMs name and a song name on it from a box. Our job was to find that CM and give him or her the piece of paper while also being found and getting ours. When I got my paper (well after distributing two, mine and one for Casey since she was back in the Village due to illness), the song on it was “Don’t Stop Believing”. I took this as a good sign since it’s a BWRFC favorite. I soon found a couple other wolves with the same song, which was a huge relief. Melissa had told us that morning that a couple of people would switch between the Village and 9H and I’d been nervous that someone in my house (possibly even me) would be moving out. Fortunately, 1103 remained intact, though we are now welcoming four new wolves into other parts of the Village from 9H. I was super-relieved that my family here is staying together. A few minutes later, I got my new family.

Team Reveal progressed quickly once we all had our slips of paper. They played a song over the speaker system and put the song name and associated team/TL up on the projector screen. When your song played, you ran up, posed for a quick picture with your new team, and headed off to the back for a few minutes of team bonding. My group was probably in the eight-to-ten range of the 21 pods, so I didn’t have to wait too long. A few people from my team had already found each other (I’d found Traci first, whom I’d talked to for a couple of hours the other day in the Wolf Den library, then we found a couple of other people with the same song), but we still didn’t know our TL. We were happy to end up with Melissa, my recent pod leader and longtime House Mom. She’s super warm and friendly, so I think we’re in for a great year with her as our leader.

I didn’t know anyone in my pod well at all other than Traci, so it’ll be good to spend lots of time together tomorrow and in the upcoming weeks as we begin to get to know each other. My team is: Melissa (our lovely TL), me, Traci, Sabrina (who’s vegetarian, loves Tibetan food, and has already promised to make me dal), Lindsey, Amanda, Kathy (who switched from 9H just tonight), Brandon (who was in my pod), Jeff, Chris, and Roy (or ‘Silent Roy’, as Chris calls him). We’ll have a full morning of team time tomorrow morning and I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone in my newest NTrip family.


Day 11 – February 18, 2010

Today was great.

We began with unit time with Chris Quaka, our Wolf Unit Leader, at the Havre de Grace Community Center. (Havre de Grace is a small town across the Susquehanna from Perryville.) Chris had spoken to us a few times before, but never presented a full CTI segment to us. This morning, he spoke for over an hour about his expectations and standards for the Wolf Unit, his goals for us as a unit, and the excitement of the upcoming year. He was an engaging speaker and injected lots of humor into the subject matter. Chris’ core slideshow used a series of pictures of his baby Logan (born last summer) to walk us through the craziness of the months to come – the energy now, the tired look on the morning after a big night out, the closeness of graduation in November. As he reiterated multiple times, these next ten months will absolutely fly. Chris also interjected some good stories into his speech to reinforce the importance of abiding by the rules about alcohol and such. He finished with a screening of the midyear slideshow from Wolf Class XV, which was an excellent tool for getting us psyched up for the amazing times to come.

After Chris wrapped up, we continued our morning with a hearty round of “How Well Do You Know Your Team Leaders?” The team leaders had come up with a variety of trivia questions about themselves which we tried to answer in house pairs. We learned some fun facts along the way. Examples: Melissa’s dream vacation would be at the North Pole while Ethan’s would be four weeks backpacking in New Zealand followed by two weeks on a cruise in Antarctica; when he was little, Daniel wanted to be a Jedi when he grew up; Suzanne couldn’t live without ice cream and peanut butter. It was a good time.

We then broke into an hour of team time for lunch. Wolf One headed to a local coffee shop, where Melissa treated us to coffee and yummy hot chocolate. It was super-nice of her. She went over her expectations (e.g. be on time, ‘on time’ meaning five minutes early) before leading us through a couple of excellent team-building exercises. One of the TL trivia questions had asked who wanted to know ‘why people do what they do.’ She asked each of us to talk about why we do what we do in life, with service, or joining NCCC. Some good answers came out which began to help us figure out how our teammates think and function. Melissa then led us in a Starburst exercise. She began by having us each take a Starburst candy. Next, she explained that each candy wrapper color correlated with a statement to which we should respond. People talked about what we looked forward to the most, one challenge we knew we’d face, or a proud moment in life. Everyone gave honest answers which provided even more insight into who we are and how we operate. The exercises were good first steps to helping us form a solid unit.

After lunch, we returned to the community center for an information-packed afternoon about child-friendly spaces. We learned that Save the Children, a program which works to help and support children around the globe, has a partnership with NCCC. Specifically, we could work with Save the Children when we get called to disaster. The organization seeks to create child-friendly spaces in disaster shelters, areas where children could take time away from shelter life to just be kids – and parents could leave their kids (as long as they stay on shelter property) to take time away and shower or regroup – in a safe space filled with toys and games. We learned how to use the tools in the Save the Children ‘grey box’ – a big plastic bin filled with art supplies, books, board games, and the like – to set up and run a child-friendly space in a disaster shelter.

The speaker, Kate from Save the Children, was very enthusiastic and made apparent the deep thought and constant reevaluation for best practices that go into every aspect of the program. She talked about the effects disaster can have on children, ways to structure the space (e.g. separate active and quieter activities or give older and younger children different areas), and how we can give away favorite toys or make a fun pack for a child who wants to play but whose parent wants them to be elsewhere. I was most struck by the incredible generosity of the program. She encouraged us on multiple occasions to go ahead and let children take toys or supplies with them and said that when we closed the space we could help figure out whether to donate the remaining supplies to a local school or other organization or, if equitable, divide them among the children still in the shelter. I love the complete selflessness of the program and gained a thorough respect for Save the Children’s work.

Our thick new ‘US Child-Friendly Spaces’ manuals in hand, we headed back to the Village in our sweet black van (the only one in the fleet, as Melissa has told us on multiple occasions). I chilled with my housemates, ate some dinner, and came to the Wolf Den to sit and write. Tomorrow is our first day of PT (yay, 5:40 AM van time) so it’ll be a fairly early night for much of the Village. We’ll spend the rest of the day in shelter simulation, learning how to set everything up outside the child-friendly space. Ah, Red Cross classes.