Round 4, Part 2: Oakland, CA

Our team is almost through with our second half of Round 4. We've been working with Reading Partners, an organization that takes the teacher's work out of planning for and tutoring students in reading. They've designed an amazing system to organize successful reading materials in a fashion that allows tutors to come in, grab their folders, and follow step by step instructions to tutor their student in reading. It's great! And it's working!

Our team has been actually putting together these materials ever since we've arrived in Oakland in early June. We've also been lucky enough to be paired with our own students for tutoring. It is great to actually see the materials we are putting together in action in the classroom.

It's been great being in the Bay Area for our final round. Reading Partners has set us up in an amazing townhouse located right on the Bay. Our front yard is the marina, so when we look out our bedroom windows, all we see are the boats at the docks. It's lovely.

The sun setting on the Bay has been a great motivator for me to go running! I love being able to run along the water and look out and see the Bay Bridge and San Francisco in the distance.

Our Team also got the chance to do an Independent Service Project (ISP) at Alcatraz last weekend. We washed hundreds of windows and got a private tour from park ranger, John Cantwell. He's been working at Alcatraz since he was 14 years old, and he is now 53!!! He gave us a detailed, VIP, 4 hour tour of the place. The same tour that is not offered to the public, but is offered to a small pool of people who win a lottery to pay $2,000 to volunteer and sleep over night in a cell. The same tour that John gave the Obama daughters last month.

It was interesting to actually get locked in cells that were much larger and more private than any rooms we've lived in since AmeriCorps! We laughed that maybe prison wouldn't be that bad! Like Jackie said while watching Double Jeopardy in Washington, "This doesn't look that bad! You get to wear jeans, and have your own job...."

John also let us climb to the top of the lighthouse, and then climb out the top and hang on the tip in the wind! It was extremely high up and pretty frightening because it was so windy!

We've also been going into San Francisco every weekend. It's a 40 minute walk to the Bart train station, and then about an hour ride into the city. It's exciting to have the city at our fingertips, and we have been taking full advantage! We even got to experience Pride Fest which was a blast!

Only about 2 weeks left in the program, and we are going out with a bang!

Round 4, Part 1: North Bend, WA

Blue 7 has been blessed with a variety of different projects over the course of 10 months. For our fourth and final round in the program, we've been given a split-round project, meaning that we will be spending the first 3 weeks in North Bend, and then we will be traveling down through Sacramento and to Oakland, CA.

With one week down, on our three week project, Blue 7 has been busy.

We began our travels to North Bend, WA on May 20th. We spent the night in a hotel, with Wifi and TV (!) and had our first Chinese food meal together...We all felt the heavy meal for days.

After two days of travel, we began our first work day on Tuesday May 22nd. We had a short orientation and tour of key places in the city, but Mountains to Sound was really quick to put us to work. With only three weeks to have the team, I'm sure they were eager for us to get some things done. We started work with pulling blackberry at the trail head of the Little Mount Si Trail. It was two days of pulling blackberry in the pouring rain. It rained from Monday through Wednesday pretty much nonstop. AmeriCorps sets us up with rain gear, but the problem was keeping our hands warm and dry enough to work.

We were lucky to have dry weather on both Thursday and Friday! We spent two days cutting back the brush on trails so hikers wouldn't get slapped with plants while hiking through the woods. We were able to hike the Little Mount Si Trail as well as the Tiger Mountain Trail while brushing the path. Both were absolutely beautiful and provided us with endless amounts of visual stimulation while we worked. It felt great to think about how much work we completed while conquering the trails each day. The sore feet, calves, and upper backs were only symbols of our dedication to completing the trails.

I've been really proud of Blue 7 since we left Sacramento. It seems like we've finally gotten the hang of functioning as a family inside and outside of work. It is obvious that we care about each other whether it's Anna cooking personal quesadillas for the whole team, Heather coming around with coffee refills for all the half empty mugs, Jackie carrying Andrew's bags while he helps Anna down the mountain, Lisabeth heading to the grocery store so we can all get our ice cream fix, Julie sitting down and going through Math with Anna, or Tommy cooking out for us on the back porch. 

We take care of each other.

Round 3: Camping!

Our team is working with Tree People this round, primarily caring for trees and leading groups of volunteers. An average work day involves either walking to our work site in Malibu Creek State Park where we are camping, or driving to the Tree People Head Quarters in Beverly Hills. There we either work on our own tree care projects, or we lead groups of volunteers to complete the same type of work.

This round, the challenge is not in the work but rather our living situation. Some of our current challenges are as follows:

• Rather than sleeping in beds we have sleeping bags on the ground. Not that bad until it rains and the ground gets wet and the bags are cold and smelly. Also, our backs are pretty tight and knotted up from all this ground sleeping.
• Fear of bugs! Sleeping with ear plugs in every night can cut this fear down a little bit, but it is still not my favorite.

• Partying Campers! Every day we have new neighbors and often times the park is completely full on the weekends. We work on the weekends and people are usually up partying through the wee hours of the morning.
• Partying Campers! They make our bathrooms pretty disgusting. When you have to share your bathrooms with people who are only there for a night or two, they tend to demolish the accommodations. There is rarely toilet paper, the seats have been carved with messages, the ground is usually covered in mud, and once in a while there while be puke splattered everywhere. It's sick.
• Rain! It has only really rained a few times, but when it does, all of our things get wet. We have to spend the next day removing everything from our tents and laying it out to dry.

Something I posted to the AmeriCorps NCCC Pacific Region Facebook page:

‎AmeriCorps Blue Seven has been completely rained out of their campsite twice now. Tree People was kind enough to let us stay in one of their yurts in Beverly Hills the last time, but when we came back to our site, we found Heather's tent on the picnic table, and Julie Ann Nicholson and Anna's tent at the bathrooms! 


Although it is laughable in retrospect, it can be really hard to see the littlepossessions you have completely soaked and ruined. Blue 7 has been lucky that the majority of our things have just needed drying, but we did take a moment to reflect on how we felt at the time, and how much greater the hurt and devastation must be for hurricane victims.

AmeriCorps NCCC forces people to downsize their possessions to fit in a single red bag. It is difficult to leave behind items that may have previously been the one thing you could turn to for comfort. Much like other teams, Blue 7 has adapted to the camping lifestyle. However, when you finally start to feel comfortable in the wilderness, and then you return to everything you own soaking wet and moldy, there is a certain level of panic and hurt.

Tommy Clifford brought light to the fact that we could relate our team's distraught to natural disaster victims.

"If this affects our team this much, it really makes you think about how people must have felt after Hurricane Katrina. This is only some of the stuff we own, just imagine what it would feel like to have this happen to your entire home." --Tommy Clifford

Although our situation is very minor in comparison, it helped us to feel a small fraction of what hurricane victims might have felt after Katrina or Ike.

Saying Goodbye to Coos Bay

On my last night in Coos Bay, I'm left to reflect on my experience. I've come to realize that Oregon has made a lasting impact on my life in a number of different ways. Below I've outlined a few highlights of my stay:

Park West Apartments is a low-income apartment complex that houses a number of different characters. Our neighbor, Rennie, is a man in his fifties who escapes his apartment approximately every 20 minutes to have a cigarette. These little breaks have resulted in Rennie getting to know our team very well. He sees us when we are rushing out of the door in the morning with our untied steel toes on our feet and our bowls of cereal sloshing around in our hands. He sees us when we roll out of the van after PT in the evening, exhausted and crabby. He experiences the shouting, stomping of the feet, and the slamming of the doors. He listens to the laughter and the loud music and he smokes his cigarettes through it all. We share stories with Rennie on the way down to do our laundry. We talk about his kids when we are getting a breath of fresh air, and we give Rennie updates on our future plans. Rennie has made our team food because "he just has extra," and we've left treats for him hanging on his door. I'm going to miss Rennie and our pleasantries very much. He's the type of character that I feel blessed to have met because even through all of our disruptive habits, he's able to understand that we are just a bunch of big kids trying to do service.

Jackie and I started an energy education program this round where we went into classrooms and we taught students about water and energy and the importance of conservation. I was able to schedule 23 different lessons, and I was able to teach in 12 different classrooms and in 3 different schools. I cannot put into words how beneficial it has been for me to be able to gain so much teaching experience in such a short amount of time. I was able to connect with different teachers, explore different schools and classrooms, and get a further idea of the age that I want to one day teach. The children often treated us as celebrities--asking us for our autographs or saying they'd seen us on the news. Teaching and being with children made me feel like me again. It is really hard to ever feel like myself in AmeriCorps because I am often so overwhelmed by the constant change and big personalities. Getting the chance to be in the classroom gave me faith that "I've still got it" and it allowed my teammates to see a part of who I really am.

Jackie and I planned a community day for our team and community members to work together at Bandon High School. We worked with the Coos Watershed on one of their projects to remove the invasive blackberry from the Gross Creek behind the high school. The students often use the creek for ecology lessons--planting trees and tracking the life of living things--and the removal of the blackberry  was intended allow them to continue using this valuable resource. During the week before the event, Kyle and I visited five of the high school science classes talking to them about AmeriCorps NCCC and encouraging them to come to the event. Jackie and I had also contacted many local businesses asking them for donations so we would have snacks for the volunteers who showed up to help. Due to the great generosity of the community, we were able to get tons of doughnuts, coffee, tea, sandwiches, bagels, and muffins all the Friday night before the big day. We had picked up all of the items on Friday, so on the way home that evening there was a lot of bickering about eating the food. I was getting increasingly frustrated listening to my teammates complain about not getting to snack on the donations, and finally I blew up at one of my teammates. We both apologized for our behavior, and I followed up with hiding all of the food for the community day just to be sure. The following day everyone woke up early, drove the 40 minutes to Bandon, and pulled out blackberry in the beautiful sunshine. Over 30 students came to help, and many of them were excited to one day join AmeriCorps themselves. I hung out with the students, showed them how to get dirty, and answered their questions about the program. Our day was more than successful and I was so proud of Blue 7 for working so well together.


I've more than enjoyed my experience in Coos Bay, but it is time for us to move on. I think we've learned how to be a cohesive team and how to actually get things done. I'm excited to start a new endeavor and I can only hope we can impact our new community in Calabasas, CA.

State of Mind

All of my teammates have joined AmeriCorps NCCC for different reasons. Some of us wanted to update our resumes with impressive information. Some of us wanted to figure out our futures--hoping AmeriCorps would be the catalyst for a new piece of mind. Some of us needed a fresh start--to get out of the life we were living and to create something new for ourselves. And others of us wanted some experience: life, travel, and love.

I find it interesting how differently the dynamic of our team is from day to day.  We have days where one person will wake up with a scowl on their face, and suddenly everyone is in a terrible mood.  We have days where we wake up and coffee is made and Andrew is cooking bacon for everyone in the kitchen.  We have days where we argue, talk about each other, and simply say things that we know are going to make someone's skin crawl. We have days where we feel connected, part of one cause, part of one family. We have days where we can't stand each other, and we have days where we are proud to be on Blue 7.

Now that we are now more than halfway through our second project round, I feel I can understand how every project will have an impact on the team. In Keene, CA, all ten of us were outside working together all day long. Every single day involved the same attitudes and the same work. We were lazy and tired every day, and we did what we were asked to do...that was all.  Here in Oregon, things are different. Working with the Oregon Coast Community Action (ORCCA), we have a number of different projects going on every single day. Everyone seems to have their own place and their own ownership over something. Whether it's networking, caring for children, making deliveries, teaching about energy, or packing food for families, we all have something.

By the time we leave Coos Bay, each of our team members will have led at least one Independent Service Project. We will have posted over 100 posters to raise awareness for the historical nonprofit theatre that was required to close down. We will have written descriptions for over 25 historical photographs for the nonprofit Coos Bay Historical Museum. We will have painted a children's rock wall so that it can survive the rainy season. We will have helped to find a small nonprofit a number of grants to which they can apply for. We will have repaired perches for rehabilitating birds, as well as a muse for an injured eagle. We will have created a piece of art for a community using all recycled objects. This list is comprehensive of only the work we are doing outside of our 40 hour work week with ORCCA.

In many ways I am very proud of my team. There are times that I feel we are lucky to be living this lifestyle and to be experiencing so many different things.  There are times that I feel we are almost spoiled--complaining about not having internet, or having to run outside.  However, being in Coos Bay has allowed me to see the impact that teams are capable of making. As a whole, I'm in aw at the work our team has done in Oregon.

I've come to realize that AmeriCorps will be what I make it. On Friday afternoon, our team couldn't wait to finally get out of the warehouse and onto the weekend. A couple of emergencies arose, and we were asked to stay and pack "Snack Packs" for children. The Snack Pack program ensures that students who may usually  go hungry on the weekends get food to last them until Monday.  Teachers discretely slip Ziplocks of food into certain students' backpacks on Fridays so they no longer return starved on Monday mornings.

Asked to pack Snack Packs for an extra hour and a half after work was not exactly what my team was looking forward to. There was eye rolling, complaining, and smart remarks from a few teammates. For me, I needed to focus on what we were doing. Not the task of placing a fruit bar into a bag, but the task of ensuring student hunger is not an issue for one weekend. Many times, there are so many distractions that it is an extremely difficult task to define your own state of mind. On Friday, I just did everything I possibly could to remind myself of why I am here. I am happy to be here, and I am happy to be doing service.

I can't count on anyone else to give me the results I want from this program. One of the largest challenges is remaining dedicated to the cause, and I have to say, I am making it happen this round.

COMPASS

a slender, piercing needle tearing its way through thin flesh.
a ring with four dominant directions
and four areas, more "gray" than sure.
an image formed from ink embedded under skin.
a portrayal of a journey filled with hard work, 
discovery, pain, and maybe, one day, success.
the uncertainty that lies ahead, 
and the track that must remain stone.
a road filled with setbacks, financial strains,
and aches that keep eyes wide awake.
time without family, peace, or comfort, 
and independence that overstays its welcome.
a lack of home, but a field of freedom.
a permanent scar left in a fragile position.
an unhidden secret available to the world.
a gamble that may facilitate a future lack of control.
a steel symbol of HOPES and DREAMS.
an entire heart of courage, desire, and drive.
a reminder of ME, finally solid, stone, ME.
the uncertainty that lies ahead,
the track that must remain stone.
.compass.

ROUND TWO: Coos Bay, OR

Our second project is in Coos Bay, Oregon working with the Oregon Coast Community Action (ORCCA).  The organization does an incredible amount of things for the community, and we are so lucky that we get to be a part of it.  We were told we'd be living in a two bedroom apartment, with ONE BATHROOM.  Yep, that's one bathroom with 10 people.

On January 9th, we hit the road for our 8.5 hour drive to Oregon.  We had packed the van the night before and left our campus at 6am.  It took us the majority of the day to get to Oregon, which of course resulted in attitudes and crabby comments flying all through the van.  See, we drive around this 15 passenger van, however, we have to take out the last row of seats so we can all fit our luggage...which makes for a very tight squeeze for the rest of us. We have to switch drivers every two hours, so we end up switching seats that often because no one can stand more than two hours in the same spot anyway.  I spent some of the trip sleeping, and some watching Community and Human Planet on my NEW LAPTOP :)

We were pretty freaked out yesterday when we arrived in our town.  I heard such wonderful things about Coos Bay, and for some reason I was expecting this beautiful vacation destination city on the bay.  However, it was gloomy, foggy, and the city just looked completely gray when we arrived.  Our apartment, which for some reason I expected to be located in the center of downtown, was in a complex next to a school.  There was caution tape in the yard and we were greeted by an apartment full of furniture that we had to move to a different apartment.  So, I went to bed feeling a little nervous about the town, however, our tour today really proved me wrong!

We spent the day with our project supervisor, Amanda, who showed us around the city and gave us a little training.  We were able to gain a different perspective of Coos Bay, and see the beauty of the coast.

We are now very excited to start our adventure in OREGON!