I saw a washed-up shark AND jellyfish today!

Alright I promised. Hello there again! Sorry it’s been so long. I feel generally caught up with most of you to a point where I want to be, so good job staying in touch.

So. I find myself in the unfortunate-looking beach town of Freeport, Texas, where I will be residing for the next nine weeks. My home is now an entire Boys and Girls Club building, where from the hours of 7:30am to 6pm I have to make believe I did not, in fact, sleep next to that floor-to-ceiling shelf of Legos in the corner of the little people playroom. My bedroom is wherever I decide to set up my cot for the night, and is also the gymnasium. If I want. I can actually sleep wherever the heck I want in the building because guess what, I literally live at work. I’ll keep you posted about how things are going on the job, but let me tell you I’m pretty sure I’ll be more stoked to talk about the BEACH that’s a FIVE MINUTE DRIVE FROM HERE! Maybe it’s the summer daze laze, maybe it’s the fourth round (aka fourth quarter, fourth year, etc) instinct in knowing that I’ve finished all my extra AmeriCorps stuff, maybe it’s the FRICKEN BEACH ITSELF, but I’m really feeling the pull of relaxation this round. So...get excited.

Want to know how I got from filing taxes in north Texas to here? What the heck I’ve been up to the last two months? Well sure I’d love to inform you! In the last few weeks of Round Two in Texas, our team was given a list of projects that were coming up for Round Three. Unlike the other three rounds, third round on the Denver campus is a shuffle round, so we individual Corps Members get to choose which project we specifically want and then get put on a team of new Corps Members from our unit who wanted the project too. It’s about the most insightful concept I’ve seen AmeriCorps NCCC throw at me yet. Regardless of your personal opinions of the people you get put on a team with, you’re at least guaranteed a group of twelve people who actually WANT to be where you are, a notion that I’ve come to appreciate the implications of more and more when it comes to group dynamics. Anyway, two of the five projects offered for Round Three were in New Orleans, and I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted one of those. My gravitation toward Nola had continued to grow throughout Round Two and I hoped that getting back to that tragic old gal of a city for Round Three would head me in the right direction for getting a job there when this is over. (Spoiler alert: I was right.)

So I left Burkburnett, Texas knowing that, 1: Next round I’d be off to New Orleans again to work for the New Orleans Are Habitat for Humanity...again, and 2: I would greatly appreciate it if I never had to live in north Texas again.

Transition week happened, that highly-intense, overly dramatic stretch of days where you suddenly find yourself passive-aggressively arguing with friends from other teams that your team is the best, or if not the best then at least better than theirs; where you sit through agonizingly long meetings that only with a good book of Sudokus in your hand can you see to the end; where you probably drink a lit-tle more than usual but who cares, you’re rekindling with friends from other teams; etc., etc., etc. So that standard rite of passage happened. Then it was back to beautiful Nawlins with my fresh new team and fresh new team leader, Sarah!

For your sake I’ll just give an overview of the eight-week spike back in New Orleans, even though the entire experience deserves its own blog:

1. As opposed to Round One, where all 12 of us stayed together on one work site the entire time, this round we split up every week to a different work site almost each time.

2. Also as opposed to Round One, we lived in an actual Habitat for Humanity house. (Woohoo!) Yes, twelve people, one bathroom. But whatever we liked it.

3. Our house was wayyyyyyyyyyy...out in St. Bernard Parish, which led to a ridiculous commute but inevitably a new perspective to New Orleans, since the community we lived in was not the community we were speciifically serving.

4. After four weeks of work, violence hit an all-time high in New Orleans and AmeriCorps NCCC headquarters shut down our projects for a week, deeming our work sites too unsafe to work at. An entire week. With far less than a day’s notice we had to pack up our belongings and move out of the Habitat house (because guess what, there would no longer be a Habitat project if “they don’t shape up” and move around our work sites to safer locations) to a communal camp with all the other NCCC teams down there at the time. The move equated to ten minutes away from our original house. Ten minutes. Seriously, politics. Anyway it was sort of fun because not only were we reunited with some other Denver teams, we also got to make friends with Corps Members from other campuses in Maryland and Mississippi. So despite the frustration of feeling as though we were letting down our sponsor, it ended up being an okay deal. When it came time for a team vote on whether or not we should move back to the house, the proximity to downtown swayed our votes to actually stay put right there at good ol’ Camp Hope. (RIP...we just heard it shut down last week.)

5. BUT no less than a day after we returned to work with Habitat (where nothing had actually changed at all...surprising...), my purse got stolen off a work site. I wrote an email to a friend about it last week, and I know this seems lazy but it was the first time I actually put it into typed words and I’m just going to paste the email here. It explains my attitude the best:

A huge first happened to me a month ago...my purse got stolen. Right off my worksite. The very same kids whose neighborhood I'm trying to improve were bored and decided to make their day more interesting by seeing if they could sneak under a house that had...no exaggeration...40 volunteers busily going about their business. It was nuts! The biggest blow was my first child, that big black camera that I LOVE and bring everywhere to document what my life in AmeriCorps is like. I was so worked up about losing that that it didn't occur to me till 30 minutes later that my iPod touch was in there too. Ugh. Ironic that literally the two nicest things I own are the things I use most frequently and thus keep in my purse. Damn. I also had my cashless wallet in there so not only did the kids wind up empty-handed in that department, but they opened up a massive process of replacing my stolen cards and IDs. It's the weirdest feeling to walk around with nothing proving that you are who you say you are. And they didn't care that I still kept my first bus pass from Sweden in there. Or my Coe ID. Or memorabilia from other places I've been. Ugh it was just shitty. It definitely challenged my worldview, but I was pleased when I discovered that even in such a vulnerable position my heart still went out to those kids. They couldn't have been any older than 12...not young enough to be excused for their actions but not old enough to be labeled as bad apples. They're just kids. They're bored. And their community has taught them that regardless of what they WANT to do with their lives, they're just going to end up like the other Ninth Warders and never leave and eventually make a living in the streets just like all the other generations before them. So why not get some practice with breaking the rules? They have nothing better to do anyway. After school programs are laughably nonexistent in New Orleans, their probably single parent (most likely mother) has to work her ass off just to make ends meet, and the older boys who inevitably become their idols are doing far worse than purse stealing. So even though I'm obviously upset to some extent at these three boys, I'm more passionately emotional about how failed they've been by their community.

6. Coincidently, this experience also helped solidify my need to spend another year in New Orleans. (For revenge, ha ha!...just kidding) It’s such a tragic city, and I absolutely love it for that exact reason. I began the interview process to work with a different AmeriCorps branch called State and National while I was down there...one position I have in mind is with the same Habitat affiliate I’ve been working with throughout AmeriCorps. It’s nice that they already know me and are familiar with my capabilities, ya dee ya dee yada. There are other opportunities for State and National in New Orleans that I’m looking into also. But consider this my public service announcement that I’m moving to New Orleans for a year, woohoo!

7. I went to Jazzfest while I was there, which is arguably the second biggest event the city puts on after Mardi Gras, and saw Drake, Simon and Garfunkel, and a bunch of local New Orleans bands for an entire day! With Jayson Schmelzer as a special guest! What a blast!

8. And finally I really really disgustingly fell in love with my shuffle team. They gave me a lot to live up to for this fourth and final round with the original Sun Three.

And...now I’m here. In the Gulf of Mexico. I’m already sunburned from laying out on the beach for too long today. It’s going to be a great round.

More later!
kt

SLACKER

Okay. So...I realize I have A LOT to catch readers up on. Sorry. I'm not going to post quite yet, but this is a disclaimer that there WILL BE POSTS TO COME SHORTLY!!!! Okay talk to you soon :)