PICTURES!

So, pictures! This is where we lived. The mural was painted by a previous NCCC team who actually built the partition. On the left is the guys' side and on the right is our side. There were eight of us living in bunks that look like...this!

This is a picture of four out of six of the awesome interns from the University of Cincinnatti who work at the Fuller Center. They are, left to right, Gabe, Jackie, Caroline and John. Troy Maria are the other two who didn't come to Baton Rouge with us.

The next one down is of my team in Baton Rouge for the Mardi Gras ball. We are, left to right: me, Jess, Kelly, Beth, Ashley, Michelle, Mary and Nicole. In front are Paul and Ben. Missing is Abe, who didn't come with us that weekend.

Well, I hope to post more soon, once I get back to Denver, but this is a small visual aid to accompany my descriptions. I'll try to get some pictures up of some of the work we've done too!

This is from about three weeks ago! I forgot I'd written it, but it provides a glimpse into the part of our lives here that I haven't talked about at all yet.

"It's Friday evening in Orange. Kelly, Michelle, Jess, Mary, Ben and I are hanging out at the church, waiting for our frozen pizza to be ready for dinner. Beth, Abe, Nicole and Buts (Paul) just walked out the door on the way to a movie. This weekend is Mardi Gras (well, really next Tuesday is Mardi Gras, but for our purposes, Saturday night will have to do) and a lot of us are going to New Orleans for the occasion. We've taken weekend trips a lot while we've been here, once to Baton Rouge for a Mardi Gras ball put on by a group at LSU, last weekend to Galveston for multiple people's birthdays, and then this weekend to New Orleans. It's been great to be so close to so many interesting places, and also nice to have such a relaxing home base to hang out in too. After being in Arkansas with only ourselves to hang out with, and with only Mena, in all its splendor, to "get away" to, living on the Gulf Coast has been absolutely awesome! Beaumont is our nearest city, with a population of about 114,000. It has a mall (*gasp*) and tons of smaller shopping centers, as well as a really nice main street, Crockett Street, which has been modeled after Bourbon St. as a pedestrian-friendly place to hang out. We ended up going there to watch the Superbowl (Go Saints!) last Sunday.

On Wednesday night, about 30 high schoolers arrived to volunteer at the Fuller Center. It's been pretty quiet for the last two weeks, so it was quite shocking to walk into breakfast this morning and find myself in the midst of a giant crowd of people all vying for a place at the sandwich table. Now that we've been here for five weeks, I feel like the Fuller Center has started to become our territory a little bit. Therefore, when it's inundated with new-comers, I start to feel a little protective. But really, they're all great workers and really positive about being here. More volunteers are always a good thing!

Every evening at the end of dinner, it's a Fuller Center tradition to do "shout-outs". If you've noticed something particularly impressive that someone did that day, this is the time to share it. Last night the high school group was so into it! It was great to see them being so vocal about their appreciation for each other and everyone they worked with.

For the past two weeks, my team has been digging a drainage ditch in the back yard of a house right on the bayou. It needs to be graded just right, so that a pipe can be laid in it and the water will drain into the bayou and away from the house. At first it was a lot of really hard digging just to get it to its minimum depth, but for the past week, it's been mostly measuring and then shaving off slight amounts to make it exactly perfect. We use this thing called a transit to sight the exact depth in various places. It's basically a magnifying glass that can be made perfectly level in order to sight the height of something relative to another point. It really just allows you to see a measuring tape from a fixed point, far away, but I feel pretty awesome and professional when I use it."

So, we're nearly done with the trench now. It's almost all filled in and drains very well. A lot of the houses we've been working on have come really far since we got here, and it's really gratifying to see the progress that's been made. I'll put up pictures next post, I promise!

NOTE: I thought this blog would be an easy way to record my impressions of this year, but it's actually proven to be quite hard to keep up with! I'm sorry for the disjointed nature of my posts, and I'll really try to post more often so I can put more thought into what I'm writing. This has been an absolutely wonderful experience so far and I cannot believe it's almost half over! Next round (shuffle round) I'll be heading to Lafayette with Terrence as my team leader and four other people from my permanent team, as well as four new people from other Water teams. We'll be working with Habitat for Humanity on some new builds as well as finishing some projects that Water 2, who had the project this round, were working on. I'm really looking forward to experiencing the Gulf in full blown spring, and really excited about still being able to eat things like poboys and gumbo and crawfish and yummm...

We're leaving Orange on Thursday, and I'm really excited to be going back to Denver to see people and hear about everyone's projects and see the mountains and hopefully hang out in the city a little.

Keep an eye out for the pictures...they're really coming soon!

Also, address in Orange is:

3810 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr.
Orange, TX
77632

We're only here for another month, so any mail sent after about 2.5 weeks from now probably won't get to me. Maybe Denver is a better bet...

Ok, so I know this is not really sufficient to make up for an entire month-and-a-half without an entry, but I think I just need to give you the facts. More interesting things will come later (like pictures- oh my!) but for now bullet points will have to suffice. Needless to say, we don't have a ton of free time around here!

So, the facts:

My team has been stationed in Orange, TX since January 11th, where we have been working with the Fuller Center Disaster Rebuilders, an organization similar to Habitat for Humanity. The organization works with people whose homes have been damaged by Hurricane Ike and helps them to rebuild, with either financial or manual help from the homeowners themselves.

- We live on a stage in a gym, behind plywood walls, sleeping on bunks made out of 2x4's and plywood.

- Our first week here, there were 95 volunteers, most of whom were living at the church with us, sleeping on the gym floor right outside our room. It was a little nuts, but fun to work with everyone.

- Our site supervisor's name is Eddie Sherman. He's a construction worker from the Jersey Shore who decided to leave his work up there and come work for the Fuller Center. Since he started with FCDR, he's definitely had to give up working directly in construction, since he's basically the supervisor for all 20 or so houses the Fuller Center working on at any given time. He spends each day driving around between all the houses, checking up on the homeowners and the volunteers working there. I'm not absolutely sure how he manages to keep track of everything and at the same time remain so entirely invested in each project.

- There are six interns from the University of Cincinnati who will be here until March 20th or so. They're all either Architecture or Urban Planning students and it's been great hanging out with them. We're really in an awesome situation here, after having been sequestered in our trailers for a solid month last round with only each other for company (not that my team isn't great).

- Our team has worked on about 15 different houses. I wish I could tell you about all of them, but there have been so many and there is so much to say about each of them that I'm not sure you'd want to read anything of that length. Every homeowner has been incredibly welcoming to us (I think I've eaten more donuts here than in the last 5 years of my life!) and extremely helpful with every aspect of the work we do. It's been wonderful and moving to hear stories of the hurricane from these people and makes our work mean so much more.

- The weather here is beautiful, though sometimes rainy. It was in the mid-70's until about 2 weeks ago, and gorgeously sunny and not-dry. I love it here!

Well, I'll really try to post some pictures soon, and more details on some of the houses we've been working on. Thanks for reading!