Be The Change.

Wisdom from the Mat

2012-01-30T21:44:00.001-05:00

As we settled into Shavasana at the end of Sunday morning's yoga class (Shavasana being "corpse pose" - you get to lie motionless on the floor after an hour of full-body stretching and movement), our instructor Jeannie offered the following wisdom that really resonated with me. She was encouraging us to tap into the part of ourselves which hasn't changed since we were children:
"There's a part of yourself that has always known ... that, in fact, it's your true essence to be happy."

In entirely unrelated news, one of my housemates got flowers the other day. I spent the first couple of days skeptical that these closely-drawn petals would ever choose to blossom open in late January, then the next few admiring their open-faced beauty. I finally caught them in good light today and couldn't resist taking a few pictures (and subsequently playing around editing said pictures):

Ain't it pretty?

Simple editing software still amazes me some days.

I loved seeing the pollen caught on the petal.

It looks almost playdohlike up close.

There you have the beginning of my week: yoga inspiration and science fun time in the comfort of home. Up next: VISTA training and taxes (both almost as fun).

Life in Yoga-land

2012-01-23T22:49:00.000-05:00

I would like to extend a huge thank-you to Yoga Synergy of Fairfield for understanding the financial situation of a VISTA and being flexible in providing membership at a discounted rate. I now have full access to the studio's yoga classes for the next seven months - the rest of my service term - and I love it already.

First, it's just great to be back into stretching and pushing my body in new ways. My last yoga class was nearly a year ago (before my world travels) and I love that I enjoy yoga enough now to appreciate it being back in my life. After a childhood of viewing the practice as silly and superfluous, I now my giant group stretch sessions to start a weekend right.

Second, this is hot/heated yoga, which brings in a whole new dimension. I was a bit nervous when I read various hot-yoga-beginners tips online about what to do if when you feel nauseous, how the mid-class misery will pass and leave you glowing, and all that. Fortunately, our classes were pleasantly heated rather than stifling hot and/or incredibly humid. Compared to the wintry outdoors, the room feels great. It wasn't until we started moving through poses that I began to sweat and appreciated the towel I had brought. (Everyone brings a towel; Douglas Adams would be so pleased.) The heat allows you to get deeper into poses. It allows me to get into some of them at all after so long not seriously stretching.

Third, it's fun social time! I know some yoga is very quiet and introspective, but this isn't that yoga. Well, it is but it isn't. A large portion of our time is spent reflecting on our own poses, but both instructors I've had thus far have known everyone in the class' name (everyone being about 15 people each time) and the second class devolved into a light-hearted conversation on male-female rivalry at one point mid-class. People were laughing and relaxed, which made it a great environment to start the day. That class also had awesome music to add to the fun.

One of the nice things about VISTA is that we're still technically 'on duty' 24/7, but we have much more time to 'have a life' than I did in my first AmeriYear. There's a lot to be said for stability and I've enjoyed getting to settle into this house by the water, sign up for yoga classes, make delicious food in our very own kitchen, and spend time with AmeriFriends and other wonderful people. I even get to sleep in on weekends. It's the little things.

Update: Books

2011-11-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

After re-editing to smooth out the adjustment in premise, I'm back down to two pages. Now I know where it's going, though! I feel the characters shaping themselves and getting ready to take over.

Books

2011-11-18T21:52:00.000-05:00

A month ago today (I know this because I returned my first set of books yesterday), I went to the Fairfield Public Library to get a library card. I already had a Bridgeport Public Library card from the branch five minutes down the street; it was an easy matter for the friendly woman at the circulation desk to look up my account and grant me borrowing privileges on the same card. She said the magic words - "You can take out as many books as you'd like" (!) - and I was off. Since my days are filled with service at and through the University, I limited myself to nine books and made it through part to all of four of them (I ended up renewing two).

Two of the books were young adult dystopias. After I read the first, I started the second and almost immediately thought, "Wow, this story line seems very familiar." Though I trust that the two authors eventually headed in different directions (I admit that I never made it through the second one to find out, though I do plan, in a far cry from good bookwormishness, to look up a plot summary online), both books started out with the same overarching plot points. When I described the similarities to my dad and offered that I could probably write that, he replied that I really probably could. (To his credit, he has not read either of the books in question.) Thus began my journey to write a book.

Thus far, I have taken the following steps:

Decide that even though I thought it would be easiest to write a dystopia, that isn't the genre I'm most drawn to and turn instead to the realistic fantasy sector (yes, I believe that does exist).
Come up with a basic setting and my main characters.
Reject the setting and decide to relocate the book entirely.
Start writing.
Consider that I should probably develop a premise for the story before getting much past four pages in the writing process.
Talk with my sister on Skype; divulge the first half of the nascent premise.
Appreciate how alike she and I think; finish the conversation feeling like I'm on the right track.
Reintroduce the setting that I had rejected, in modified form, for one of the main characters; keep the new setting for the other.
Taking into account the new premise, delete one of the four pages written thus far; write two more.
Think up the rest of the premise; prepare to write.

As you can see, I'm already ten steps (and five pages!) into the book. It really does have potential to be an enjoyable read. We shall see!

Until it gets to some readable stage, I have a wonderful evening project to occupy my time after the service day. It's fun to have a new goal (write a book) towards which to work after eleven relatively goal-free months since I turned 24 and, simultaneously, completed my time on the Congressional Award. I like goals.

Food Revisited

2011-10-24T21:49:00.000-04:00

It's only a week to Halloween, which means it's time to get back to writing! (I'm not sure why it means that, but I hope we can both agree that it does.)

I attended the 7th annual Connecting for Change this weekend, a Bioneers by the Bay conference hosted by the wonderful Marion Institute. Though my biggest highlight of the weekend was seeing all the friendly faces of the fantastic Marion Institute staff and getting to see my lovely former NCCC housemate as her current team helped run the conference (she's now a team leader and spends lots of time making sure they all stay happy and alive), I also loved the conference itself. The keynotes were engaging and compelling; the workshops left me feeling empowered and change-y. (Can we also agree that 'change-y' is a word or would that be too much to ask?) It was a good weekend.

One of the speakers at the conference was Ben Hewitt, a native Vermonter and the author of 'The Town that Food Saved.' Among other topics, he spoke of how Americans on average spend 9.5% of our salaries on food and have the persisting perception that food should be cheap. He proclaimed, "Food should NOT be cheap! It's the most important thing you put in your body. ...It should NOT be cheap." This got me thinking. As part of my AmeriVentures, I've been attempting to stick close to my food stamps. By keeping my food budget close to $200 per month, I've endeavored to get some sense of what it's like to live on food stamps. The venture is falsely constructed, as I miss out on some of the primary emotions of living off food stamps: the fear that comes as that balance nears zero and the days of waiting for the exact moment when money will be added to the card. Instead, I calmly calculate how far over I went in the first two weeks with my plethora of fresh fruits and vegetables and attempt to limit myself with kitchen creativity in the last two weeks of each month.

The experiment is over. I attended the conference with a fellow VISTA (yet another AmeriFriend involved in change-yness) and we talked about the cost of food during our three-hour drive back from southeastern Massachusetts to southwestern Connecticut. She pointed out that we often talk about wanting everyone to have access to fresh produce or wanting everyone to have access to organic foods, but leave ourselves out of the equation. There are positives to spending in solidarity with those who don't have access; there are also positives to using the access I do have, to spending my money on fresh and organic foods and let it speak for my values in a way. Money talks, it seems.

As a result of all this conferencing and thinking, I've decided to readjust my budget to allow me to buy more fresh fruits and vegetables and, going a bit towards the other extreme, to buy more organic foods. I attended a workshop this weekend at which a doctor discussed just how far up the food chain we humans are - environment --> plants --> herbivores --> omnivores/carnivores (incl. humans) --> babies - and what that means for the concentration of toxins in our foods. This got me thinking about those pesticide sprayings any one pepper or zucchini may have had in its life. Wouldn't it be nice to eat a vegetable that hadn't been coated with chemicals 10 times over?

I thought this would indeed be nice, so I went to Stop & Shop (the Fairfield branch; I already adjusted my grocery shopping location when I found early on that a) this one is right on the way home from work rather than past my turn, and b) this one targets a different demographic and that demographic is admittedly much closer to my own, preferring local apples and whole grains to chips and bread for the focal displays). I picked up what organic vegetables I could find beyond leafy greens (an eggplant and a bag of carrots) and some local apples then headed over to Whole Foods, got lots more organic vegetables, and headed home to a delicious dinner of tilapia, kale, mashed butternut squash, and a wheat roll (made locally without sugar). I spent much more money than I would have on this same trip before the weekend, but I ended up with an amazing meal that made me happy. I'll take that.

You, lovely reader, get the next step of my research into this is issue. I found some interesting data as I was looking up the 9.5% statistic online to make sure I was remembering accurately. The statistic was accurate...back in 2004. The USDA puts 2009 US expenditures on food consumed at home just under 7%. By comparison, citizens in Spain, France, and Italy (all of which, I must attest, have fantastic food and a wonderful food culture) spend about 14% of their income on food to be consumed at home. The USDA survey looked at 168 countries and found that people living in the United States commit the smallest percent of our expenditures to our food choices: every other one of the 168 nations commits a greater percentage. It's not surprising that Jordan, Indonesia, and Pakistan all top 40% in spending on food - Azerbaijan is at the extreme with 46.9% of household final income expenditures spent on food that was consumed at home. It does, however, provide a pretty stark image of the shift away from meals eaten in the household and suggests that perhaps there are greater points of concern than food not being cheap enough for the average American. As Ben Hewitt said, "Food should NOT be cheap! It's the most important thing you put in your body. ...It should NOT be cheap."

I'm off to do change-y things. Enjoy a crisp apple or other healthy fall treat this week!

They Were Right

2011-09-06T22:09:00.000-04:00

People were right when they said that things would pick up once the students arrived. After spending more weeks wishing that something - anything - that a) I could start now and b) would take more than 4 hours to complete would come across my desk, our halls were filled with lost first-years and my desk was filled with tangible, long-term projects. It was a fantastic day.

A highlight was talking with Danielle, my lovely office-mate, about how students assume that we know absolutely everything just because we work there. Example? I had a student ask if I knew a certain professor (I didn't) then follow that up with a query about whether one lab was cancelled or all labs were cancelled because "I don't know if I'm missing class right now." And I'm supposed to know that how exactly? As she was texting and talking to a friend while sitting in the hallway unmoving, I figured she wasn't all too concerned about her potential absence. The hallway I work on is designated for language classes, which makes for fun trips to the water fountain to stay hydrated.

Most of my day's highlights, surprisingly for such a full work day, had little to do with general office happenings. (Speaking of fun office happenings, though, our new Center for Faith and Public Life Assistant Director officially accepted her job today! Now my supervisor can breathe many deep sighs of relief.)

Highlight #1: A phone conversation from one of the disaster coordinators I worked with last summer in Nashville, whom I hadn't talked to in over a year, during which I was able to help re-establish a potential disaster-response partnership with NCCC.

Highlight #2: Tutoring a couple of fellow VISTAs in GRE math - we worked on Pythagorean triples and 'special' right triangles. One brought me dark chocolate as a gift; they told me that what I'll be most tired of by the end of our tutoring sessions is them telling me that I should be a math teacher instead of going into administration. I was happy because they understood more after the two hours than before and some problems had become less scary.

Highlight #3: Putting a trip to NYC with my mom on my calendar for Explorers' Day weekend. My mother, good food, and Broadway? Winning combination.

Highlight #4: A sincere email from a friend.

Highlight #5: Discovering that my rugby team plays at Yale - only 45 minutes from me - in less than a month. I haven't seen them play since graduation! So excited.

Highlight #6: Another phone conversation about disaster, this time in which Melissa set me up to connect students at Fairfield with an NCCC team doing disaster-response volunteer coordination in Connecticut. She got back to me faster than the Red Cross, whom the team will be working for under a FEMA deployment. Friends are awesome.

So today was a day full of connections, reconnections, and math learning fun time. Total win.

As for tomorrow, Danielle and I will be training nine students in the Service-Learning Associates program. The students will each support a faculty member in a service-learning class with logistics, communication, coordination, etc. And I get to meet another Community Partner! Things are indeed picking up : )

In Which I Go Grocery Shopping

2011-08-22T22:07:00.000-04:00

I found my blog on only the second try this time. I'm so glad it's not too hard for me to locate. Thanks, Google.

My exciting news update of the evening is that I went grocery shopping. "Wait," you say, "you love food. Of course you went grocery shopping. Why, you probably go twice a week!" Okay, I admit that's true. This, however, was a special grocery trip as it was my first with food stamps. Translation: actual groceries!

My savings would have allowed me to spend lots of money on groceries up until now, but I'd rather attempt some minuscule understanding of what it's like to wait for federal aid to kick in so I had been spending fairly day-to-day up until now. Granted, I got lots of fresh fruit; I tried to limit the fruit and other purchases to things I would consume in the next couple of days in hopes that my EBT card (the debit card on which food stamps are now distributed) would arrive in the mail. Due to my AmeriCorps term showing up in a federal-database search of my social security number, I had to send in an excepted income letter (which VISTA provides to all active members) before I could receive benefits. This states that members' pre-existing benefits cannot be reduced as a result of our AmeriCorps living stipend. Since I applied ten days before I started service, I could use this letter to receive benefits at pre-AmeriCorps levels. The outcome of this letter-requirement was that I was moved from expedited to regular processing for SNAP benefits so ended up receiving my EBT card about 2 1/2 weeks after applying. This is, I will note, much better and nicer than having to wait the full 30 days it could possibly take. I'll now get $200 every month to spend on food. This makes grocery shopping generally more pleasant and enjoyable.

As a side note, I'm enjoying shopping at Stop & Shop much more than I thought I would. I had planned to do most of my shopping at Whole Foods, but I love that the Stop & Shop a mile from my house in Bridgeport helps make Bridgeport not-a-food-desert and I feel obligated to support it in its provision of fresh produce and other healthy options to the community. I also like shopping in the community which I serve rather than across the border in Fairfield. As I generally consider the Fairfield-Bridgeport community my service domain (and hope students will grow to see that as their community too), this may be a bit hypocritical. That said, I'm fully aware that I do service here because Bridgeport is here, not because of Fairfield. Supporting the Bridgeport economy and non-food-desert status works for me.

Happily, I now have delicious salads prepared for all week. Yum.

Let's Talk About Service

2011-08-06T18:51:00.001-04:00

06430, one of the zip codes of Fairfield, Connecticut, ranks 40th overall on Mongabay.com's list of the "100 richest zip codes in the United States". But wait, you say, where's its neighbor Bridgeport on the list? Well, let's look at Mongabay's list of the 200 wealthiest zip codes in Connecticut (all lists ranking by income as per IRS tax returns). There's another Fairfield zip code. Still no Bridgeport....

According to money.cnn.com, which ranked Fairfield as one of the 100 contenders for the ten best places to live in the United States in 2010 (the city placed 9th in the same ranking in 2006), Fairfield's median family income per year is $127,920. While I'll be serving at Fairfield University this year, few (if any) of the volunteer opportunities I help shape for students will be in Fairfield. Most will be in Bridgeport, Fairfield's neighbor to the east, which shares a common border but differs on most levels, from road quality to racial diversity to income.

As I prepare to drive to Philadelphia for my VISTA pre-service orientation tomorrow, I decided to take a look at the numbers: how different are these neighbors? I checked out the composition of each city in 2009 at city-data.com. Here's how they stack up:

Population - Fairfield: 57,578; Bridgeport: 137,298

Median household income - Fairfield: $101,192; Bridgeport: $39,949; CT average: $67,034

Primary racial composition - Fairfield: 93.6% white alone; Bridgeport: 35.6% Hispanic, 33.7% black alone, 26.7% white alone

That's just a quick sketch - obviously both cities are far more diverse than any three quantitative statistics could show - but it does paint quite the picture for the service year ahead. Here we have a rich, white town bordering a much less wealthy, far more ethnically diverse city. Suddenly the white = rich assumptions people made about us obruni in Ghana, along with all the corresponding inaccuracies and stereotypes, seem relevant again.

As a final note on the disparity, I'll comment that my landlord rents this beautiful duplex on the water in Bridgeport (in Black Rock, one of the so-called 'safe' neighborhoods) because she decided she would rather pick up and move her son to Fairfield so he could attend public school than pay for him to go to private school in Bridgeport. There was no real consideration of sending him into the Bridgeport public school system. There's a lot of potential for valuable service here.

Tangentially related (if only that it also involves the upcoming service year), I now understand why AmeriCorps NCCC considers itself the hardcore younger sibling of VISTA and State & National, the two other AmeriCorps National Service programs. It considers itself thus because it is. There's no question in my mind - zero - that all three programs provide opportunities for amazingly valuable service, but NCCC gets hands dirty and hearts invested, asking members to give 100% every day physically and mentally. VISTA only asks for the mental and allows lots of that 'free time' unknown to NTrips.

When I was on disaster last year, my team worked multiple 60-plus hour, 6-day weeks. I logged over 70 hours a couple of those weeks. The VISTA commitment at Fairfield? 8:30 to 5 on weekdays. That includes a lunch break. Those 70 hours did not account for lunch. Rather than spend 10 or 11 hours on site plus two more doing paperwork before crashing for the night, I'll work until early evening then pack up and go home. Not every second will be devoted to service. I'll rarely end up in the office until 8 or 9 at night. Crazy, huh? It'll be a huge adjustment to have this entirely different schedule. I may spend a fair amount of off-hours time plotting new service partnerships or volunteering myself, though, which is something to which to look forward. Another thing to look forward to is the chocolate-chip-walnut brownies I made tonight as a gift for the friend I'll be visiting in Philadelphia tomorrow. Nobody said they all had to make it to her. Another difference from NCCC is the freedom and flexibility in food. Imagine going from one half of one refrigerator shelf for a week's worth of groceries to triple that for shop-whenever-I-want groceries. The difference a car makes in independence versus only our awesome, black, 15-passenger government van is phenomenal.

Reality Shows & Muffins

2011-08-02T21:00:00.002-04:00

As you may recall, I'm not as big a fan of reality TV as I used to be. When I was younger, MTV was hip and the Real World showed me all I could aspire not to be in all of its language-censored glory. Now...not so much. After getting to see the actual real world - that big blob spinning through the universe at thousands of miles an hour - reality television just isn't that interesting anymore. Why watch people fight when you could be hiking a mountain only ever traversed by goats and their herders in Argentina or lighting up a child's face with the gift of a ten-cent banana in Ghana? There simply seem to be better things to do with my time - attempt to fulfill my part in saving the world, for example.

All that noted, I found comfort in reality television last night. I was sitting on the couch of my new living room enjoying a fantastic Bollywood film on education - directed, produced by, and starring my new favorite actor Aamir Khan - when my housemate asked if there's any chance I watch the Bachelorette. I took this as a hope that she could watch it - it was - and we enjoyed the next hour settled in for an overly-drawn-out finale of love found and love crushed. As this was one of the two shows my roommates insisted we watch regularly in college (the other being Grey's Anatomy), there was a retro nostalgia (I know, I know, college is too recent for true nostalgia) in watching. More importantly, there were frequent commercials during which Staci and I had bonding time. She's moving out next week, bound for Florida for her next three-month optometry placement, but we can be friends in the meantime. I'm happy to know someone here now.

Another mundane-to-you, exciting-to-me happening last night was my actual lease signing! Yay! Now I'm all official here and can start feeling like this truly is home. In honor of this newfound home-iness, I baked muffins tonight. I used my new favorite banana-blueberry-walnut recipe, my spin-off of a basic banana muffin recipe. It's butter-free, oil-free, otherwise generally healthy, me-approved, parent-approved, and 100% delicious. Since I no longer have parents or parental coworkers on whom to foist extra muffins, I plan to freeze half so they can last, well, maybe a full week. Seriously, these muffins are awesome. The kitchen heated up beyond comfortable from the warmth-radiating stove, but the stove works and the muffins browned nicely so it was totally worth it.

Along with muffin success, I put my new frying pans (a holiday present from my mom) to good use making a stir-fry for dinner tonight. This included these awesome local green beans from home, some of which are traditional green and others of which are dark purple! The purple ones turn mottled purple-and-green in cooking, providing for a fun end result.

Speaking of food (as we so clearly were), I applied for food stamps today. We'll apparently be encouraged to apply for this and other government programs at next week's AmeriCorps VISTA orientation; it makes sense that they would encourage us to learn what it's like to be on food stamps as our stipend is just below the poverty line to help us better understand the experience of those we serve. I know my experience this year will be far cushier than that of most of the people I joined in line today, especially since many of them had multiple small children in tow and were in that office in the middle of a work morning and I saw a few teary-eyed faces of people departing from the back rooms. That said, I am so glad I have had this food-stamp experience thus far. It's one I never would have had were it not for AmeriCorps.

The office accepts applications from 8:30 to 11:30 every weekday morning and there was already a line of about 25 people (maybe 15 families represented) by the time I arrived at 10:30 AM. I had already printed and completed my application, but most people arrived empty-handed and were given the form to begin a new application as they stood in line. There were two other Caucasian people, an elderly couple, in line - Bridgeport is predominantly black and hispanic - and many mid-thirties mothers with young children. I waited about half an hour, handed in my form at the desk, was directed to wait for an interview, filled out one more form while waiting, was called into the back section of office cubicles after 15 minutes, passed through the only-unlocked-when-open door to meet the woman doing my intake, chatted with her and signed a couple more forms (e.g., stating that I'm not requesting food stamps for any fleeing felons), and headed out on my way. The whole process took just under an hour. Now I have one more form to mail in (verification from my housemate that we purchase our food separately) and I'll hypothetically begin receiving benefits.

Food stamps are awarded from the day your application is received at the office, so mine would begin from today. Applicants generally wouldn't start receiving SNAP (the food-stamp program is now technically the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits for up to 30 days, but I noticed that "Emergency SNAP (7 days)" was checked on my form rather than "SNAP (30 days)", probably because my only current income is well under a dollar of interest each month on my checking account while I'm paying full rent on my housing. VISTA, as a government service program, is considered excepted income; that is, my future VISTA stipend won't affect how much I receive in SNAP benefits, though it would be a factor were a VISTA to apply after beginning the service year. And you thought the government complicated things sometimes.... Overall, it'll be nice to have the extra money to put towards healthy, nutritious (read: generally more expensive) food. My landlord Stephanie seemed very surprised when she learned last night that fully two-thirds of my VISTA stipend will go to housing (rent & utilities). And that's for one of three rooms in one of two halves of a duplex. Welcome to the poverty line.

Addendum: I forgot to mention the most memorable part of my visit to my local branch of the Department of Social Services (where SNAP and other benefits are allocated): the security. Along with the perma-locked door to the back offices and movie-theater-ticket-window protective 'glass' encasing the front-desk workers (though not those at the information desk), one must leave a driver's license or other identification at the information desk to get the key to use either of the gender-specific, single-person bathrooms. I noticed the signs announcing this policy and watched one man return the key for his ID. There's also a police (or security?) officer always on duty there. It's easily apparent how such a place could foster distrust for the Department and feelings that no one really cares. The space for disconnect and distrust is quite large, full of locked doors and glassed-off spaces.

Dangerously Awesome?

2011-08-01T16:46:00.000-04:00

1.7 miles. That's how far from my new residence the huge, just-opened-in-June Whole Foods is. It shares a complex with also-useful CVS and Home Depot, the latter of which I've already frequented to pick up a small saw. Apparently bed assembly sometimes requires a bit of construction fun time. (I had opted to use a board over a box spring; the board had opted to be just too big at one corner to fit the frame. It has since changed its ways.) In good news, Stop & Shop is even closer than Whole Foods. This certainly isn't New Orleans.

As you could guess, I've officially moved into my new apartment (house? something?). I share one half of a duplex with two housemates. We have a big, sunny kitchen, a backyard with a porch looking out over the corner of a pretty cove and across to a baseball field (yay for Little League games!), and a living room with a super-cushy couch. (I should know, as I'm sitting on it right now.) My room is wonderful, which is to say it easily fits both a bed and my erg. Here's a picture:

The desk belonged to my great-great-aunt Ruth. My mom, who wonderfully let me take it, also helped me hang the pictures on the wall. It took ages due to the nature of the frames, but we finally got them straight! All three prints are by Aboriginal artists living in central Australia.

In other fun unpacking news, one of the newspaper pages my parents used to wrap up my dishes for the kitchen (thank you!) was an article from the New York Times Book Review about one of my history professors at Brown whose class on the American Revolution I took in his final semester before retirement. The article talked about how amazing he is as a leader in the field. As I hadn't generally been skimming the pages as I unwrapped, this was a neat chance find. I do remember his encyclopedic knowledge on the Revolution - kind of cool.

Back in the States - In Which Rain is Softer and Life is Busy

2011-07-26T16:31:00.000-04:00

I understand that it would seemingly be easier to post consistently to this blog in the States than in Barcelona or Paris, home having connectivity advantages over hostel life in either of those great cities. I understand that posting every 2 or 3 months does not advance any quest for frequency or regularity of blog additions. I understand that it shouldn't take me ten minutes to locate my own blog (to my credit(?), I was distracted by a recipe for apple sandwiches), regardless of how far down it is on the list of options granted to me by Google.

Let's agree that a) our 2 1/2 month hiatus means our reunion will be even sweeter, b) I probably still have lots of fun travel updates for you (true), and c) the new format I've designed for you may not be as easy a background for reading, but does have a very pretty picture from the Tuscan countryside. Those points concluded, let us commence.

I'll begin with the now-standard question: Where in the world is Becca? This week, I'm in Massachusetts, where it's currently raining outside - less intense than African rain, these droplets splat rather than pounding down. Next week, I'll be in Connecticut, where I'll be starting a sure-to-be-wonderful year of service through AmeriCorps VISTA. Since I last posted, I've been in Lyon (bonjour Tom!), Rome, Tuscany, Umbria (the region of Italy bordering Tuscany to the east), Massachusetts, Washington DC, and Maryland.

I do plan to share lots more fun travel updates, but I'll stick to recent life in America for today. Almost immediately after my return, just as the jet lag was wearing down, my sister arrived for a visit from Israel. She brought her three-and-a-half kids (hi Ud!) and her wonderfully patient husband Avigdor. We had a birthday party for her upon their arrival, complete with homemade kosher carrot cake and a piñata. She and I exchanged wonderful sisterly birthday/congratulations cards which I'm sure both of us will treasure forever (if we don't accidentally destroy them as they sing to us for the thousandth time). We took the girls (ages 4, 2, and 1) to the park, where they had fun riding the little train that loops around the grounds. Admittedly, I had fun riding it too. How could you not when seated with nieces bubbling over with excitement?

My next stop was DC. (I'd been home for ten whole days so it was clearly time to travel somewhere.) I had a fantastic visit with friends in our nation's ever-lovely capitol city and got to meet some truly amazing young people at the Congressional Award gold medal luncheon and ceremony. If you're worried about our nation's future resting in the hands of our generation, a) encourage service and b) don't be. Stopping at Perry Point on the trip north from DC, I enjoyed visiting AmeriCorps friends still serving in NCCC before they headed off for their next round of saving the world.

I returned home to settle in for a month of pre-VISTA relaxation and preparation. I took the GRE and was happy to find that I remembered what 'mendacious' means on test day. Since I hadn't formally studied big words just for those 4 hours of my life, I consider this a big success. I proceeded to begin grad application fun time, compiling the necessary paperwork for the September opening of applications and starting to compose essays. I admit that I still like applying to institutions of higher education - go ahead: judge. I also continued the epic quest, begun pre-world-travels, to sort through every item in my room in the pursuit of having less stuff. As these travels have shown, a backpack-full is often enough. I have many backpacks-full, but not so many as I once did. The great find of today, in a stack of paper that threatened to eat me whole if I don't sleep with one eye open, was the complete script of my rugby class' musical ode to the senior class our junior year. Words don't even begin to describe that creative work. In good news, the stack of paper is now down to the size where it might take three or four bites to consume me. I'm liking my odds.

I've also been playing with all the fun features on my new mac, working on an NCCC scrapbook (towards my goal of finishing one for the first time ever), and avidly watching the Tour de France. Sadly, the Tour (capital T) ended this weekend; happily, it'll resume a mere 49 weeks from now. Cycling, with its unique blend of competition and reliance on adversaries for survival, is quickly becoming one of my favorite spectator sports. Admittedly, this is probably greatly aided by my lack of attempts to watch it live; it's much more enjoyable to watch the leaders for two hours than for thirty seconds of blurry 35-miles-per-hour glory.

Pictures! So many pictures!

2011-05-09T10:43:00.000-04:00

Since I'm about to head to Italy tomorrow (and, crazily, back to the States one month from today), I share with you some pictures of adorable African orphan children to tide you over until I get around to posting about the rest of my time in Ghana. Here's the link to week 1; weeks 2 and 3 are the same with the appropriate number replacement:

https://picasaweb.google.com/Becca.Constantine/GhanaWeek1#

Enjoy!

Day 8 - From Obruni to Yevu

2011-05-09T10:40:00.000-04:00

Saturday, March 19 – Day 8

I’m in the Volta region! I’m also mildly sunburned on both forearms except for the bracelet spot on my left wrist. This means I got sunburned in a period of approximately two hours after sweating off all the sunscreen I had applied in the intense late-morning heat.

Emily decided this morning to join Tamar and I on our journey northeast to the Volta region. (Ghana has ten regions, somewhat like American states.) We took a taxi up to Odumase-Krobo for nine cedies. That’s six dollars for three people to go 45 minutes and he was already overcharging us at that rate. Everything is directional here; the cab was also carrying another woman headed the same way. [Note from the future: Everything being directional means that all you needed to know to get to another town or city was what direction it was. To go to Madina or Accra by trotro, you simply stood on the appropriate side of the road (i.e., the side on which traffic was headed towards the city) and waited for a trotro, any trotro, going that way.]

The cab driver dropped us off at Cedi’s Bead Factory, half a mile down a dirt track from the (paved) main road, where we were immediately approached by a very friendly man who guided us through everything about the place. He showed us the primary ways they create all the beads – all handmade – in the factory and showed us around the outdoor facilities including the main bead-making area in which five others were working and the blazing-hot outdoor kiln. Afterwards, he took us to the little bead store filled with beautiful handmade crafts. I got myself a wonderful bracelet for 2 cedis which alternates beads fired from tiny pieces of broken-bottle glass with beads which are fired, painted, then re-fired. I also liked the colorful beads made by pouring powders of different colors into a small mould. I got Mom a bead-strung clay bowl; the clay was also shaped and fired there. I enjoy how much is handmade here.

We continued on to another market on the road north to Kpong, where I picked up my first two (of at least ten, I anticipate [note from the future: more]) yards of gorgeous fabrics. They’re all colorful and beautifully printed. We then took a long tro ride from Kpong to Ho. When the trotro guy tried to overcharge us five cedis per person for the hour-plus ride because we’re white so must have money (we ended up paying a still-inflated four cedis each), the man in front of us offered the comfort that God does not favor people who do such things. Religion does seem to have a good place in that man’s life.

We reached our final destination of Ho mid-afternoon. Tamar’s former project medical director, Eric from Projects Abroad (another international volunteer program), met us at the Ho trotro station in the taxi he drives when he’s not working at Projects Abroad. He took us to the hotel room he had booked for us then drove us out to visit Tamar’s host family from her first month here in Ghana. Spending time with their healthy 8-month-old boy playing with his assortment of toys made me miss our orphanage kids with their minimal-toy, maximal-creativity jubilation.

From there, we continued on to dinner, where I tried the traditional Ghanaian meal of banku with grilled tilapia. The tilapia, served whole and eaten by hand (to facilitate bone-avoidance) was delicious. I also enjoyed the banku, a bread-dough-like ball from which large chunks are broken off, dipped in a spicy salsa-like sauce, and swallowed whole. Apparently, swallowing the large chunks whole keeps it in your stomach for digestion longer, extending the time for which you feel full. I also tried some of Emily’s kenke, another traditional meal similar to banku but made with only corn rather than corn and cassava. Emily likes kenke but can’t stand banku. Indeed, many volunteers dislike banku. I enjoyed the new eating style and experience. It was fun.

We’re now in the outdoor back area of a local bar with a couple of Tamar’s Projects Abroad friends and Eric. There’s a monkey sitting on the fence about ten feet away. A monkey. This, friends, is Africa.

[Note from the future: Later in the evening, one of the bar guys leashed the monkey to a tree. Emily decided to try to pet it. She was unsuccessful: the monkey punched her. Yes, Emily has been in a bar fight with a monkey in Africa. I share this anecdote to validate my behavior with regards to the chicken incident of my final morning.]

Springtime in Paris

2011-05-07T14:21:00.000-04:00

Bonjour world!

Yes, it's true, my plan to post daily has been sidetracked slightly. After 10 lovely, mostly internet-free (other than AmeriCorps-position-related emailing) days with my mom in Barcelona, I'm here in beautiful Paris. Internet at the hostel, like most things in Paris, is not free. This has encouraged people to resort to other measures (mostly wine and good conversation) for evening entertainment. We spend our days out in the sun, wandering parks and busy streets, or sheltered in the magnificent shade of the Louvre or some other wonder. I spent four hours inside the Louvre yesterday, during which my love of Michelangelo's work was reaffirmed. (His 'Captive Slave' sculpture is on display there.) It made me even more excited for Rome & Florence.

There'll be time for more travel stories later (mostly lots more on Ghana), but I'll share three highlights now so you too can soak in culture from your home or office (not that you would ever read this at work, of course):

1. Watching Rafael Nadal, the top-ranked tennis player in the world right now, overtake international #6 David Ferrer in the finals of the Barcelona Open. Both players are from Spain, but Rafa was more of a hometown favorite as judged by the posters and cheering of the crowd. I enjoy that tennis spectators use a slow clap to encourage players in break-point situations.

2. Making new friends on a free 3-1/2 hour tour of Paris offered through all the local hostels and spending the entire rest of the day taking photos of and in front of monuments of stunning grandeur (e.g., the Eiffel Tower, Paris' Arc de Triomphe). (Note: Most of our pictures were far less lopsided than this one; many involved jumping.)

3. Meeting about ten English-speaking individuals or pairs at the hostel after an entire day of near-silence not knowing anyone or being even close to passably speaking the language (reading: yes; comprehending: sometimes; speaking: no) and spending five or so hours sitting around in the common area playing card games and such. Extroverts love such happenings, in general.

Okay, I'm off to read the book I picked up at the Barcelona hostel (after leaving the one I had finished, I chose one of the few English options on the multi-lingual 'library' shelf) then get some sleep before an early train to Lyon in the morning.

Upcoming plan: Lyon then a month in Italy with Dad. Back in the States on June 9th.

Hope life is fantastic!

Bad Me

2011-04-21T19:44:00.000-04:00

Sorry folks, no Ghana post tonight.

In good news, I might actually have a spot in an AmeriCorps position when I get home at the rate I'm going.

Real Madrid won 1-0 over Barcelona last night. The locals weren't happy, but some of the older boys in Ghana were. I tend to side with them : )

Gooooooooooooooooaaaaaaal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-04-20T14:09:00.000-04:00

Oh hey!

This is to inform you, the loyal reader, that I won't be posting about Ghana tonight because I'll be off with fellow travelers watching the Barcelona-Real Madrid football game at some fine establishment.

More tomorrow!

Espana

2011-04-19T18:16:00.001-04:00

All my posts may be about Africa, but I'm actually in Spain right now, as you may recall. Barcelona is big and entirely different from Dodowa, but also beautiful and full of life and energy. This morning, I toured a chocolate museum with three other girls from the hostel, one from Taiwan and two from the north of France. The entrance ticket was a chocolate bar and two of us enjoyed a hot chocolate drink at the end that was basically still-warm melted chocolate. Fantastic.

Fun fact from the chocolate museum: There's a huge tradition of giving mona (from Arabic munna, a type of gift) on Easter Monday (next Monday) in Barcelona. The mona is a cake the godfather gives to his godson every year up to his first communion at age 12. The cake is topped with one hard-boiled egg for each year of the godson's life. It seems that the tradition has evolved into families eating cake on Easter Monday. Between Mom's arrival and Valentine's Day on Saturday, tennis finals and Easter on Sunday, and Easter mona cakes on Monday, I don't know how I'll stand all the excitement. It's going to be a fabulous week.

In other news, I took a two-hour nap today. Reminded me of Ghana.

Day 6 - 37 Hospital

2011-04-19T18:01:00.001-04:00

Thursday, March 17 – Day 6

I am in the hospital.

Don’t worry, I don’t have malaria or typhoid or any other ailment of which I’m aware. Emily, Tamar, and I are here at Accra hospital with Bismark and Joshua because Joshua broke [Note from the future: badly sprained] his wrist last night playing football (soccer). The older boys play football on the field every day after school. It is their sport and their passion.

Joshua broke the same wrist he had broken back when he was eight years old and somebody hit him or pushed him down. (Physical violence is common here to teach respect and many of the WORCSA children have difficult pasts, some including abuse.) Sara, Niki, and I met him last night en route from the house to the orphanage. We had been headed up to tutor but Niki and I offered to walk Joshua’s health insurance card back to the volunteer house. Two of the older boys escorted us.

Joshua getting his wrist checked by Michelle.

Volunteers handle all the kids' medical matters, including dispensing medicines for a fever or even malaria, deciding when hospital trips are warranted, and trying to figure out when the kids just want attention or the candy-sweet medicines.

Health insurance, unsurprisingly, is different here. Take Joshua, for example. Joshua, like all the kids at WORCSA, gets insurance for 4 cedis per year (paid by volunteers). His most recent health insurance card for his annual renewal has yet to be delivered from Accra by the health insurance man who comes once every three or so months. The temporary card he has expired yesterday. Even with the health insurance card, which has 15-year-old Joshua’s birth year as 1996 but his age listed as only 11, we paid an 8-cedi registration fee when we checked in at the hospital. Before the insurance man delivers the good-for-one-year card, the insurance place in Accra takes four months (of that one year) to process it. It’s a long, drawn-out affair.

This is a country of hospitals and clinics rather than primary care physicians so Accra’s 37 Hospital is full of people. X-ray sent us to the full-to-the-brim clinic waiting room to get a referral. The clinic shifted us (before we waited in any line, fortunately) to registration, where we got Joshua a patient card and paid the 8-cedi fee. After registration, Tamar and Bismark asked around for where we should head next. Someone at the clinic said we should go to the trauma & surgical ER and someone else said we should go to the clinic; we headed to the ER to avoid the long clinic line. There, we met the super-helpful older entry nurse who green-lighted us through the consultation and referral process after having a younger nurse do a basic blood pressure / pulse check right there at the wooden entry table. All the nurses wear blue-and-white or green-and-white versions of the stereotypical World War II nurses’ uniform, complete with pinned-on apron and stiffly folded three-sided white cap.

Day 7 - A Very Good Day

2011-04-19T17:51:00.000-04:00

Friday, March 18^th – Day 7

Today was my best day here yet, I feel comfortable saying. Above all else, it was filled with high-quality one-on-one and small-group time.

I helped Beauty, the second youngest to Godwyn, get ready this morning then carried her to the bus stop. Three of the youngest – she, Godwyn, and Chicababy – are sponsored to attend Word of Faith Christian School along with all the oldest kids Word of Faith is infinitely better education-wise than the local Methodist school which the younger kids attend. It also costs about $700 US per year. On a plus for Beauty, who was badly abused until her arrival at WORCSA and still lashes out, Word of Faith was established by two American women and does not use caning as a disciplinary tool.

I walked Beauty then stood at the bus stop holding her, then, at one point, her in my left arm and Godwyn in my right with Chica hugging my legs from the front, watching the kids interact. One of the boys not from WORCSA walked to the stop carrying the remainder of a loaf of bread, about 3 pieces, in its bag. He handed chunks around generously, including one to little Godwyn. I started home shortly before the bus arrived and enjoyed watching the older kids help the little ones board the trotro-sized bus.

Though everyone agrees that Godwyn is two years old, the teachers at Word of Faith say he's close to three based on his development. He's smaller than my 17-month-old niece due to a severe protein deficiency when he was young, which, as they learn in school, leads to a condition called Kwarshkior. Playing with a plastic bowl in the corner, he looks like the quintessential African orphan baby; he's actually incredibly lively and adorably sweet.

Highlight of my day: the afternoon. This afternoon started slowly enough. It felt like there were fewer kids out-and-about than usual, even compared to the standard quieter atmosphere between the time the Methodist school kids get out around 2:30 and the Word of Faith kids’ bus drop-off at about 4. I spent quite some time sitting outside the boys’ room with Tamar, Niki, Joshua (who had stayed home from school due to the pain in his injured arm), George (the oldest, who was playing DJ on a cell phone that had a few stored African songs), Bismark (the third oldest, he’s George’s younger brother and co-leader at the orphanage), and ever-shifting combinations of younger boys dancing to the music. The oldest boys (George included; Bismark will transfer there from Methodist after Easter break) weren’t at Word of Faith because they’re studying for exams.

Later, when the WoF kids arrived, I spent some more time carrying around Beauty and allowing children to take pictures with my camera. George called me over and said he’d heard I’m good at maths. He absolutely must have heard this from Bismark, with whom I had a conversation in the hospital registration waiting area during which I pledged my love of math and tutoring math (without introducing the foreign concept of ‘tutor’) and offered my willingness to help him or anyone else in search of math-improvement help.

George, age 18

I affirmed for George that I know and love math(s) and he asked me to help him. We spent the next hour one-on-one in the otherwise-deserted classroom working largely uninterrupted on finding solution sets to inequalities involving a variable and some fractions (e.g., 5/3 x – 4/3 > x + 11/12). Lucky came in twice to try to run off with my camera case, but George handled him beautifully, making a game of chasing him under the desks until he rescued my case from now-shrieking-with-laughter Lucky.

Lucky (school name: Daniel), age 6

George and Joshua voluntarily walked me home after the study session, though it was not yet dark. George, who’s 18, wants to go to an American university in three years after he graduates Word of Faith, then continue on to medical school and become a doctor. His favorite class is biology. Joshua, who has years to decide his future, gently and super-sweetly coached me on the appropriate proximity (within about a yard) at which to extend a greeting to people who are passing. As greetings are essential, I very much appreciated the unprompted etiquette lesson.

Most of us returned to the orphanage after dinner (fried rice with a token smattering of vegetables) for the Friday night dance party George had told me on the walk home would occur if we showed up. Though Niki and Tamar got their groove on, many of us just sat and held kids. I held Kujo, then sat him on my lap as I read to him, Kwame, and Eto. Kwame had found two short kids’ books, one a Winnie-the-Pooh story about fall, and I read each aloud two or three times. The boys were much more patient than in daytime.

Afterwards, I walked a crying Lucky around to calm him then sang goodnight-circle camp songs to him and Kujo while sitting between them as both fell asleep with their heads in my lap. I eventually carried Kujo successfully to bed (a corner of a rug on the floor in the boys’ room – none of the youngest children have bunk beds), then chatted with Eto and Samuel about football and music before the latter fell asleep with his head in my lap. It was a peaceful night.

In other events, I took my first bucket shower today (so easy) and Tamar and I walked the five minutes to the salon this morning to get our hair braided. Even with three or more women working on it at all times, mine took nearly two hours to braid. The price? Ten cedis (about $6.50 US). I tipped two cedis to bring the total to a whopping 8 USD. Things are different here.

Dodowa vs. Barcelona

2011-04-18T16:12:00.000-04:00

As it turns out, there exist some differences between a village in Ghana and a bustling city in Spain. Here are five differences of note from the past two days:

Fruits & vegetables - Out of the typhoid, malaria, et al. zone, I've immensely enjoyed getting to eat fruits and vegetables that can't or shouldn't be peeled in uncooked form again. Selections from the past 48 hours include pear, apple, plum, pepper, carrots, and zucchini. Yum.
Running water - I found that I use water differently now that I'm so used to bucket showers. It no longer makes sense for the shower to run for five minutes straight or for the tap to run for the ten seconds it takes me to apply soap to my hands. Once you've had all your water carried to your house in buckets (note: I tried it; water is heavy) by small children for a couple of weeks, every drop has a lot more significance.
Electricity - The power is on right now. It was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Nice but vaguely unsettling in its surety.
Greetings - Everybody greets everybody when passing on the street in Ghana. If you're within two feet of another person, it's considered rude not to say "good morning", "good afternoon", or "good evening". People in big cities tend to give you strange looks when you offer a simple "hello" ("hola") or even make eye contact. It's very different.
Walking in groups - Yesterday, I was walking with another girl and we passed a pair coming from the other direction. She went around them to the right, I to the left. In Ghana, we would both have passed to the same side of the other group. It's believed that when you cross members with another group in passing, your luck crosses with theirs. You may get good luck, but you'll also get their bad luck. Crossing paths with another group is thus avoided.

So yes, I'm readjusting to walking down streets and the constancy of electricity in the Western world. That's an aftereffect of a month in Ghana for you.

Accra Pictures

2011-04-18T15:57:00.000-04:00

Pictures tend to make foreign (literally) concepts easier to visualize and comprehend. Also, they're pretty. In upcoming times, I'll post more pictures of adorable and energetic orphan children, but here are a couple from the first days in Accra to begin:

The IVHQ Ghana volunteer house (left) & compound

A first impression of Accra (uh-KRAW), the big city

Day 4 - It begins.

2011-04-18T15:43:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, March 15 – Day 4

Happy Ides of March?

Today was my first day at the volunteer house in Dodowa and at the WORCSA orphanage at which we volunteer. Life has shifted rather a lot in the past 12 hours since our morning IVHQ orientation. We start our day at just past 5:30 tomorrow morning, so I’ll keep it short.

The kids are challenging and attention-deficit and engaged and fantastic, often all at the same time. Peter, one of the older boys, might have malaria, according to fellow volunteers Michelle (who was a nurse for years back home in England) and Tamar (who started this morning with Niki and I after a month on a medical project through a different program). Tamar, by the way, unconcernedly has typhoid; apparently the shot is only 85% effective. Lucky, who has special needs, clung to my back for much of an hour this afternoon. Kujo, who’s maybe 3 [note: he’s 5], fell asleep in my arms briefly before an orange-drink snack was brought out. I helped Eto and Elizabeth and two others with math homework, a highlight of the day. Eto was working on basic multiplication (e.g., 5x6), the girls on expressions such as 2a[(3x+y)+4(2a-b)].

Friendships and comfort zones can form and shift quite quickly. Everyone being new together shifted in a ten-minute transitory period to 3 of us rookies being surrounded by 11 veteran volunteers, coming to live in their house and join their project. Three are living this week, which creates an atmosphere of reflective farewells. It’s an odd sensation to be thrown into the challenges and critiques as well as the positive energy about the kids that these seasoned volunteers have developed over 2 or 4 or 8 weeks. I know the house will shift, amoeba-like, to welcome us.

Day 5 - 5:30 AM & Evening Rain

2011-04-18T15:41:00.002-04:00

Wednesday, March 16 – Day 5

One advantage of waking up at 5:30 AM is that you’ve already done a-million-and-a-half things by mid-morning. By 11 AM, I had spent an hour at the orphanage helping “the littlest ones” get teeth brushed, clothing on, and otherwise school-ready, walked some of the younger ones to school (Lucky held my hand and a giant empty vitamin bottle much of the way), returned to the house for our breakfast (porridge, white bread, and mango – I had delicious nut butter on the first two), chilled with the other girls for awhile, fallen asleep during the chill session for an hour-long nap, and played a game of cribbage with Tamar. After being up for an hour around 2 AM due to the discomfort of the heat rash that stretches all down the front of my neck, the nap was essential. Fortunately, a coating of Neosporin and a dose of Advil did enough that I could eventually sleep again. Better heat rash than typhoid (or any one of the multiplicity of significant infections and illnesses the volunteers here have had). [Note from the future (April 17^th): When traveling to Africa, BRING NEOSPORIN. ALWAYS.]

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This is African rain. African rain is that summer-warm rain that soaks you to your very core in two minutes flat. African rain is like the rains of New Orleans, but it easily lasts half an hour, not five blissful minutes. African rain cleans your body and your spirit, refreshing you outside and in. African rain leaves your hair soaked and your feet muddy. African rain is too much for any single towel or line full of drying clothes. African rain sends you scampering for shelter or committing to a fully-clothed shower in a lightning storm under the banana trees. African rain washes away the dirt and grime, momentarily frees the mind of lingering heat rash and other discomforts, and cleans both the earth and the spirit. African rain is a beautiful thing.

After a cleansing shorts-and-a-tank-top shower in the rain (Jess and I avoided our planned bucket showers), I feel clean and refreshed and peaceful. This rain reminds me what I love about Africa, why I came to Ghana: the warm people and the extremes of weather. Some of the children still at the house joined us in the rain while other volunteers and children sat on the porch and watched us wash off layers of dust and stand and dance. We all got to simply be. As much as I love rain, I LOVE African rain.

Epic World Travels of the Service Sort

2011-04-17T15:37:00.002-04:00

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you truly are." - e. e. cummings

Ghana Ghana Ghana!

2011-04-17T15:20:00.000-04:00

It's true, I'm alive!

Where in the World update: I've survived an amazingly fantastic month in Ghana and arrived today (via a transfer through Cairo last night) in Barcelona, where I'll be for the next three weeks. I'll spend at least this week trying to share with you some of the awesomeness that was my five weeks in Ghana.

Yes, I'll be actively posting for the next week. If you have lots of time, you can read every day about my adventures in Africa. If you don't have lots of time, you can curse me for posting days out of order to better cater to my everyday readers. Or you can use what little time you do have to read about adorable African orphans - it's up to you.

To tempt you into the latter use of your precious time, here's one of my favorite pictures from my trip. This is Beauty, who's two years old, at the bus stop before school:

Don't you want to read about African orphans now? You can't say no to that face.

More tomorrow!

Day 1 - In Which the Learning Begins

2011-04-17T15:13:00.001-04:00

Saturday, March 12, 2011 – Day 0 1

I felt like I was already on Ghana time during the flight down to DC from Boston. It’s barely past 9 PM but 5 ½ hours of sleep last night combined with the vague stress of packing for the next three months of my life(probably high-stress by my standards) has taken its toll and now I’m mostly hoping to sleep well on the flight.

I arrived in DC to find the airport filled with college students (seemingly mostly from UConn, including the men’s crew team) celebrating spring break in typical shorts-and-t-shirt style. My favorite was the pair of guys in matching khaki-shorts/navy-blue-shirts ‘uniforms’, one shirt proclaiming “Obama ‘08”, the other “Huskies”. My walk from gate D3 to C14 gave me time to begin processing that 90 degrees is much warmer than 30s and 40s. It’ll be a hot month.

I reached the gate and found the seats already mostly filled, not surprising for an international flight. Here, I was struck by a realization. (I blame the sleep deprivation and distractions of packing for some of the lag time on these now-obvious thoughts.) Whether it matters to me or not, race will matter in the next month of my life. At the gate, I sat down by the window, already aware by the time I reached my seat that I was one of three white women in the crowded boarding area. The sole white male was the older man, who works for United, who has been circling through the area offering jovially to check any and every bag. He’s also making sure we’ve all had our documents (passports and, for US citizens, visas) checked at the desk in preparation for boarding.

Race will matter in that I will automatically stand out by the color of my skin. I remember the Ugandan women’s rugby team telling us [the Brown women’s team] they were surprised how small we were, that they expected us all to be fat from fast-food hamburgers because we’re from America. The IVHQ Ghana pamphlet has already offered a warning of sorts that “fat” is used in a complimentary tone in Ghana. Don’t, it advises us, be offended.

According to the display monitor, it’s partly cloudy and 84 degrees in Accra right now. It’ll be an amazing month.

[Note from the future (April 17^th):

It’s true: race did matter and fat was good. On the race front, I heard “obruni, obruni!” more times than I could count, mixed in with the occasional enthusiastic “yavoo!” (obruni is Twi for foreigner, yavoo Ewe; Twi is the primary dialect of Dodowa, Ewe the Volta region). My taxi driver on the way to the airport yesterday told me that the country in the world he would like most to visit is America because there are “many blacks” there. As for “fat” compliments, the kids happily told multiple volunteers that they were getting fat as their stays progressed into the second and third months. Obolo is a compliment because higher weight signifies access to adequate food. Wives should be plump to show that they are well cared for by their husbands. Our staple foods of white bread, noodles, and white rice seemed to seek to contribute to the goal of fattening us up. It was nice to be in a country with a concept of beautiful so opposite from the skinny American ideal. I think the American approach to moderation and weight control probably serves health better in the long run, but the body image issues sidestepped by the Ghanaian view create a much more positive overall image atmosphere.]

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Anybody who’s flown with me (cough cough, Melissa, cough cough) knows that I like to make friends on planes. This particular flight is no exception.

I reached my row towards the end of boarding only to find that my beloved aisle seat was occupied and only the window seat next to it was vacant (pro of international flights: no middle seat by the windows). Unfortunately for my neighbor, I didn’t submit to the aisle-window swap; I would love to acquiesce, but movement and freedom are essential aspects of my long-flight experiences. I’d rather not submit a seatmate to my stretch-time needs. Fortunately for me, not swapping didn’t seem to harm our long-term interactions. I helped with her Ghana entrance form (she’s from Accra so the form was straightforward, but trying to read the small passport font without reading glasses was proving difficult). I thought I was going to settle in to watch Due Date once we hit cruising altitude (Robert Downey Jr. was good in Ironman, so why not?), but I was mistaken. It turns out, I ended up watching one-minute segments every five or so minutes broken up by questions about where I’ll be in Ghana (Dodowa) or comments on how big the mountains in Colorado are or how sugary American food is (her proclamation: way too sweet). I finally gave up on having even one earbud in towards the end, at which point she suggested that I switch my screen to the map because I wasn’t really watching the movie anyway. Oh goodness : )

We now arrive at our first two lessons of the trip:

Lesson #1: I have an accent. You have an accent. We all have accents. This much we know. But did you know how challenging it can be for someone from another English-speaking country to decode our accents? Very. (For example, I was giving my seatmate the flight number – UA 990 – and we went through a long time on “UI” with a brief stopover at “UL” before hitting “UA”.

Lesson #2: I admit that I had been warned. Personal-life distinctions in conversation, the IVHQ booklet said, are very different and you may find your relationship status (especially if not married) at the center of a conversation. I didn’t realize this meant I would be getting marriage advice on the plane. Specifically, when my seatmate found out that I’m 24 and unmarried, there was the characteristic two-minute conversation break, then she turned to me and said, “You should get married in the next couple of years.” This led into us talking about appropriate marriage age. Take the ages at which Americans typically marry. Cut those numbers in half. Twenty-four starts to look much older, right? This may be one of the few areas of life in which Americans move slower than any non-negligible portion of everyone-else-in-the-world.

Day 2 - On the Plane

2011-04-17T15:12:00.000-04:00

Sunday, March 13 – Day 2

I changed yesterday to day 1 because there is no epic adventure without that initial step out the door. Choose your beginnings with care then enjoy the awesomeness that life holds.

About ten minutes after writing about race (again, pre-jetlag lag time), I was washing my hands in the airport sink and realized that race mattered as much or more in Baltimore or New Orleans as it will these next five weeks. Quite possibly more. [Note from the future (April 17^th): True.] There, it’s a daily, in-your-face tension point. If you’re white in certain neighborhoods of Baltimore, you’re either a police officer or a census worker. Chances are good that if you’re not a police officer, the “po-po” will keep tabs on you until you head back to safer streets. I may notice how much more I stand out in some parts of the world (city or continent) than in others far more directly now that I’m not protected by the group anonymity of my khaki-and-grey team, but we as a collective unit stood out as much then. This is one area in which, for me, being in a group bred complacency and singularity breeds awareness.

On a cheery note, I don’t anticipate having to knock on many doors this time around.

-----

Let’s say it’s a very good thing that bananas were my next food challenge. Breakfast on the flight: blueberry yogurt, European biscuit-crackers, a “mini banana bread loaf,” and a banana. I am proud to say that, in a complete reversal of years of (carefully cultivated!) banana-avoidance practices, I ate the entire banana. I mixed it in with the yogurt; it had been refrigerated for storage, which helped the generally-questionable banana consistency. I never would have chosen a yogurt,-banana,-and-orange-juice breakfast three years (or three months) ago. We are more capable than we think. We may veil our capacity for change in an attempt to avoid the work of changing, but it is there and it is immense.

In other accomplishments, I miraculously slept nearly six hours on the flight. I never did watch the other 80% of Due Date.

Day 3 - The Card Game

2011-04-17T15:10:00.000-04:00

Monday, March 14 – Day 3

Everything is wonderful thus far (surprise, surprise, I know). The country is beautiful, my fellow volunteers are friendly, our meals are delicious, everything is cheap, and the weather is ~~warm~~ sweat-inducing hot.

I’ll begin with the people. Evans and Jonathan (same pronunciation as in Hebrew: YO-nuh-tahn) met me at the airport and drove me the half hour to our volunteer compound. (All the houses here are inside walled compounds. Ours shares its space with two smaller family homes.) The house is great. An all-purpose living/dining/office/family room serves as the hub. It has the IVHQ staff work desk with two computers and a printer, a television always playing American movies and shows via a cable hook-up, a rotating fan (essential), a table surrounded by plastic chairs, and a dartboard. The bedrooms are simple: four bunk beds and a ceiling fan in each. The bathroom area has a sink and mirror outside two rooms, one with the toilet, the other the shower. The kitchen is standard – sink, stove, countertops, and fridge. We mostly only use the fridge, where all the communal purified-water individual sachets are stored, as it’s really Haaj’s domain. Haaj prepares all the meals and she does an amazing job with them. Breakfast was the amazing crepe pancakes I loved in Uganda with nut butter and jam. We had our first traditional meal, red-red, for lunch. Red-red is a spicy bean dish (kidney beans, it looked like) with fried plantains. Ghanaian cooking is typically quite spicy.

So who is this “we”? There are six volunteers living at the house right now: Lucas, Sharlene, Domenica, David, Nora, and me. Lucas has been around for the longest (“forever”, according to Sharlene), six months last year then five this year. He’s just finishing up these 5 months and will be heading back to the States this week. Sharlene is a New Yorker who’s here for the hands-on element of a Northeastern co-op program. She’s been around for one of her four months already, but is finishing up an unplanned stay at the house recovering from malaria. She’s our resident expert on the programs and where to spend the weekends. She says all the volunteers at the pink program where I’ll be (all the IVHQ Ghana programs have color-identifying names) seem to absolutely love it. Good stuff.

Domenica, David, Nora, and I are the new volunteers here for tomorrow’s orientation. Two more volunteers arrive today for the once-every-two-weeks orientation opportunity. I love the volunteer culture. We’re all into travel, adventure, and new experiences. Domenica and David are traveling as part of their public-health master’s program in California. After two months in Ethiopia, they’re here for two weeks. Nora, our resident English volunteer, is here for two weeks after six weeks in Uganda and two traveling through Ghana with a friend.

Our hangout time included last night’s epic game of Hearts. Sharlene had only played the similar game of Spades, but David supplied the explanations and cards and a couple of practice rounds had us ready to play. Nearing the end of the game, I had 27 points, David 50, Domenica 60-something, and Sharlene 94 when I got stuck with the queen of spades. The final round began with me at 40, David at 51, and Sharlene at 99. David and I passed across to each other, both knowing that I would likely win the game – he gave me a 98% chance – unless I was stuck with the queen for the second time in as many rounds…and all game. As you may have guessed, I ended up with the queen. She was passed to me and I had few other spades so I had to play her early and get her right back.

At this point, I had two options: 1) hope David eventually gained control and try to dump two or three hearts on him, or 2) attempt to shoot the moon. Go big or go home, I figured, and stated that I might as well try. Miraculously, my mediocre hand had just enough high cards to match everyone else. Holding the four of hearts until everyone else had mercifully depleted their supply of the suit, I managed to shoot the moon and win big. Kinda awesome.

At that point, it was 10 PM so we all went to bed. I enjoyed a lovely first sweat-reducing shower. The clean feeling lasted a whole ten minutes before the sweat picked up again.

-----

Yay new friends! Our newest volunteer, Niki, is also going to the pink project : ) Niki’s 18 and from Auckland, New Zealand. She’s here for three months (or potentially more) on a gap-year break before Uni. We’ve already discussed traveling together on weekend free time. Fun!

Life skill I have yet to acquire: balancing a basket full of fruit on a towel on my head. This is an incredibly legit skill that every woman here seems to have. Of note, the bowls do seem to have head-sized dimples in the bottom for this purpose.

I love that our house is a no-shoes-please zone.

World Travels Day 0

2011-03-12T18:41:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in Terminal C of Logan Airport in Boston waiting for my flight to DC. Sometime after 10 PM, I'll board a second flight from DC which will take me direct to Accra. Many thanks to free airport wireless giving me an opportunity to share a final reflection before heading off into the world.

It's been a busy few days. Activities completed yesterday included spraying lots of clothing with toxic mosquito-deterring chemicals (for the record, I don't want malaria, thanks) and booking a flight from Barcelona to Paris. I've never been to France but I'm optimistic that my abysmal French will be enough to carry me through five days of mostly-touristy activities in Paris after a decidedly non-touristy month in Ghana. (Unfortunately, French-language career both began and ended with a seventh-grade class that ~~moved~~ crawled through verbs at a slower rate than I would have thought possible.) Today was filled with the final stages of gathering everything I'll need for the next three months of my life and fitting most of it into my backpack (we're talking a 2300-square-inch hiking-style backpack here) and watching the end of Waiting for Superman, a fascinating documentary on aspects of the current state of American education.

How does it feel, heading off to Ghana? I primarily feel prepared and mildly nervous. The nerves mostly come from the craziness of spending a couple of days collecting everything to which I'll have access to for the next five weeks into a backpack then flying, with only that backpack, a third of the way around the world to do service at a rural orphanage in a country I've never been to and about which my knowledge is admittedly limited. I don't know about you, but they didn't cover much Ghanaian history in my childhood social studies classes.

I thank Outward Bound and my adventures in New Zealand for the preparedness aspect. I learned from Outward Bound how little we need for comfort and how strong each of us has the ability to be. I found in New Zealand that I'm fully capable of wandering around in an unfamiliar country, immersing myself in the experience of the stunning landscapes, and meeting amazing people (including a wonderful 70-something woman with whom I chatted for hours on a bus ride through the North Island).

Speaking of Outward Bound, I recently received the letter I had written myself on solo (that being our solo assignment). It was timed perfectly to send me back out into the world with some excellent reminders. Here are a few excerpts from me to you:

     You can do anything you set your mind to, so aim high and always persist.

     Climbing stuff builds character. Go on big hikes sometimes in life.

      Just sit. Not every moment, but keep in practice.

     Ten minutes a day adds up fast. Use it well.

     There will be tough days and tired weeks, but continue to push through (it's easier than bamboo!)..... On every day, including the many happily smooth and sunny ones, give every moment your all. Lend a helping hand to another Corps member, work to get that paint line nice and clean or future inhabitants, and try to show that best self you choose to be each and every day. You are who you want to be..... Go do good things in the world.

     PS No puma sightings yet, but there's still time.

-----------

We never did see that elusive puma, but we did get to summit some amazing peaks and wake up to the most gorgeous riverside hikes I've ever experienced during my two weeks in Patagonia. I look forward to more breathtaking moments on this next big adventure. I'll try to share more with you about Ghana than you ever learned in social studies class.

(Re)training Ourselves

2011-02-20T17:33:00.000-05:00

When I was a child, I steadfastly avoided bananas and nearly all things acrobatic. Through conscious choice, I've learned to retrain myself to accept both of these. Our own power over our actions and lives is amazing sometimes, especially when it manifests itself in such astonishingly simple ways.

There were many foods I refused to eat when I was young - my staples included chicken nuggets and macaroni with homemade cheese sauce - but bananas were far and away the most vehemently refused. Well into college, I avoided bananas at all costs. I did not like the smell or texture and knew the taste wouldn't please the palate either. After slowly introducing peppers and mushrooms into my life through constant inclusion on my plate, I decided it was time for the banana. Africa, after all, is well-known for bananas and plantains; it's also advised to avoid fruits that you can't peel yourself while traveling or living there. Bananas it was.

I started small, adhering to the same theory I did with the other foods: (re)introducing a food works well when it's done as for children, 10 to 12 times in small amounts. I began with half a banana in my oatmeal. I didn't like that bowl of oatmeal much, but I survived. The second time around, it wasn't quite so bad. Next came a banana chocolate-chip muffin from Whole Foods. Surprisingly delicious. Tonight, I'm on to trial 4 (and 5, 6, ...): homemade banana chocolate-chip muffins. This feeds into a second theory to which I subscribe: people (children) tend to respond well to foods they helped prepare. I have hope that I'll be a banana-lover within months. It'll be good for me.

Acrobatics were another area in which my childhood involvement was underwhelming. Reasons included my sister's monopoly of all things dance-related and the fact that I once got a nosebleed doing somersaults during gymnastics class at the Y. As my swim career was already taking me to championship meets, I put aside cartwheels and focused on my backstroke.

Today, I headed to Sunday-morning yoga at the Y - what a brilliant concept - where we were focusing on twists this week. Late in the class, as she regularly does, our instructor encouraged us to take some time for headstands. Comfortable at the preparation level from last week's class, I decided to take things one step further. I kicked my legs up once, twice, and suddenly I was upside-down! My feet safely supported by the giant mirror that runs the length of the room, I took a moment to reflect on this occasion. I hadn't felt ready to hang out upside-down in a handstand even moment before I was there, but challenges often take the form of things that make us slightly nervous. Challenges for some may include a 5K or tofu. Marathons and Morningstar are easy for me to face, but I find challenges in the occasional food and in yoga class. As I move forward in life, I'll do so with the knowledge that each of us has the power to achieve any height if we take a deep breath, kick our legs up, and accept the challenge.

More another day - I'm off to enjoy a muffin.

Map Fun Time

2011-02-18T18:59:00.002-05:00

Sometimes we find fun things online. Here's a map highlighting the countries to which I have traveled or will very soon travel. Australia, it turns out, is much bigger than the Netherlands. Who knew?

Where in the World is...?

2011-02-15T10:54:00.000-05:00

When we were little, Carmen Sandiego was never easy to find. She could be at Mount Rushmore; she might have stolen the Lincoln Memorial off the National Mall; she probably wasn't in Yosemite, but it was hard to say for sure. It took some persistence and dedication to find her.

I never thought I'd be as hard to keep track of as Carmen Sandiego. After all, I always know where I am so how difficult could I be to find? Pretty difficult, apparently, if we track by the number of texts I've received over the past month reading, "Where ARE you?" or "Are you still in the US?" Inspired by a recent post on my Facebook wall, I'm chronicling my recent and upcoming epic adventures so you'll never again have to wonder whether I'm in the States (at least not for the next six months).

Recent travels:

Israel: I went to Israel in December with Melissa, my former NCCC team leader. We got to spend nearly two weeks with my three adorable nieces, who are now 4, 2 1/2, and 1. Aderet is learning to write (in Hebrew before English), Nava speaks mostly coherently and with a great deal of enthusiasm, and Dina is entirely mobile and loves surreptitiously snacking on crayons. My sister continues to be herself, which is always a good thing.

Jordan: During our trip to Israel, Melissa and I took a day trip to Jordan to see Petra. This was mostly motivated by our discovery that Petra was on the BBC's list of 50 places to see before you die. Also, it's ancient and I love old stuff. We had an amazing time and got a great, if all-too-brief, insight into another culture.

London: My mom and aunt decided to go to London for New Year's and I was the lucky beneficiary as their travel companion. We saw three West End shows (London's equivalent of Broadway), including a fantastic musical production of Legally Blonde. We enjoyed wandering through the Globe Theater and taking a day trip to Stonehenge.

Upcoming travels:

Ghana: I depart for Ghana on March 12th and start my program orientation one month from today. I'll be spending four weeks there volunteering at an orphanage, followed by an additional few days to experience the culture outside of my volunteer placement. Why Ghana? Its reputation is as a warm, safe, friendly nation and the volunteer program through which I'm traveling is very highly reviewed. People who've been there absolutely love it and I know the children will be amazing. I'm looking forward to this trip a lot.

Barcelona (and perhaps France): I'll fly from Ghana to Barcelona for two weeks there, including ten days with my mom. I've never been to Barcelona but southern Spain is beautiful and I hear amazing things. I look forward to fun workouts on the beach and enjoying springtime in Europe. Somehow, I'll get from there to Rome.

Italy: After my dad taught himself Italian, he decided it'd be good to go to Italy for some language immersion. We'll be spending a week each in Florence and Rome (both of which I love - I'm looking forward to revisiting the Roman forum and Michelangelo's David) and two weeks biking through Tuscany. I consider this the best possible type of bike training for my upcoming triathlons (whenever those may be). I expect sunshine and gorgeous hill towns steeped in centuries of history and culture.

And the USA...

I'll be here until mid-March and will return a week into June. At that point, my sister will visit along with her husband and all three children. They'll be here for about a week, which should be amazing. I'll also be visiting DC this summer to see some certain special friends. After that, I plan to settle down in New England for another fantastic year of service in AmeriCorps.

See, that wasn't too complicated? Right?? As always, the best way to reach me will be via email and I'll try to share world-travels adventures on here at some point. I'm optimistic for pretty pictures.

Our Generation

2011-02-15T10:16:00.000-05:00

[Note: This is the full text of my speech at the NCCC Perry Point Class XVI graduation. It shares a lot about what service is to me and our generation's impact on the world through service and life.]

Most of us knew by the age of five what we wanted to be when we grew up. We wanted to be farmers or firefighters, architects or ambassadors. I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer.

None of us, when we were five years old, planned to be National Service Members in AmeriCorps. But here we are. We’re not in the ballet or the Olympics, but we are fighting fires and building homes. We’re traveling the Atlantic and Gulf regions in service to America. In doing so, we’re leading our generation in National Service.

Our generation was defined for us before most of us even knew what a generation was. When we were young, we were Generation Y, that amorphous group following Generation X. Later, we became the technology generation, growing up on cell phones and iPods. We got a reputation: we were the generation that had forgotten how to connect, had become so immersed in online culture that we were losing the skills of real interaction. We spoke a language older generations didn’t understand, introducing JK and LOL into their vernacular. They expressed fears that we might never leave our Nintendos and X-boxes long enough to make a difference in the world.

This year, Class XVI, we have made a difference.

As we’ve served together over the past ten months, I’ve loved seeing and reading about you in action. Let me tell you: you are amazing. Let me tell you, from serving with you this year, a few more things I’ve learned about you as a member of our wonderful class.

You are strong.

You’ve lifted boxes, lugged lumber, and succeeded when people asked, “Really, are you sure you can get that with just two of you?”

You’re patient.

You’ve survived ten months of living with ten other people, ten months of messy kitchens, twenty-hour van trips, and epic battles over radio stations.

You’re bold.

You’ve climbed on roofs, crawled under houses, and overcome poison ivy. At least once this year, you feared doing something and yet, knowing it was the best thing to do, took action and got it done.

You are professional.

In all you’ve done, you’ve carried yourself with poise and strength and repped the A to the max.

Above all else, you are compassionate.

You’ve given the past year of your life to service, taken ten months for others, to mulch trees and dig ditches, create trails and pick up pinecones. You’ve built many houses – given people a home – and gutted out others in the wake of disaster. You’ve talked to neighbors down the street and volunteers on the site, met non-profit staff and the President of the United States. You’ve bettered lives and strengthened communities.

Our generation has been told that we’re too busy connecting online to connect in person. We IM and text, we’re told, in place of real conversation.

This has been a year of real conversations. This year, we’ve talked and listened. This year, we’ve put aside the comforts of a settled home to travel with ten strangers – now ten friends – and share our lives. We’ve served in communities from Florida to Maine and conversed with “the locals” about everything from mosquitoes to mathematics in grocery stores, sanctuaries, and swamps. We’ve traded our cell phones for shovels and sandpaper and taken action for the members of communities across our nation. In doing so, we’ve helped define our generation.

We are the leaders of tomorrow.

We are the next farmers and firefighters, architects and ambassadors. Our generation, armed with our cell phones and iPods, will shape the next decades of this nation. Now we have, from this year, new tools to carry into the future: hammers, shovels, and our interactions with citizens across this country which we will use to shape our communities and our nation.

My challenge to you, Class XVI, is to define our generation within your community as one engaged in service to the world around us. Shovel the snow from a neighbor’s sidewalk when you do your own; help out at your local food bank over the holidays; serve with a friend or with your team at a reunion; volunteer for a day or a week or a month both next year and every year thereafter.

Commit to continuing the legacy of service.

Together we have the power to raise roofs and stomp out stereotypes, build homes and strengthen communities.

Together, Class XVI, we will get things done.

A Brief Close-Out

2011-02-15T10:08:00.000-05:00

Before moving on to the next phase of my life (epic adventures!), I think it'd be good to create some sort of bloggy closure to my NCCC experience. Perhaps someday I'll post more of my adventures in that particular year of my life, but quite possibly not. All in all, I learned a ton and had some amazing experiences. I'll end the year with some simple highlights and challenges (a brief reflection exercise of the SLI variety, we could call it).

High: My house. 1103 was, from day one, family. We still stay in touch and those strong, beautiful NTrips were a defining part of my year, keeping me sane with their 5 AM yoga and morning coffee chats.

Challenge: The team. I get along with pretty much everybody, but I quickly found that they don't always get along with each other. I relearned how crucial honesty is and enjoyed our third-round commune with nature. The fourth-round commune with horror movies was less enjoyable.

High: Tennessee. I may spend years of my life forgetting Nashville, but the homeowners were amazing, my team was incredibly hard-working in spite of all the obstacles thrown our way, and the church families were some of the most caring and compassionate I've ever met. In the end, we did good things.

Challenge: New Orleans. I had been excited to go, but that lasted about 24 hours once we reached the city itself. A highlight of my time there was a note-passing conversation with Melissa during a forum on the city's rebuilding in which we discussed how much better-prepared the Netherlands are for flooding than is New Orleans. That would be step one for me; the ability to withstand a 70-year flood is simply not enough in that region. Even 100 years? We can do better.

High: The Point. It very much became home. I loved it.

Challenge: Acknowledging the green-gray divide. Color-coding uniforms to create status divides is a very tricky matter that was never once openly discussed during any training or other formal event.

High: Being an STL. I learned that my love of paperwork, organization, and meetings is actually applicable to real-world jobs. I even figured out what some of those jobs might be. Also, notes were passed via a certain potted plant in the forum. Good times.

Challenge: People leaving the program. Given the physical and emotional toll this single year takes on an individual, it's no wonder that about 10% of the class never makes it to graduation. It's sad, though, to see teammates and fellow program members leave to go off and regain their personal glow elsewhere. I like that our generation is able to keep in touch easily in spite of their departure from the immediate proximity.

High: Speaking at graduation. This competes vigorously for the title of 'Highlight of the Year'. I loved the message of my speech and was thrilled to be able to share it with the Corps, our campus staff, and visiting families. I loved pacing around by the river at all hours of the day, addressing an imaginary audience in the rain, and successfully recalling every word on the day of graduation as a result. I'm happy that other people seemed to like it too, including the father who noted that he saw me turning pages even though I didn't glance down at my paper once. (I did keep on the correct page just in case.) This was a great end to an amazing term of service. I truly believe our generation has the power to achieve all that I set out in that speech.

Welcome to Fourth Round! Days 218 + 227 + 230

2010-10-02T12:55:00.000-04:00

Day 218 – Tuesday September 14, 2010

After two days in the van, we arrived in New Orleans late Sunday night. Our work week is Tuesday through Saturday so we got Monday off to rest and recover from our 20-hour drive. We went to WalMart late morning for grocery shopping (most of us have a strong dislike of the store but it’s MUCH cheaper for getting the basics and had other household items in its vast stretches) and I picked up a bike along with my groceries. It’s a mint green cruiser, a one-speed with reverse-pedal braking. It’s completely impractical and therefore lovely. Its fat tires were wonderful at not getting broken on the many shards of glass strewn about the streets and sidewalks on my later hour-long ride.

The ride itself was also lovely, my first venture into the city after our grocery trip. Most of the sights along the way back – we drove by United Saints so I could see the team’s last housing – were places at which the team had spent a significant number of nights drinking second round. When I had asked (on at least two occasions) what there is to do in New Orleans other than drink, I’d been met with long pauses, I-don’t-knows, and “nothing?”s. I was a bit nervous that this could be the truth, though more so overwhelmingly skeptical about the prospect of “nothing”, so was relieved to run across both the vibrant little French Market and the aquarium along a nice Riverwalk boulevard. I also biked up Bourbon Street, mostly just so I could have gone, albeit in the daylight. I might (might) make it again sometime. Even at night.

Today was our first day of service with Habitat Restore and Warehouse. It was great! I did have a headache all morning, which was less than fun, but I much enjoyed the service day, especially my work on the warehouse side. (The warehouse distributes donated new construction materials to Habitat build sites; the ReStore, like Baltimore’s Loading Dock, resells donated goods – from crèche scenes to sinks to doorframes and windows – as the money-making side of the establishment.) Buck and I began helping Paul, who runs the warehouse, load long pieces of metal into a trailer bed at Dr. Bob’s. Dr. Bob is an artist who works in a small building and yard a couple of blocks from the ReStore, which he shares with a miniature extension of the warehouse and sometimes a Habitat truck or two. The whole time we worked, Paul chatted with us about where we’re from and such. It turns out that he’s from Massachusetts and has been to Northampton on multiple occasions. I decided that I like him a lot. Jor had told me before I came that she loved working with him. I do too.

Later in the morning, after spending my only time on the ReStore side dusting off paint-protecting stuff and Christmas tree stands, Amanda and I went over to Dr. Bob’s and loaded up some insulation made out of recycled jeans (“none of the itchy stuff’, announced Paul). Amanda drove the box truck over to a build site ten minutes away, where we unloaded it into two neighboring houses. I had the fun job of handing the insulation out of the back of the truck to the build crew. I enjoyed it. My arms were covered in dirt by the time we made it back. I also knew how to latch up the back of the truck and operate the mechanical up-and-down back ramp controls.

We returned just in time to load up another order for a further-away build site. I learned where the shims and “1-bys” (1x4s, 1x12s, etc.) are in the warehouse as we refilled the truck. At the first drop-off, I’d met a girl named Katie who’s “from your neck of the woods” (Paul’s introduction). It turns out she’s dating Eoin, a guy I rowed with in high school. During our warehouse loading, I met a guy named Mike who went to school with Katie and knows Eoin. It seems half of the Habitat people I met have spent some time in Massachusetts, most of those not far from me.

This trend continued later in the afternoon, when I got to go on the delivery with John, one of the ReStore staff. As we drove across the Mississippi to drop off the boards and such which Amanda and I had loaded, I learned that he too had spent time in my neck of the woods. Kinda crazy. John and I had a good time, finally finding the site after Google Maps directed us to the wrong part of the street and eventually making it back across the Mississippi after an hour caught in traffic during which about four ambulances and three police cars raced by with lights flashing. The delivery took over two hours; I liked getting to see a bit more of the city and take our time unloading all the boards at the site. I ended up dirtier and more smudged than before.

I much enjoyed showering when we returned home. I felt super-clean. It made me happy.

Day 227 – Thursday September 23, 2010

I was involved in a world record today. Certified by the Guinness Book. It involved tons and tons of macaroni and cheese. Well, just over 1 ton. But that’s a lot of mac ‘n’ cheese.

Cabot paired up with Habitat, somehow, to make an event out of creating the world’s largest macaroni and cheese. The final dish weighed in at 2,469 pounds. It was stirred in a cauldron, itself weighing 1,900 pounds, dating from the late 1700s. Traci and I, after being the lucky ones to have our names drawn by Melissa (of the five available, herself included, since Buck is in Michigan this week for a friend’s wedding), got to join Wolf 3 at the mac ‘n’ cheese event. Once it was officially weighed and the woman who served as the Guinness Book of World Records official witness presented a formal certificate to the chef in charge, we helped distribute bowls to thousands (close to three, to be precise) of people who came to help consume all that mac ‘n’ cheese. There was a line over a hundred people long for part of the morning. I was busybusybusy, which I loved. After we did the distributing, we got to eat some of the tasty record-setting dish ourselves. The noodles, having been stirred up in the cauldron, shoveled into bins (with a literal shovel), ladeled into our bowls, and spooned into our mouths (by us) were delicious. Very flavorful. Bread crumbs, pepper, and everything. A world record has never before tasted so good to me.

Life at the ReStore is also good. Aisle 1, my pet project, is looking fantastic. I continue to enjoy getting out of the building on deliveries and pick-ups. The Tuesday to Saturday work week still feels quite strange. In the evenings, my team watches lots of movies. I’ve been reading lots of books, especially during the horror movies. I took a break, of course, to watch Pirates of the Caribbean the other night. So much fun. New Orleans is still big, dangerous, and not all that pretty; I’m continuing to take adjustment time.

Day 230 – Sunday September 26, 2010

Gwyn gave me a hug yesterday. This made me happy.

She had asked me a couple of days ago to do a store directory and I finally set aside the day to do so yesterday. We had discussed it briefly – a list stating “Doors…aisle 8” and the like which I could paint on one of the recently repainted hollow doors set aside for just such projects. When I went to make the directory, my first task was to map out what it should even include. I drew myself a map-like directory, a style I thought might be easier than “Lighting…aisle 27” since aisle 27 (along with about eight other aisles) is hidden in the back behind the employee-only loading dock. I showed Gwyn the map for what to include, mentioned how this version was just like in department stores, and got approval to go ahead – map, not list! I grabbed a door, painted the lovely shade of French Market Blue, and got to work. I used masking tape to make all the aisle lines for the store then busted out the purple paint and made it pretty. The end result was surprisingly artistic-looking after I painted “Welcome to the ReStore” next to the paint-and-sharpie map (sharpie, I figured, would be easier for changes in the event that some new item gets a permanent aisle). I waited for the paint to dry then took it to show Gwyn. She was thrilled, declared it better than she could imagine, and asked if she could give me a hug. All in all, a productive Saturday at the ReStore.

The other productivity I’ve had at the ReStore is the shining success of Aisle 1. I had thought it’d be great to make a small display of items for sale then realized multiple displays might be needed to cover the range of items in the store. Wandering around looking for things I’d want to display, I found that Aisle 1, right by the entrance ramp into the store, had fairly little in it and looked rather scattered. Gwyn said the idea of a display sounded great – they had had great success displaying children’s schooldesks, which didn’t sell when stacked but immediately did when set out classroom-style – and I should ask Bob. Bob gave me the go-ahead and even allowed me all of Aisle 1 for my plans. Gwyn fully endorsed this free reign, glad to have the rather scattered aisle off her hands. A week ago, three volunteers helped me clear out the aisle and collect up items from around the store to fill it. My original idea was to showcase the second- or third-best desk, stove, etc. with small markers directing people to the desk, appliance, or other section where they could find their own best item. As items came in off the loading dock and the space filled in, it became clear that it would become more of a showcase for best items, mixing decent with almost-new.

Friday was the first busy day Aisle 1 experienced, Tuesday through Thursday being understandably quieter shopping days. The result? Seven – seven – items sold from “my” section. I had been on the warehouse side all day and came over at the end to find missing a futon sofa, a small bookcase, a taller wicker bookcase, a sewing machine, a small picture frame, and the small lamp perched on a cabinet. Needless to say, I spent the first hour of Saturday (pre-directory) filling in all that was gone. One of the new items I added was a wooden mantle for around a fireplace from Neil’s mantles-and-door-frames section. One customer asked me in the morning how much it cost and Gwyn told me later that she’d fielded multiple questions about mantles, an oft-overlooked item, during the day. Pretty cool.

I’ve learned some solid retail sales lessons in my time at the ReStore, most sparked by my own intuition and simple observations about customer behavior. It all comes down to this: 1) customers are lazy and 2) the more you can do to make things easier for customers (e.g. subtly spotlight one good-quality item of each type, put good stuff in a display section), the happier both you and your customers will be. Simplify it for them.

I'm Baaaaack!

2010-09-01T20:50:00.000-04:00

Didja miss me? Yes, yes, it's been four months. And five days. Spanning two entire rounds. In good news, I'm back!

Posts may continue to be sporadic, but I have lots and lots of enthralling entries saved just for you. And whatever friends or frenemies of yours may read this. Tons of exciting things have happened (literally, tons) including 30 days on disaster (hence the lapse in posting), 2 weeks as an STL at Perry Point, a 14-day summer break, and 6 leisurely weeks of vacation - I mean service - in Massachusetts. (Vacation, you wonder? We live within ten minutes' walk of our own private beach, I got weekendly parental visits our final three weeks, and I got fun desk jobs all round.)

We drive back to Perry Point tomorrow! Fourth round: NOLA. There's lots to share before then so I'll post occasionally with moments from the past. We begin with the most recent past.

Days 204 + 205 (post-race recovery)

2010-09-01T20:31:00.002-04:00

Day 204 – Tuesday August 31, 2010

Two days post-Half-Ironman: Huh? Whaa…?

One day post-Half-Ironman: Ouch…what?

Day of Half-Ironman: That was fun. Let’s go sit down away from the sun for many hours.

My triathlon was Sunday and it was tons of fun. I’m now having trouble focusing when tired (that being ever since about 7:30 last night, which was approaching my bedtime), but I’m surprisingly unsore. My shoulders are a bit tight, but new bike gadgets should help fix that. In fun news, I survived. In other fun news, the usual cut-off time for a full Ironman is 17 hours. Not bad, not bad.

Life at the Marion Institute is great. Working for Glenn gives me lots of freedom to learn new things since he’ll frequently have me do one or two assignments then send me off to someone else for a bit. On Friday, for example, I helped him with some Connecting for Change edits in the morning, learned to enter Cambodian Living Arts donations into the office system around midday, and prepared gift baskets for the weekend board meeting for Desa in the afternoon. I enjoy learning new things.

Both weekends have also been tons of fun. Mom and I headed to Boston last weekend and enjoyed a show (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), some shopping (yay new running shoes a week before the race! – don’t try this at home), and excellent birthday dinner for her big day. I spent this weekend driving to and from Middlebury, Vermont, (4 ½ hours away) with Becky and Glenn, hanging out with Dad pre- and post-race, and, oh yeah, doing a really long triathlon. Glenn is lots of fun outside of the office. I like hanging out with people in the real world (outside work, not outside the NTrip, just to clarify). Becky and I both enjoyed the race immensely and I know at least one of us (that would be me) plans to do another. Before doing another, though, I plan to spend the next week sitting, sleeping, and having vague trouble grasping the right word at any given moment. I’ll also stay out of the sun a fair deal, as I currently associate it with exhaustion. Mmm, shade.

Day 205 – Wednesday September 1, 2010

Welcome to September!

On a half-ironman update, I feel great! I’m waiting at least until tomorrow to exercise – I know my body appreciates the rest – but I’ve been much more able to focus today and generally enjoyed life. My shoulders are a bit sore, but all else is well. I just set up my countdown to my next race, a half marathon in NOLA which Buck picked out for himself, Melissa, and I. It’s 7 ½ weeks away.

Last night, we had a wonderful cookout at Sacred Hearts (our lovely retreat center housing) with local neighbors who will enjoy the Great Neck trails long after we’ve left and staff members from both Allens Pond and the Marion Institute. I loved getting to hang out one last time with all these amazing new friends and appreciate just how many people I’ve gotten to know this round. Though I initially felt a bit bounced around at the Marion Institute when Glenn kept sending me off to others, I now absolutely love that I had the opportunity to help out so many of the staff there. It was fun to see Michelle (CLA donations fun time), Judy (Green Jobs, Green Economy logic models with Kalia), Desa (gift baskets for board members and NCCC alum extraordinaire), and, of course, Glenn (so many random edits). Plus Becky, Gina, and Lauren from Allens Pond. This is a great part of the world.

Today, we had our final half day of Mass Audubon service for the round, said our goodbyes at the Marion Institute, and came home to pack and load the van. We had actual down time this evening, my first in awhile since my weekends have been so full with fun parental visits. Tomorrow, we roll out at 5:30 AM for the Point. I’ve already called driving first shift. I like starting off early. For van rides, not workouts. But I’m working on that.

PS I love New England!

The 190s

2010-09-01T20:30:00.001-04:00

Day 190 – Tuesday August 17, 2010

Duck Derby was fantastic. So too was the weekend that followed.

After a day full of ducks and auction items, Dad swept me off to Plymouth for a couple of days of team-free relaxation and wanderings. We enjoyed brunch and mexican (separate meals) along the main street, spent much of Sunday at Plimoth Plantation, imagined the plantation buildings in their original locations from atop Leyden Street, wandered Burial Hill and found the Bradford family plot, went to a movie (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), floated aboard the Mayflower II, and splashed around at the fantastic hotel pool, complete with Plymouth-rock-themed hot tub (yes, we did see the real rock too) and Mayflower-themed spirally water slide. I had a wonderful time.

My return to the team was quite nice too. Dad took me to lunch and we went grocery shopping then I settled back in for a lazy Monday-off-work afternoon. I finally broke open my Ancient Greek textbook – the one Mom had gotten me for Christmas – and was happy to discover that there are very few letters in Ancient Greek which I hadn’t seen in math class. Who thought math and Classics was a strange combination? I can already read basic words, such as autonomy and Hippocrates, which makes me happy.

Today was our first day back at Great Neck (Wildlife Sanctuary). That meant that for Traci, Jeff, Sabrina, and I it was our first day at the Marion Institute. Glenn, with whom I’ll be paired for the next two weeks, gave us an extensive (think: two hours) orientation and tour in the morning. Afterwards, Sabrina went off to start working on family programming for the Institute’s upcoming Connecting for Change conference with Lena while the rest of us headed down to the basement for an hour of straightening up the shelves. We stopped at noon for our hour-long lunch. Glenn had informed us very matter-of-factly that lunch is an hour so thus it is. In true AC fashion, we take half an hour of official lunch and half of sponsor-mandated break. So I refer to it, anyway, as we justify the appropriate time-giving-ness.

In the afternoon, Glenn announced that cookies had been brought and were in the kitchen. They were giant and Swiss chocolate chip. I had half of one and it was delicious. Traci had a full one and felt stuffed. We also got down to actual work. My primary task was creating a spreadsheet of all the Connecting for Change speakers (almost all of our work will revolve around the conference) for the bookstore which supplies books for the event. I entered the books which speakers had said on the form that they’d written then looked up what books other speakers had written so the bookstore could stock those too. There are going to be lots of speakers. It looks like it’ll be an amazing conference.

Day 192 – Thursday August 19, 2010

Today officially marks the end of my attempts to write every day. Well, yesterday did but I didn’t write then. So today marks the official documentation of yesterday’s cessation of attempts. Yes, it got to me. And by ‘it’ I mean AmeriCorps. I was once an eager soon-to-be-Corps-member, reading blogs and soaking up anything and everything about the NTrip on Facebook. Quite notable was the dramatic drop in blog posts once people enter NCCC, often down from that idealistic once a week to one or two a month throughout CTI and first round, then one or two in the entire second half of the service year. Now I haven’t posted on my blog since before Tennessee, but I certainly have a lot to post. My future service companions will have the option to read hundreds of days’ worth of entries about life in the NTrip. Or not to, should they be slightly less absurd than myself. Anyway, I’ll now write on a most-days basis. Or maybe a many-days basis. We shall see.

Yesterday, I spent my entire service day at the Marion Institute compiling information on past sponsors of the Connecting for Change conference. The “Past Sponsors” section of the Marion CFC website has about 8 sponsors on it. There are, it turns out, over fifty. I made a ten-page word document with the sponsoring organization name, website, and logo plus a paragraph on each, often some rewording of the organization’s mission statement or website “About Us” section. I finished just before we ended at 5. It was fun. The four of us – Traci, Sabrina, Jeff, and I – all went out to lunch at the Thai place across the street for Jeff’s birthday. It was also fun. There were more cookies at the office.

Today, I spent my Marion time on past CFC exhibitors. The “Past Exhibitors” section of the CFC website has exactly zero exhibitors on it. There are, it turns out, about seventy. No logos this time, but I spent my day compiling organization names, websites, and informational paragraphs. I’ll finish up early tomorrow morning and move on to whatever comes next. A highlight was editing an email for Glenn. He had asked Sabrina to and she’d laughed and brought it downstairs to me. There were only little things – a misplaced comma and a grammatically incorrect sentence – but I do love to edit. Also on editing, I found a typo on the website of one of the grad programs that has had a table at CFC. Really, grad school? Really?? Silly grad school. There’s no way I’d go there.

I also survived my Team Leader interview today. I had it at 9 AM, right at the beginning of our service day. My phone interview, which lasted 47 minutes, was with Chris Quaka and Kat (the wonderful Badger STL). The TL interview is structured a bit differently from the CM interview. The CM interview focuses on how you’d do in a team and your views on various subjects such as flexibility and diversity (how would you define it? how do you live it?). The TL interview starts out with some of the interview basics (e.g. what expectations would I have of the TLs in my unit? how would I help prepare them to fill those? (professionalism and knowing they’re there for each other; set clear expectations, be available, and help them get to know each other so they have each other as resources too)) but then focuses on a series of scenarios. My scenarios involved spending a week with a team that was struggling, hearing AmeriRumors about one of my best TLs, and a poorly executed transition community meeting. Afterwards, I got to ask Kat and Chris about their biggest challenges and successes this year. I liked Kat’s answers.

So what’s next on the agenda? More awesome service in an amazing program. These two weeks at Marion are helping make this the best service summer ever, so much more than I’d imagined it would be. We live in a huge “cottage” by the beach, I have a triathlon in two weeks, the team is performing well, and I get to spend the entire summer in an office. How fun is that?! So fun, I know.

In other news, we did a fun teambuilder tonight. We got a list of 29 items we could take on a camping trip if our group got lost in the woods and had to choose 15 to bring and prioritize those. Fortunately, the 4 bags of marshmallows did not come. The gun and ammunition, however, made it on the list at number 5. I would definitely bring a tent above those. We already had a water jug, peanut butter, matches, and sleeping bags. What a good top 4.

Climate Rally Awesomeness

2010-04-26T18:56:00.000-04:00

The Climate Rally was fantastic. Kate came to visit and got to meet some of my teammates; we went on an epic quest for humidity-fighting treats on my lunch break.

Newspaper estimates today (one day post-rally) place attendance figures around 150,000 people. Yay for environmental consciousness! And awesome concerts. I hope even half those people do something greener (e.g. bike to work one day, wash clothes in cold water sometimes) to help make this world a climate-happier place.

I got to watch John Legend and The Roots from the fifth row. It was fantastic!

Days 75 to 77

2010-04-26T18:48:00.000-04:00

Day 75 – Friday April 23, 2010

I woke up today feeling energized and ready to go after under 7 hours of sleep but a fabulous previous evening. My body, unfortunately, had other ideas for today. I was doing well as we headed to meet Darin at Herring Run Nursery, but spent most of the rest of the day feeling a bit under-the-weather starting once we settled in to weed the potted nursery plants.

Team RIO, fortunately, is awesome at taking care of one another. My teammates were totally fine with me taking a couple of sick hours to nap in the shade of a tree directly abutting the nursery. I was able to sleep a bit and felt mildly better when I returned to weeding two hours later. I made it through another hour of service, this time alphabetizing laminated information pages about the nursery plants by scientific name, before I took another break for my second nap of the day. Traci had suggested at the end of my first nap, which coincided with the end of her and Roy’s lunch break, that I sleep in the wheel-less wheelbarrow which was now resting on the ground. This was the site of nap two, which was excellent. The wheelbarrow was comfortable, I was warmer than the first time because Melissa had loaned me her sweatshirt to use as a blanket, and I woke up feeling much better. All was good.

We had divided up for much of our service day. Traci, Roy, and I stayed at the nursery eventually joined up by Sabrina and (briefly) Laura, our wellness counselor up at the Point; Jeff, Lindsay, Chris, and Amanda headed over to a local school to supervise middle-schoolers in tree planting; Melissa helped at the nursery and drove people around in the van; Kathy took a sick day and Buck was on a personal day. All of us on duty for the day rejoined at the nursery at the end to clean up and gather up plants for one order a woman had come to pick up. We then headed back to the mansion where we met up with the rest of our team for PT.

PT today was the mile run test for our physical assessment. Being a bit sick, I wasn’t going to run a mile so I’ll do mine tomorrow. Today, I timed everyone who did run while Kathy and I did up-and-side gators (an arm and shoulder exercise). Afterwards, I walked two laps of the track with Melissa to round out the rest of PT time before stretching.

Day 76 – Saturday April 24, 2010

Today was a great day. We finally got to see some of the fruits of our canvassing labors, we had project reveal for our awesome second round spike, I ran my mile (fast), and I had a fun night out on the town with friends. All excellent.

We began our service day at 8 AM with a return to Walter P. Carter Elementary/Middle School, the base of operations for our first two days of Tree Baltimore free tree canvassing. This time, we got to help out at the first of the three free tree giveaway/planting days we’d been promoting via door tag distribution during that canvassing. After helping arrange a bunch of trees for planting around the school itself by some of the day’s volunteers, we actually got to plant trees in the neighborhood! I worked with Melissa and four guys on volunteer days from local energy companies. Together, we loaded fifteen small trees – thirteen flowering (a mix of persimmons and serviceberry) and two shade (red maple), all between two and six feet tall – into a wheelbarrow and took them up a few blocks to the area we’d been assigned.

Following a map and an associated list of addresses and tree requests, we proceeded to plant those trees in people’s yards around the neighborhood. It was very rewarding work. While the first tree Kyle (from Constellation Energy) and I planted went to a less than enthusiastic house owner, she certainly didn’t turn it away. My next tree, which James (Baltimore Gas & Electric) and I put in, went to a very happy owner, as did our fourth (the third encouraging us to go ahead and plant it anywhere in the front yard). Though some of the trees will certainly have lower chances of survival due to less-than-impassioned owners, we placed many in caring homes where they’ll be watered with love multiple times per month. Out of our entire list of fifteen houses, only one person declined a requested tree while two asked for a second one. We happily obliged.

Once we’d finished with our deliveries, we wandered through the neighborhood with extra serviceberries and red maples in our wheelbarrow offering them to anyone we saw outside on porches or in yards. We ended up having two takers out of about five offers, which was a much-better-than-I-expected return. The first was later the highlight of the day for both Melissa and myself at Team RIO’s daily Closing Circle (a tradition we started two days ago as an end-of-service-day reflection time). We were walking along the street with our wheelbarrow and as we passed two men leaning against a truck, one jokingly asked if we wanted to plant one of the trees we had in his yard. We said, sure, we’d love to! He was, understandably, taken aback but then both he and his wife, who was sitting across the street with two friends, became totally psyched as we went ahead and planted a new serviceberry in their front yard. They kept smiling and he thanked me profusely multiple times for us giving them this tree. It was a very cool experience.

We returned to the school at noon to help pack up the giveaway event, loading extra trees into the back of a Tree Baltimore pick-up truck and folding up tables. We had hoped to be done with our service day then – Abby had projected a short day and Melissa had our project reveal planned – but we ended up with one more task to test our AmeriFlexibility. The Ash Street Garden folks had traded supplies for sweat equity with the Loading Dock. They needed extra hands to help hold up their end of the deal. We spent the next two hours at the Loading Dock shoveling and redistributing dirt and mulch in the front parking lot. We moved piles of each from the lot itself into the new bordering landscaped plant installation. One guy from the Ash Street Garden was working with us, but he eventually turned all his attention to his truck battery, Chris functioning as his knowledgeable helper, when his truck sputtered and died with a bed full of mulch.

Around 3:30, after an hour of post-work rest at the mansion, Melissa texted us to come meet her outside because our project reveal was ready! We ended up spending the next 45 minutes working our way through a very cool reveal. Melissa had guided a spool of heavy-duty string (though she said yarn works best) from tree to tree in the forest, winding it around some and tucking folded paper clues in the string-tree intersections. Our task was to link hands (traveling together, as if we were in the Vanimal) and work our way through the course as a unit. Some of the clues had challenges (e.g. give each person’s middle name, nobody providing their own) while others had hints at our next project (e.g. are we ready for a Monday to Friday work week?). We rotated through who was in front, circling the chain around so each leader could join the back after reading out a clue, so everybody got a chance to share one paper aloud with the group. Kathy and Roy had the honors of reading our final project itself at the end. I’m so excited for it! We’ll be working with United Saints in New Orleans, Lousiana! Yay NOLA! Yay construction! United Saints’ mission is to help rebuild and build houses in the First Street parish of New Orleans as part of the greater Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. We’ll be helping out on all types of tasks, from painting to gutting to drywalling, across multiple project sites. Both the service work and everything else about the project sound absolutely amazing. Also, we’re incredibly psyched to be headed to New Orleans. It’ll be fantastic.

Major event four of the day (or three, depending on your counting system) was my mile run for our monthly PT assessment. I headed over to the track with Melissa and Buck to complete the test I’d sat out yesterday. It went incredibly well; I finished in 7 minutes, 47 seconds. This was the second mile I’d run since middle school and the first under eight minutes in that time (my initial PT assessment mile having been 8 minutes, 5 seconds). Brandon (aka Buck - don’t get confused) ran the last lap with me, which was quite nice. I enjoyed hearing his commentary on pushing through certain markers (only 200 to go) and starting a sprint as we turned into the last bend. It made me realize that my mile is now pretty much even with my 2K erg time-wise, lending ease to comparisons between the two. Fortunately for me, only one involves running.

Event five was a fun evening in Fells Point with Traci, Buck, Roy, and Sean (from Wolf 5). Melissa had ungrounded the Vanimal at the end of project reveal so we decided to take it out for a night on the town. Buck, Roy, Traci, and I headed down around 7 and enjoyed dinner at a vaguely tropical-themed restaurant overlooking the harbor. Sean got his team to drop him off amidst other errands and joined us after dinner. We all wandered around for awhile, stopping in a music store for a bit where Sean and I tried on many pairs of ridiculous sunglasses, then settled on walking about twenty minutes to Inner Harbor to check out ESPN Zone (Traci and Sean had never been). A relaxing half hour there preceded our return to the Vanimal for me to drive us all home. Good way to spend a Saturday night.

Day 77 – April 25, 2010

I feel comfortable stating that our ISP today made this day one of my highlights of this service year. There may need to be about a hundred highlights by November, but this will certainly be one of them.

Eight of us – Traci, Kathy, Sabrina, Lindsay, Jeff, Buck, Chris, and myself – headed down to DC this morning for the Climate Rally, a big Earth Day week concert event on the National Mall. The local Baltimore contact for the event, Pearl, had approached us with postcard fliers last weekend at EcoFest and said they were still welcoming volunteers. When we saw that Sting, John Legend, The Roots, and Passion Pit would be there, we decided immediately that this was a must-do ISP. Pearl had coordinated a charter bus down to DC for the event (people were bussed in from all over the region) so we were set with free transportation. We were even provided with metro cards to ride from the bus drop-off at Stadium-Armory over to the Smithsonian station.

After a van ride to the bus, a relaxing bus ride (during which I listened to my iPod for the first time in weeks as I sat in the fourth row back, right side, aisle), and Chris’ first ever subway ride, we stepped out onto the National Mall and found the volunteer tent. We were happy to begin our ISP with the distribution of free bright yellow t-shirts for us to wear as volunteer identification. Yay free t-shirts! We then got a tour of the event from three young volunteer coordinators as we learned our duties.

We’d been told we’d be working in the areas of crowd control and logistics. Our actual duties fell more along the lines of “be a presence”. The goal was basically to have volunteers, police, and first aid stations accessible at all points of the rally, which stretched across a fair deal of the area between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. We were part of that volunteer force, equipped with little knowledge but plenty of enthusiasm. What did we know? Where there were bathrooms (everywhere), how the event was eco-friendly (the stage lighting and giant display screens were soy-powered; the sponsor tent section was run on solar and wind power), and what to say about the schedule (there isn’t a public one, but we do know that The Roots will be playing 4 times and Sting will be performing at 6:30). Once informed, we were encouraged to spend the day wandering the event and simply enjoying it. Perhaps one of the least difficult tasks ever in this case.

Sabrina and I checked out the sponsor village at the beginning of our shift. We didn’t make it back as far as the four NASA tents (to which I directed a group later when asked), but I had a great conversation with the people at one tent about worldwide population growth and said growth’s rate in and impact on developing and developed nations. I felt like I learned a lot. Kate, living in DC as she does, was able to stop by late morning, which was fantastic! We walked over to meet her at the Metro stop and went to sit together by the stage as the early bands got going. We ended up running into Raven 4, in DC for a final day before moving to Vermont tomorrow for the end of their spike (rounds split between multiple projects are fairly common), and hanging out with them for awhile. Afterwards, I took a lunch break to walk with Kate to Starbucks for cold beverages.

I returned to find that Sabrina, Traci, Jeff, and Lindsay were now wandering around some other part of the city attempting (rather unsuccessfully, as they were lost) to complete an off-site task for one of the volunteer coordinators. It sounded like they were supposed to meet someone near a Metro station but had not been given the clearest instructions; they ended up walking for some time before returning to the rally. Still at the rally myself, I found Kathy and sat with her and one of the Ravens in the shade for a bit then moved closer to the stage, where I soon found Buck and Chris (thanks, cell phone, for helping me meet up with friends in crowds). As the three of us stood together, a guy approached me from a nearby blanket and asked, “What team are you from?” It turned out that he had been a TL at the Point last year (for one of the Raven teams) and was at the concert with last year’s Programs STL and Wolf 1 TL. Yes, AmeriFriends do stay in touch outside the bubble.

I considered going over to introduce myself to the guy who was Wolf 1 TL, but I was soon distracted. Kathy joined us and she and Buck went to sit down so she could rest her leg while Chris wandered off momentarily. As I contemplated whether to sit with them or stay comfortably standing, John Legend came onstage to perform a song with the group that was out there. That made that decision easy. Since my teammates were all set with friends, I took the opportunity to use my impressive crowd-weaving skills and go watch John Legend up close. I made it to about the eighth row of people standing packed together by halfway through the song. Twenty minutes later, I (and the clump of volunteers I stood near) were in the fifth row. I stayed there for the next hour and a half – this really was following their instructions by keeping a presence and schedule questions were less pertinent as the major concert part kicked in – and was so glad I did. I got to listen to James Cameron speak about Avatar and the environment and hear from the awesome guy who founded Earth Day 40 years ago and from Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), who sponsors lots of climate legislation. I also got to see and hear (and feel, thanks to the intense sound vibrations in the ground) some phenomenal musical performances.

The Roots did indeed perform a bunch of times, first on their own then with most of the other artists there at one time or another. They were fantastic. My hands-down favorite, though, was John Legend. He sang and played on the piano for a good twenty minutes in the course of the concert. His main performance, towards the end, was with The Roots. He and they are releasing a CD together in the fall and they performed one of the songs on it, a cover of ‘Wake Up (Everybody)’. It’s one of my new favorites. I’d never even heard it before today.

The concert and the entire rally were phenomenal. Not only did I provide some direction to inquisitive attendees (though I was asked three times as Passion Pit performed who they were and didn’t find out until a bit later), but I got to learn lots and saw John Legend and The Roots perform from five rows back. And they were very awesome. Very awesome indeed.

I headed out as Sting was introduced to meet up with my team, fortunately finding the group easily since my phone battery had died an hour earlier. It turned out they were all meeting up right then, which was perfect; I had totally missed the message because my phone struggled to send or receive data within about thirty feet of the stage (and then the battery died). We returned home late, not leaving DC on the bus until 8. Melissa met us with the van at the bus drop-off outside Johns Hopkins, we had a fun dash to the Vanimal in the pouring rain as thunder crashed overhead, and we headed home for a later dinner (for some of us, anyway) and a good night of sleep. Fantastic day.

Round 2: NOLA!

2010-04-26T13:31:00.000-04:00

We took a team picture before project reveal Saturday afternoon; it was one of our first times all together since first round began.

Project reveal involved lots of hand-holding and string. And fun times in the woods.

After project reveal, we debriefed on the picnic benches outside the mansion.

We learned that our second round spike is in New Orleans! We'll be building houses and doing other construction-related activities with United Saints of First Street. We'll be living in our own house with three bedrooms and wireless internet.

Days 73 and 74

2010-04-26T12:57:00.000-04:00

Day 73 – April 21, 2010

We did not mulch trees today. We did, however, supervise high school boys as they mulched trees. It was fantastic.

Our morning began at the forestry department tool containers in Druid Hill Park (the park we drive through every day to work), where we loaded up lots of shovels, rakes, and wheelbarrows into the bed of a Tree Baltimore truck. We distributed the tools evenly to 14 mulch piles around the park, all along the central road. We also distributed ourselves evenly (seven remained after accounting for Melissa taking three to the doctor) to the mulch piles. I got mulch site two, which stretched from the road up a gentle rise to a gazebo. It was excellent.

Unlike our deer fence post-hole day at Cylburn Arboretum, we had an adequate number of tools and supplies (buckets for carrying mulch supplemented one wheelbarrow per pile) for the number of volunteers. I got 35 boys at mulch site two along with two teacher chaperones. All our volunteers were high school seniors from a local Catholic school participating in their annual service day. They were tons of fun, your typical senior boys.

They got through the two piles of mulch in roughly twenty-five minutes, but we fortunately had a third pile delivered and set some to raking leaves to occupy a bit more time. They finished the third pile around 11:50, well before the anticipated 1 PM lunchtime, but ended up being able to clean up early and enjoy their cookout lunch at the gazebo. This was good, because Ann and Charlie from Tree Baltimore already seemed to be grasping for additional tasks for them to do at 11 AM just before they coordinated the second mulch delivery.

Fun story of the day: I was talking to a couple of my, uh, less motivated volunteers as they ‘supervised’ mulching at one tree. One was fixing a wheelbarrow by replacing the missing metal axle piece with a stick (worked out perfectly) while the others stood in a circle near the tree and occasionally spent about five seconds spreading around a new bucketful of mulch as it was delivered. The guys enjoyed asking me questions, such as where I went to college (they were all impressed) and what AmeriCorps NCCC is. One asked if I’d played a sport in college and I said yes, I’d played rugby. Upon hearing this, his friend turned to him and said, “I told you she could beat you up!” What?? Melissa later suggested that perhaps our stylish steel-toed boots give this impression. Apparently, though, I came off as a leader to them. I did feel pretty accomplished keeping all 35 of them quiet and attentive during our initial briefing of safety (stay out of the road) and why and how we mulch. I also intentionally hooked my aviators on the top of my sweatshirt for the morning in spite of the overcast sky. Because these things matter with high school boys.

We had lunch at the gazebo cookout then headed back to the tool containers to label lots and lots of tools with P&P stickers, continuing the work we’d started yesterday. The rest of our afternoon, which turned out to be quite a rainy one, was filled with this labeling. We began at the tool containers then moved to the tool trailer outside the P&P office building then back to a small container next to the first long one with which we’d started. Lots and lots of stickers and tape.

Our evening was pretty excellent. We had a team meeting before dinner – the weekly Wednesday specialty roles meeting which will now be the weekly Wednesday team dinner – because Buck is back as a Team Trainer (the specialty role responsible for teambuilding exercises) and brought with him the knowledge of his composite team practices. He started a weekly practice of each sharing a high and a low from the past week. For this week, we did a high and something we’d like the team to improve on so he can appropriately tailor future teambuilders. My high was returning to Moveable Feast.

After the meeting, we had team dinner for the second night in a row! Crazy, I know. Melissa made chili, half vegetarian and half with chicken, which was most delicious. I’ll need to get her recipe for my TL days. Sabrina made brownies from mix for dessert. Also quite good. I forced Melissa back into our pre-spring-break workout routine with a walk twice around the loop afterwards. It wasn’t a huge workout, but it was a good first step back into things after over a week off running. It was a great routine to get back into and I laughed a lot along the way.

Day 74 – Thursday April 22, 2010

I had a stellar day today. Let’s start with Happy Earth Day! and go from there.

I awoke to a foggy grey morning, so much so that I decided to forego my usual drive-to-work sunscreen application. We headed at 8 AM to the Parks & People office, where we learned from Abby that we’d be splitting our day between two Earth Day volunteer events. Good start.

Our morning event was at a United Church of Christ in the Locust Park neighborhood of BMore. Our site would have been within eyeshot of Inner Harbor except that the UnderArmour sports gear national headquarters building was between us and the water. I love UnderArmour and was happy to hear from Jim, the pastor who was the primary church presence at the event, that the company is a very good corporate neighbor.

The volunteer morning was lots of fun. We were joined by students from Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School, which is about two blocks from the church. The student group included some adorable young kids, perhaps second grade, who sang a gardening song at the opening remarks. The other major attendee was Maryland Lieutenant Governor Brown, who brought about ten staff members and came out to plant stuff. Mary from Parks & People, who had set up the natural play space at EcoFest, coordinated the volunteer efforts. We got a picture with the lieutenant governor, part of that political photo op series taken before a politician leaves an event, and all told him what states we’re from. It was lots of fun.

Our role in the service project did not, for the most part, involve the students this time. While Amanda worked with children planting things inside the fence, most of us headed outside the church fence into the UnderArmour parking lot and pulled dead vine fragments and tons of live English ivy off the fence; Chris and Brandon also removed barbed wire from the top. Removing vines reminded me of our work our very first day with Parks & People pulling vines off the outside of the Duncan Street Miracle Garden fence. I had lots of fun with it.

Sabrina found out just before lunch that she’d be heading back to Perry Point from this afternoon to tomorrow morning to move forward with her pet project of starting up a Corps community garden in the Village. As a result, she asked me to take her spot on the upscale ISP tonight. Possible awesome ISP? Duh I said yes.

We drove from Locust Park, the first neighborhood community garden having been officially planted by the students, to Carroll Park at 2 PM. We found Abby there at the volunteer day, which was a joint Ravens football team staff and M&T Bank event. She led us down the main path beside the golf course to our work sites. While three people started out lining a small newly-planted-by-volunteers garden with rocks, the rest of us headed further along to a medium pond. The pond was split into two smaller ponds by a ground-level rock divide about 10 feet wide through which a channel ran connecting the two bodies of water. Lots and lots of trash builds up in the pond and on the rocks. Our job was to help the volunteers already there remove some of that trash. They had already collected about twenty bags of trash by the time we arrived, between paddling around and cleaning the water and banks in three canoes and walking down to the water’s edge. We added to the giant pile of trash bags with our (mostly on-land) collection. I focused on collecting trash out of the dead invasive stalks on the land abutting the boat launch. After about 30 minutes, Molly, the very enthusiastic volunteer coordinator, told me that I could go ahead and bag up the invasives and the trash all together because they would all end up in the same place (incinerator or landfill). This sped up my work immensely and I ended up with five big brown paper leaf bags full of invasives and trash. Mmm, accomplishment.

After a full day of Earth-ness, we hopped into the Vanimal for the ride to our ISP, changing into our AmeriTuxes (the sharp black pants and white polos we wore for induction) during our RiteAid stop along the way. The five volunteer slots offered to us were taken up by Jeff, Lindsay, Chris, Amanda, and myself. The rest of the team had not been interested in an additional four hours of ISP after a full service day; we ended up totally lucking out.

The event was Hope in the Harbor, a $175-per-plate fundraiser for the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. It was held at a museum in Inner Harbor and we knew that Duff from Charm City Cakes, the head guy on the television show Ace of Cakes, was a big guest at the event. The entire affair ended up being totally awesome.

It took a while to find out where we needed to be once we got there. Namely actually gaining entrance to the building took about twenty minutes since the door guards didn’t know volunteer coordinator Ken by name and he didn’t think he’d need to come to the door when I called him because we were volunteers so should get let in. Fortunately, he did eventually come find us and everything was smooth sailing from then on.

Ken was completely on top of his game organization-wise and already had all of us divided up into our roles for the night. Jeff and Amanda were posted at the silent auction, helping bidders with the process and guarding against wandering items. Lindsay and Chris were ushers in the main dining hall, helping people find the way downstairs and generally being available for questions and such. I was a greeter. My job was to stand by the front door, welcome people to the event, shake hands, and point them to reception and the wine tasting and silent auction beyond.

I found my station and met the four women with whom I’d be working. Two of them, Joann and Carol, introduced themselves right away and got to chatting. They spent most of our hour together asking me questions about NCCC; Carol and I only got to greet about five parties each as a result. Carol was in her forties and showed me pictures of her twin boys. Joann is 79 and told me repeatedly how much more she knows at 80 than she knew at 50. She shared with me stories of the service she engages in, Ken assigned us both to the 9 PM silent auction item-distribution shift as greeting wore down, and we spent the rest of the night wandering the event together.

An evening with Joann is a grand adventure. We headed upstairs to the main dining room, where we watched speakers present moving, emotion-filled testimonies about the amazingness of St. Jude’s. We then headed back to the kitchen with my teammates for some leftover hors d’ouvres since Joann was quite hungry. The event’s live auction was just finishing with an awesome grand finale when we returned from the kitchen. As we watched and listened, the final item – a custom-made cake from Charm City Cakes – went for a mind-boggling $15,000. Even more impressive, Duff asked if the bidder who had been competing with the winner would be willing to make a matching bid. When he assented, Duff agreed to go ahead and make two custom cakes. One cake became two and fifteen thousand dollars for St. Jude’s became thirty thousand. Kind of insane but also really awesome. (I later learned from Ken that 85 cents from every dollar donated to St. Jude’s goes into the hospital and research, with only 6 cents going to administrative expenses.)

Joann’s philosophies, of which she shared many, include ‘Live life to the fullest.’ She enacted this by leading me to pretty much every food table at the event after the silent auction. The main room was lined with tables set up by local restaurants and she took it upon herself to try food from almost every one during our hour break. (Volunteers sampling the food was completely fine with all involved, at least wherever she’s involved.) I was keeping her company, chatting and offering an arm on stairs and making sure she got water when she needed it, and so of course joined her as she walked around the event. She encouraged me to try almost all that she did, leading me to test some very unexpected delicacies. (Duck is yuck but whatever that squishy Lebanese thing was it was great.) My favorites were the desserts. I tried a cinnamon roll and the famous Captain Crunch french toast (overrated, in my opinion) from the Blue Moon Café. When we got back to the silent auction level, I got to try pumpkin chocolate chip cake from Charm City Cakes! It was fantastic. Dangerously Delicious Pies had chocolate pie and a chocolatier was set up in the silent auction room. Basic summary: awesome.

I ended the night with more Joann time. Her favorite things to discuss included how happy she is in life (she’d be ready to die tomorrow with no regrets), the constant presence of God, my apparent ‘old soul’, how much she likes people, how much she likes me and we connect, and lessons learned during a long and happy life (e.g. keep your thoughts positive, as they control all; if you have aches and negativity, acknowledge then release them and move on). I had a lot of fun walking around with her, offering a helping hand where I could, learning from her carefree seize-every-moment style, and enjoying amazing food together which I would otherwise have been very unlikely to try (instead leaving it for the guests as my Joann-free teammates tended to do, having not walked up and asked about trying things as she did).

Summary of the day: Met the lieutenant governor. Filled five leaf bags with invasives and trash. Discussed NCCC with inquisitive people. Ate Charm City Cakes (i.e. famous) cake. Made a new friend. Tons of unexpected awesomeness. In case you missed it, I love this program.

Days 70 to 72

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Day 70 – Sunday April 18, 2010

I had my first full free day at the mansion today; it was fantastic. I had had other days off since we arrived in Baltimore, but we went up to the Point for one and the rest were over spring break. I’m not sure how I’d do with too many in a row, but this one was certainly quite relaxing.

My day was nice and slow-paced. I made my own muesli this morning, Australia style, by adding oats and raisins to my breakfast yogurt. I spent the morning reading about politics and writing AmeriMail. In the afternoon, I made spinach-and-black-bean enchiladas for lunch then watched The Hangover with Chris, Traci, Roy, and Outward Bound intern Sierra, who just moved into the mansion for the first three weeks of her two-month post-college-graduation internship. Afterwards, Roy, Traci, Sierra, and I went for an awesome hour-plus hike on the trails behind the mansion for personal PT, which had been bumped by the long service hours of the last two days. Traci and Roy had been out on a couple of the Leakin Park trails before so were able to direct us to such gems as a five-foot-tall statue of a squirrel in the course of our wanderings.

We returned at dinnertime then proceeded to do very little for the rest of the evening. While some people settled in to watch movies in the lounge, I got a lovely phone call from Jen and enjoyed spending over an hour catching up with her. I also checked in with multiple friends online and read the first of the happy celebratory emails congratulating the fabulous Brown Women’s Rugby team on advancing to a third straight final four with a win today.

Day 71 – Monday April 19, 2010

Today involved lots of van time and hours of Moveable Feast fun time. And our weekly team meeting. Not all that much else.

I woke up earlier than perhaps desirable for a day off, 9:05 AM, to hop in the van so Sabrina would have the requisite three people to get her to her chiropractic appointment. (Melissa is allowed to take the van alone as a TL, but she was in DC for the night.) We headed out at 9:30 and Amanda, Roy, and I were back by 10:30, but we had to leave again at 11- ‘we’ now being Traci, Chris, Amanda, Kathy, and I – to pick Sabrina up and drive over to Moveable Feast.

Due to a GPS mix-up, it took over an hour to get to Moveable Feast from the office rather than 15 minutes, but we did eventually make it. Fortunately, Tom was super-understanding and agreed to have us stay a bit late so we could still get in four full hours of ISP time. We spent our afternoon making frozen meals. I doled out ladlefuls of gravy and gloved handfuls of pasta, helped stack finished meals as they came out of the sealer, then helped lay out, stack, and bag sets of five different meals to go out to individuals. Many people associated with Moveable Feast will have groceries for 16 meals delivered for the week along with 5 pre-prepared frozen meals available for times when they’ve just gotten back from an appointment or a long day at the hospital and are too tired to cook. It’s an awesome organization.

Our return trip was happily much smoother than the trip there direction-wise. We stopped at Target on the way back for a Melissa-approved (in spite of the Vanimal being grounded) health and wellness run, during which I picked up such necessary items as face wash and Kashi cereal. We arrived at the mansion at a few minutes to 6, just in time for a team meeting. We discussed the plan for tomorrow (cleaning out garden beds at a school and canvassing), talked a bit about canvassing in general, and went over upcoming ISP opportunities and how the weekly disaster list is generated. All in all, very informative.

Day 72 – Tuesday April 20, 2010

Mmm, morning PT testing in the ballroom. What better way is there to start the day?

Much as I don’t always love rolling out of bed to start PT a full two hours before we need to leave for work, we did the non-run part of our monthly PT assessment – namely one minute each of sit-ups and push-ups – this morning and it went quite well. I upped my sit-ups from 17 to 26 (thanks, core work during circuits) and met in about 50 seconds my target of 24 push-ups (since I did 23, the top mark for my age range, last time). Our total PT for the morning was rotations, stretching, assessment, more stretching so it was a nice easy start to the day.

We had lots of time to make lunch, get into uniform, and the like before heading to the Parks & People office at 10:30. We met up with Abby and learned that we’d be spending the morning at Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School, which has the distinct honor of being the school across the street from the park in which we first learned to mulch (donuts not volcanoes!). Once at the school, we split into two groups to finish the two tasks set forth. The other group went dumpster diving in a paper-only recycling bin, removing all the cardboard and flattening it. Apparently, the bin smelled weird.

My group – Roy, Amanda, and I – worked in a small garden bed. It had been used to grow bay grass in the past, which grass was then transplanted down by the shore. As of this morning, it was completely filled with unwanted everyday grass. We used shovels to dig out the root systems then pulled out the grass so the bed can be returned to planting use. We were happy to find when we began (awesome news) that the bed was filled with a sand mixture, not dirt. This made our task much easier than it would otherwise have been since it meant that the grass, once broken up with the shovel, came right out during weeding. While Roy and I shoveled and Amanda weeded, we all shared stories about favorite teachers and crazy class times growing up. It seemed appropriate since we were right outside the school cafeteria listening to the announcements being made inside. Apparently, from one of Roy’s stories, I’m not the only one with English-questionable math teachers as a young one. Better analytic calculus than algebra, I suppose.

We headed back to the P&P office from the school and enjoyed lunch outside in the shade of trees. Roy and I (finally) called to start scheduling CAP events, which was much easier than we had thought it might be in our month-long anticipation and procrastination of said calls.

After lunch, we all labeled tools with P&P stickers and clear protective tape for a solid 15 minutes before heading over to the Herring Run Watershed Association building for afternoon fun time with Darin. We spent much of an hour putting Free Tree Distribution & Planting Days stickers on door tags then headed out into a new neighborhood for canvassing. My canvassing buddies for the day were Traci, Roy, and Chris. Traci and Roy would take one side of a street while Chris and I took the other. We focused on hanging tags, only promoting the program to people already out on their porches rather than knocking on doors. This was a good type of canvassing.

This evening, Team RIO had its first complete night together in Baltimore. Buck (aka Brandon) returned from composite! He got back around 8 tonight after a month in NOLA and a couple of days back at the Point for debrief. Lindsay and Jeff had made tacos and Amanda had baked a cake (the basic mix made fancy with chocolate chips and M&Ms which Dad sent in a recent excellent package); we enjoyed our second team dinner in our time here at the mansion. It was wonderful.

The rest of the night went by quite smoothly. We arrived home from our service day at nearly 7 PM and didn’t finish dinner until well past 9 so it was already quite late, but I still got to talk to both Jamie (YAY!) and Jordanna after Traci and I did all the dinner dishes. It was most fantastic (Kate).

Hope all is well outside the AmeriBubble!

Days 67 to 69

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Day 67 – Thursday April 15, 2010

Today proceeded as yesterday was intended to service-wise with street-tree planting in the morning and free-tree canvassing in the afternoon. Trees, trees, trees : )

We began our day with PT in the ballroom at the slightly-too-early hour of 8:30 AM. Morning PT tends to be rather tired PT for Team RIO. At 10:30, we headed out for the day, beginning in Druid Hill Park (the P&P office is located at the edge of the park and P&P has some storage areas within the park down the road from a child-sized Safety City) to dip the root systems of bare-root trees in protective gel then load them in a pickup truck bed for transport to their future homes. We had tons of fun with the gel – Traci and I ended up with it all over our forearms – and treated the fifteen trees in enjoyable style.

We headed over to the P&P storage container one lot over in the park (by way of a hole in a fence which project supervisor Charlie pointed out to us) and loaded shovels into the back of the Vanimal for our morning work. Another typical morning in Round 1: Spike of the Shovel.

Our next stop, where we’d spend the next three hours, was in the city. We planted ten street trees around the Hollins Market neighborhood from the fifteen trees we’d gelled an hour earlier. Each tree was going in an extant tree pit, so our job was simply to dig out an appropriate area in the pit, place the tree in the newly-created hole, and refill with the dug-up soil. We found out after-the-fact that we hadn’t dug any of the holes deep enough because saturating the soil with water lowered it slightly on the trunk. Fortunately, the P&P Critical Projects Crew members were able to fix the issue as they watered by adding more soil from elsewhere in the pit. A good learning experience for us.

We enjoyed lunch on the sidewalk outside the Hollins Market, where some teammates got sandwiches and such, in the shade of the big canopy which stretched from the market out to the street. The sidewalk was super-wide so we were able to settle into a nice oval and still not block foot traffic in the least.

Melissa picked us up at the end of lunch, after driving to the health clinic for about the sixth time this week to get teammates from walk-in appointments, and drove us over to the neighborhood where we had canvassed yesterday. I teamed up with Chris and Roy to continue up the same streets Sabrina, Melissa, and I had started on yesterday. We had a fantastic time. We only signed up three more people for trees but we talked to a number who are interested in calling in later (of the not many who actually answered their door between 3:30 and 6:30 on a Thursday). We also talked about living in cities (Roy) vs. college towns (me) vs. rural country (Chris), discussed what we might want to do with our futures (Chris is thinking firefighting, Roy acting), and our individual knocking-on-doors style (ranging from Chris’ three-tap police knock to Roy’s nine gentle taps). Since very few people actually answered their doors, we were able to carry on a two-hour conversation with ease. Good times. Canvassing is much more fun that way.

We returned to the mansion shortly after seven hungry after a long day. Melissa awesomely made all interested parties delicious vegetarian chili for dinner, some leftovers of which I was able to claim for lunch tomorrow. I also enjoyed an amazing card from Jen including the best necklace ever. It only took us seven years. We got our weekly FedEx with last and this weeks’ issues of Get to the Point, both of which mentioned my ISP finish. Kinda crazy.

All is good here in BMore! Looking forward to an intense 12.5-hour day tomorrow.

Day 68 – Friday April 16, 2010

Intense 12.5-hour day officially survived : ) And fun.

We rolled out of Eagle Drive at 8 this morning headed for the Cylburn Arboretum. We spent our morning supervising 100 students from Boys’ Latin – all boys in 5^th, 8^th, and 11^th or 12^th grade – as they dug holes for deer-fence posts to be installed. The challenge: 10 of us, 100 of them, around 20 tools total. Digging sticks (long metal rods with a flathead-screwdriver-like end useful for breaking up rocks) and post-hole diggers (giant pliers-like contraptions used for extracting dirt from an 8-inch-wide hole in the ground) were the only tools necessary for our task this morning. When we showed up at Cylburn, our supervisor for the day, Fred, explained, entirely unconcernedly, that we had some of each tool ready to go. We went to check them out and found 9 digging sticks and 13 post-hole diggers. Yes, some.

We decided to flexibly face the challenge by each taking one group of schoolboys, one digging stick, and one post-hole digger. I ended up with 14 in my group – some had as few as 5 due to the way the supervisors distributed them – and two teacher chaperones. We headed down the path and had a good two hours of work. Mostly, my five fifth-graders were incredibly enthusiastic about the project and all stood crowded around the hole at all times while the eighth-graders acted too cool for it and the upper-schoolers talked about lacrosse (apparently the sport of note at Boys’ Latin) and prom, occasionally stepping in to offer strength and force in applying the digging stick to break rocks. My primary roles as supervisor were to ensure that everyone did take a few turns at the action and those working and watching did so safely. Our work site was the beautiful woods of Cylburn and the boys reminded me somewhat of my swimmers so it was an enjoyable morning.

We returned to the post holes without our supervisees after lunch for half an hour of work before we left Cylburn for the day. We were able to work on four holes at once with nobody standing around tool-less, which was a wonderful change in efficiency from the earlier project. It’s great to engage school kids in service projects, especially environmental ones which involve a morning in the woods, but it’s tough to get them out there then not be able to keep everyone occupied with the project. It was nice to get our hands on the tools and see everyone able to work at once after that. I get so used to the AmeriCorps get-things-done way of life that I now more fully appreciate everyone being able to have something to do. Sitting and observing is nice, but action is nicer.

In the afternoon, we headed over to a church about ten minutes from Cylburn. The church was the host site for UrbAgGala, the Urban Agriculture Gala, an event held tonight to raise awareness about community gardening and greening in Baltimore and to serve as a celebratory and gathering space for community gardening and other urban agriculture groups. I got to spend the entire afternoon preparing awesome produce donations for the big free meal (donations strongly suggested) being offered this evening. I helped mix oil and fresh spices into big trays of root vegetables pre-roasting, peeled carrots, and chopped spring onions. In the non-produce sector, I also helped arrange cookies in baskets, set up chairs, and roll golf-ball sized, football-shaped meatballs. My highlight of the afternoon was learning from Sabrina how to mince with a knife then successfully mincing lots of lemon zest. Yay, awesome new skills!

We finished our service day at 7, the time the gala began. We stayed until 8:30 as a service learning opportunity. The idea of service learning is to attend events, go places, watch movies… anything really that connects to our project or round, then reflect on those experiences later in the context of our service and this round. UrbAgGala was a great event for service learning because we got to hear from lots of people passionate about urban agriculture speaking, singing, or even storytelling to encourage and celebrate a greener way of life here in Baltimore. We also got to eat amazingly delicious food which we’d helped prepare off compostable plates with compostable forks. They didn’t even have a trash bin out in the food room of the event, only recycling and compost. It was just that awesome.

We got home late (around 9), tired but happy. We get to sleep in a little bit tomorrow since Abby pushed our start time back to 9:30 from the originally-planned 8:30. Tomorrow is EcoFest, which should be another wonderful event.

Signing off from Baltimore – stay green!

Day 69 – Saturday April 17, 2010

EcoFest! Yay!

I had an awesome time helping out at EcoFest all day. We supervised the event’s compost bins (fun fact: wax paper and paper plates/bowls/cups are all compostable), I spent two hours watching children play with water, logs, cups, and paintbrushes (technically supervising, I suppose, but more hanging out with imaginative 3-year-olds), and we got our first free t-shirts! Oh, we mulched too.

Our first stop of the work day was at a wood salvage yard, where piles upon piles of logs and sticks of all sizes filled the area outside of a squat cement Baltimore Gas & Electric building. Our job was to sort through the logs to find some which would make good additions to a natural play space for children, ones which they might stand on or find some other use for in creative play. Accompanied by Mary from Parks & People and a chainsaw-wielding volunteer named Kenny, we quickly tracked down a number of suitable logs and loaded them into the back of a P&P truck. Among my contributions were two potential magic staffs and one half-log which would make an excellent surfboard in a natural play space.

While Lindsay, Sabrina, and Jeff went with Mary and Kenny to unload the logs and reload the truck with bamboo for a play space teepee, the rest of us spent half an hour trying to track down Chris’ phone (Chris, Amanda, and Melissa) which he thought had fallen from his belt while he scouted logs, setting off miniature fireworks (Kathy, Traci, and I), or sitting in the van (Roy). Chris later found, upon our return to the mansion this evening, that he had left his phone here today. He had 28 missed calls from Melissa.

We headed over to Druid Hill Park, the park through which we cross almost daily on our way to the P&P office, and settled in for an afternoon of EcoFest by Druid Hill Lake. My first task was helping at the composting station, making sure people knew what could be composted and raising awareness about composting and recycling. Jeff and I had a chill time hanging out there for the first hour of the event, which ran from noon to near six, and I had a great conversation with Peter, one of the co-founders of Waste Neutral, the company which ran the composting station. We enjoyed free Chipotle food for lunch, a major perk of being an EcoFest volunteer.

I took a break, as we had been encouraged to do, to wander through the rest of the 30-ish tents and tables set up on the path. I collected free literature about lots of cool programs and acquired both coloring books and a radon test kit as give-aways. I love environmental festivals. My wandering, however, was interrupted when I was just over halfway through the tables; it was time to mulch. Somehow, even though we’d been told to do our tasks for a few hours and wander some helping where possible, there was mulch. A big pile of mulch arrived and we were asked to spread it around the trees in the field behind the EcoFest tables. I thus got to spend 45 minutes of my festival afternoon with a pitchfork, a wheelbarrow, and lots of mulch. Mulch, you’ll always find us. We understand.

I took a break from mulching to return to the compost truck then soon transitioned to the children’s play space. This was an area stocked with a tire swing, a Traci-assembled bamboo teepee, a rope, and lots of logs and cuts of wood to play on and around as kids saw fit. The idea was to provide parents insight into the possibilities for creating a natural playground for their kids rather than spending lots of money on some fancy metal-and-plastic play structure. This totally resonated with me as I watched the kids play. While the tire swing was an obvious crowd-pleaser, the rope also found its followers. Some used it as a jumprope; one boy dragged it around for about twenty minutes proclaiming himself a cowboy. I stationed myself at the water chutes, where two hollow logs were propped up to drain into metal bins half-filled with water. Small children painted water onto the logs with paintbrushes, poured water in them with plastic cups, made soup in the bins with clovers and grass, cleaned out the inside of the logs with sticks and water, made wood-and-clover pizza using the log as an oven, used water from one cup to knock down three more full cups as it rushed down the log, and much more. I loved watching their creativity and imagination in action.

The difference in approach among age groups was especially striking to me. Older kids, beginning around age six or so, would come up and ask me what they were meant to do with the water chutes then try a couple of things before wandering off again. Their expectation, it seemed, was that they would be told how to play, given a direction for productive action. Younger kids, on the other hand, engaged freely in uninhibited play. They might begin by pouring water down the log, but quickly progressed into a million other activities. We tend to provide kids with play structures that we think would be fun for them; they are, but so too are logs and water and simple mud pies. Their imaginations will make the rest. It’s fantastic to watch a small child create a universe out of a log and a paintbrush.

We began breaking down the play space when the day cooled after five (we had planned to leave at 5 but they were in desperate need of volunteers for event break-down) and managed to wrangle ten free volunteer t-shirts before we headed out at six. They had been concerned there wouldn’t be enough, but fortunately there were. Free t-shirts from ISPs and volunteer days are a huge part of the NTrip experience and we were psyched to begin our collection.

The evening was your typical excellent Saturday night. The Vanimal is grounded (i.e. unable to be taken out for social purposes) due to a recent incident involving its rear bumper and a guardrail, but friends from Wolf Five obligingly picked up Traci, Roy, and I for yet another wonderful dessert social at the Paper Moon Diner. Once again, I laughed so hard I teared up. There’s just something about that place.