How Could I Have Forgotten?!

Oh my goodness. I typed out that whole last entry and forgot one of the most important things that happened. How did I do that?!

Christina had the conference call with the other team leaders to figure out the teams for next round on Thursday morning, but they couldn’t tell us until Friday evening at 6. Christina said it was so the team leaders could have a day just to think it over and make sure they had the right teams. So…what project did I get? Big Bend National Park! Yep, I’ll be camping for two months in the Texas desert working on trails. Also, there is some kind of nine-day project that is even more in the wilderness than the campsite where we will normally live, so we’ll go make a campsite there and carry our stuff on mules. I’m not kidding. I think it seems like a pretty good team also. Lindsey is the only other person from my current team who will be there, but the other people seem cool. So I’m definitely still intimidated, but getting excited also. When else in my life would I ever have a chance to do something like this?

And now getting back to the present. We had an ISP scheduled for Monday the 22nd at Audubon Zoo. Christina had told us that she had to really fight the other team leaders to get us one of our top few choices because apparently my team is the lowest in the unit for ISP hours. Christina said she had a hard time getting a few of us (especially Lindsey and I) one of our top few choices for the next project because we were so low. Before Monday, I had 42 of the required 80 hours, and I think Lindsey had 40. Christina has told Lindsey and I multiple times that we really need to get our ISP hours up as much as possible before we leave for Big Bend. If it’s 100 miles to the nearest grocery store, there will be pretty much no way to get any ISP while we’re there. Luckily, we had 7 hours of ISP at the zoo scheduled for Monday working with the horticulture department. We arrived at the zoo a bit late after an epic journey that our GPS took us on. We’re using Dani’s personal GPS because Jane, my team’s British-accented government issued one, got stolen when our van got broken into last month. Imposter Jane, Dani’s American-accented one, is not very reliable. She tried to take us across a ferry to get to the zoo. We were first sent across the street to Audubon Park to rake some rocks into the lake. This did not make for a very promising day. We all really wanted to work in the actual zoo. Luckily we were only in the park for about half an hour then sent back to the zoo. We worked mainly on Monkey Hill, which is indeed a hill, but with no monkeys in sight. There were some plants along a stream that needed mulch and some palm trees that needed trimming. While Christine, one of the workers, cut off surprisingly large and heavy palm fronds, Jess, Rob, Heather, and I loaded them into a truck. TK and Lindsey spread the mulch. When we filled the truck we rode over to the elephant area to dump the palms. Apparently elephants eat palm trees. Sadly, we just unloaded them outside of the cage and didn’t get to go into where the elephants are. Much of the day was actually just spent riding with Christine and Brandi, the workers we were assigned to, in golf carts and trucks back and forth across the zoo. The zoo is closed on Mondays, which is why we were able to volunteer that day, so it was kind of like having the zoo to ourselves. We got to see a lot of animals while working and also had a super long lunch (11:45-1:00) where we got to wander around a little and throw a Frisbee around. After lunch, we just continued the same work, except for Heather and Lindsey who got to cut and kill elderberry plants with some pink poison. It was pretty much the best ISP ever.

On Tuesday the 23rd, I was sent to Painters Street to work with Brian. That’s the house where we worked with those really intense guys who used to work for Habitat last week. Brian had requested someone to just work the saw all day, which is exactly what I did. There was a group of volunteers from a college in Michigan as well as a slightly elderly couple from San Francisco. The woman from the couple, Midge, was assigned to be my helper. Like many volunteers who just get assigned to be helpers, she was not terribly helpful, but very nice and fun to talk to. Since the floor had been done by the intense guys, the Michigan group started putting together wall frames. The day wasn’t very exciting. I just cut stuff and talked to Midge all day. And it is Wednesday March 3 right now as I’m writing, so it’s getting hard to remember details from last week.

On Wednesday, Tomm was at Painters with me because Brian is like his favorite person. Tomm got put on the saw all day while I got put in charge of volunteers. Brian even let me wear his extra tool belt, which is much more comfortable than the nail pouches that Habitat volunteers wear. It also helped me look important and made the volunteers ask me lots of questions. Thursday and Friday were also pretty much the same I think. Tomm and I being at Painters with Brian and the rest of the team split up putting up chain link fences and laying down sod at houses that are almost done.

On Saturday, Christina had said that Tomm and I would be at Painters again. All week, she would drop us off there first because she had to get his keys to unlock wherever else people were working. When we got there, I guess she got a phone call or something, but she told me that I had been requested by Pete, the Habitat guy we only worked with for an afternoon, who we all dislike. Apparently he needed someone to lead a whole bunch of volunteers he was getting that day. (I figured out that Christina was stretching the truth a bit about him requesting me. I remembered that he never asked any of us our names that day we worked with him, so there’s no way he could have requested me. Christina just chose me for this little project.) So she dropped me off by myself at Pete’s worksite. He and Brittney, his AmeriCorps Direct assistant, did indeed have a lot of volunteers that day. When he was first making announcements to them, he said he needed 15 people to go with me to another site. At least 20 people ended up coming with me, and they were all med students from LSU. Can you say intimidating? We went a few blocks away to a house that had been finished and the family moved in a week ago. There was an ENORMOUS pile of sand that had been dropped off there that needed to be spread out under the house to level it out. (Habitat houses in New Orleans are all built on 3-foot pillars, remember?) It was as high as my shoulder with a diameter about as wide as I am tall. There was a day a few weeks ago when we were at the house on Music Street that had a pile of sand that we had to spread out over the yard. There were only like 7 people from my team there, and this pile seemed infinite. It took us all morning to spread. The pile at this house with the med students was easily three times as large as the infinite pile on Music. We had two wheelbarrows with broken and flat wheels, about 25 people, and lots of shovels. It really wasn’t that bad. The family that had moved in (a mother with two sons and a daughter) was there working with us and I got to talk to the mother a lot. She was SO EXCITED to live there. Like most Habitat families, this is her first time owning a house. She loves the house, the location, and the neighbors. It was really nice to talk to her because I think a big part of the fun of working with Habitat is getting to meet the homeowners, which I haven’t been able to do with any of the houses we’ve worked on in New Orleans so far. Anyway, the med students leveled out the ground under the house really quickly, and we still had about two thirds of the pile left. I had to start making up where else the sand should go. Luckily, Pete came to check up on us part way through the morning and said that I was doing exactly the right thing. I also had to make up answers to the many many questions the med students asked. Why do they need sand under the house? How does this improve the house? Why is there so much sand? Why do they use sand instead of dirt? It was ridiculous. Apparently, I’m pretty good at making things up. Somehow, this gigantic pile of sand was all dispersed by lunch time. I send the med students to lunch with instructions to go back to Pete’s worksite afterward, not back to this house. While I had been talking to the homeowner, she kept saying that I should come inside and see the house, and I took her up on it. It was the same layout as the house on Mandolin we worked on with Dan and Forrest when we first got here and it was really nice to be able to see what it looks like finished. The last time I saw the Mandolin house, the interior still just had wall frames. It’s had to visualize a house when you can still see through the walls. The homeowner was so happy to show me around and tell me about her plans for where to put furniture and everything. It was pretty nice. Then the family had to go run errands during lunch and I had to wait by myself on their front steps kid-who-got-left-at-school style for Christina to pick me up.

That Saturday was also Lindsey’s 21st birthday. She had been wanting to go to a nature preserve nearby, so Christina arranged for us to take the afternoon off from work to go (if you call it service learning, we still get work hours for it). It was really cool. We walked a trail through swampy areas on a tour guided by a ranger. We even got to see two smallish alligators. Really all we could see was the tops of their heads poking out of the water, but it was still exciting. And it was a beautiful day, so it was really a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

It is currently Sunday, March 3rd as I write this, so details now are getting really fuzzy. I think Sunday Feb. 28 was spent just being lazy. I think some of us went to the YMCA like we usually did on Sundays, but that was about it.

Last Monday, March 1st, was another ISP at the zoo. It was the same group as last time, with the addition of Tomm. This time we worked outside of the Tea Room, which the zoo employees said is a place where people like to have various conferences and things. There were several plants and bushes outside that had just died in the cold weather New Orleans had been having lately. We had to dig up roots for a while then help plant a few new trees. I got to use a leaf blower, which is oddly satisfying. We got so much dirt and leaves on the nice brick patio, but then it all just blew away so easily. Also, since we were so far from the employee area, we got to use the public restrooms which proved rather entertaining. Inside each stall was a poster thing that had facts about various animals’ bowel movements. Seriously. We learned all sorts of poop facts. We decided that each project round, we should endeavor to create new national policy and learn some kind of poop fact. (Background on that: Apparently the higher-ups didn’t like that we had any sort of participation of the elk hunting at Cal-Wood while in uniform. Christina said that something about it was going to be added to the next NCCC handbook. Also, one day at Cal-Wood, we were going along a trail with Angie for her to tell us what all needed to be done that day. There was a lot of animal scat on the trail, and she used the opportunity to teach us how to tell the difference between deer poop and elk poop. Thus, national policy and poop fact of Round 1. For this round, obviously Christina told Vaughn about the gunfire that took place near our worksite that one day, and some kind of policy is going to be created about that. And after last Monday, we also have all kinds of new poop facts. Ridiculous.) It ended up being a short day. The only thing we did after lunch was go into a little space in the employee area where banana trees had been growing. There were a lot of rotting branches or something, so the employees cut down the icky branches and we loaded them into a truck. They let us go after that because it looked like it was going to start pouring any minute and they didn’t want us to get started on another project.

I am now going to end this post and start a new one. I feel like no one (except my parents, of course) will want to keep reading when the posts are so insanely long. So…the end (for now).