Beginning of Round 2

Yesterday Blue 3 arrived in Green River, Utah after a day and a half of travel. Upon arrival in town a few cars driven by the people at Positive Action Community Team(PACT) surrounded our van and escorted us to the Boys and Girls Club while waving American flags out their windows. It was quite the welcome, and I feel like our presence is much more significant in this community than it was in Los Angeles. We met with the people working here (including several Americorps VISTA members and a former NCCC Corps Member from the Sacramento campus) and were told it was about time to pick up the kids from school. We walked a handful of elementary school students from their school to the Boys and Girls club and played with them until five, when Karate lessons started. At that point we were fed dinner and then sent over to a community hall meeting. It was really interesting to see the local politics in effect and to see the mayor and the council dealing entirely with tangible issues, rather than the vague promises and ideologies that seem to be more prevalent in larger governing bodies. After the town hall meeting we were finally given access to our housing, which is a really small two bedroom apartment, roughly the size of the apartment I had to myself back at RIT. Once we set up the place I crashed pretty much instantly.

Today, after our usual 6A.M. PT, we started a full day of work, which entailed us working at the Baxter Building, a run down building that they're trying to renovate into another office. I spent the majority of the day shoveling discarded parts of a layered tar roof that they'd recently pulled off into a dumpster. I was frequently up past my ankles in mud and was really grateful for all my personal protective equipment, as I got hit in the face with wood and found a roofing tack in my shoe while working. The wood was actually my fault, I threw a plank into the wood pile in such a way that it hit another one, causing it to come flying back at me. I don't think I've ever met such a vengeful pile of sticks before. After lunch half of the team left to work at the Boys and Girls club, but I stayed at the Baxter building to do more physical labor. After work we made dinner, finished setting up the apartment, and I'm currently writing this from inside the Boys and Girls club (we have unlimited access to this space too).

My first impression of the town is that it's a struggling, very tiny community. I think they don't really have the population to sustain a lot of business, so as a result a significant part of the community is unemployed. This further adds to the problem, because the town looks rather run down due to all the empty buildings, which probably further repels potential businesses. They do get by on what they have, which is commendable, but I definitely see why we're here. I feel like any work we put into this town will benefit everyone, which is very different from our first project. The town subsists primarily on agriculture and tourism, so they're subject to a lot of external factors as well.

Other random thoughts about our living: It's currently extremely muddy all through town; I doubt I'll be wearing my normal sneakers anywhere while I'm here. Food is really expensive here, so we'll have to be extra careful with our budget (we accidentally went way over today while grocery shopping). Having access to the Boys and Girls club is wonderful, because it gives us space to go away from the rest of the team in that very small apartment. The stars at night are amazing; I haven't seen them this clearly since I was in Maine. It isn't nearly as cold here as I thought it'd be, it feels pretty much just like being back home (not that home isn't cold, I was just preparing for worse). The people we're working with are awesome, they all seem really knowledgeable, funny, and mellow. I'm not ready to say that I'll like being here quite yet, but for now it seems livable and like our work will be appreciated, so I think it'll be rewarding in the end.

Transition

I'm currently sitting in a hotel room with Steve, Mike, and Scott, somewhere in the border between Nevada and Utah. Regulation keeps us from driving more than ten hours or 550 miles a day, otherwise I'm sure we'd be in Green River by now. I'm really excited to get there and see what the community is like, and it'll be nice to start working again.

The past week we'd been on base for transition, preparing our debriefing for our last project and briefing for this project, along with miscellaneous meetings and projects. It was really weird to be back on base around all the other Blue and Green unit teams (all of Gold and most of Silver are still somewhere in the Gulf Coast). I frequently still hung out with Blue 3, but also had ample opportunity to wander off and reconnect with people that I hadn't seen since training, which was nice. In some ways it made me really appreciate my team, but I've also been wondering what life would be like if even one of us was replaced by someone else. It's interesting to think that replacing even one of us would completely change our team dynamics. While back at base we spent one day working for the Sacramento food bank (I don't remember the exact name), and sorted over 2400 apples and oranges, not including the bin full of rotten ones we had to throw out. Aside from that we didn't do much aside from meetings while on base.

However, I did get a really exciting offer for life after Americorps. I've been in contact with researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory about collaborating on prosthetics research once I get into grad school. They mentioned that they're planning some very exciting research soon, and that they'd like to have an engineering at University of Rochester working with the lab that generates most of their primate data. Based on that, I'm probably going to discount Purdue and UPitt from my list of schools, since they were ranked equally with U of R before and U of R has a pretty much guaranteed research opportunity waiting for me. I'm going to visit them the end of this month, and I'll be able to say more about the position after I get a chance to talk with the researchers there.

In retrospect, I do really miss working in Los Angeles, even though I wasn't a huge fan of the city. I really grew fond of the students I worked with there, and even though I know that another team is going to be replacing us at Dorsey I still worry about how they're doing without us there. I'm not sure how I feel about meeting a whole new group of kids in Green River, knowing that I'm going to be leaving them in two months as well. However, this group should be about a polar opposite of who we were working with before, so it should still be interesting. Also, it sounds like our site coordinator is very big on using individual talents, so I might be able to put some of my more practical engineering skills to use. Green River is apparently best known for its melon crops, so I'm thinking I'd like to try and obtain the supplies to teach the kids how to assemble a melon launching catapult. Model rockets and egg protecting devices might be fun activities too. Mike keeps making jokes about how bad of an idea all this stuff is, but hey, engineering should be fun, shouldn't it? I can't wait to see what it's like out there.

As a final note, the snow and cold, crisp, clean air are very refreshing out here. I was starting to miss having real seasons.