Ten Days in Paradise

           

 

          On a recent mid-October morning, as I lounged in one of the welded iron chairs hidden away behind the chapel at All Saints’ Episcopal School in Vicksburg, Mississippi and watched dry leaves skitter across the brick patio, I imagined I had a pretty good idea of Paradise. 8 weeks in Baton Rouge taught me many lessons, but perhaps one of the most important is how little materially we need to be truly happy. I met people whom I could only describe as fully alive - people who had lost or given nearly everything they had at any juncture in life, but kept their purpose and joy. The work they strove to complete each day, the prayers they offered, and the ceaseless efforts they made toward the happiness of others lit a fire in their eyes that a practical observer might say had no business being there.

               I’m very happy to have participated in their stories for the relatively short time I worked with or for them in the concrete, asphalt, and cardboard world I like to call the Box Kingdom. It was in this surreal, artificially lit cavern that my team and I simultaneously changed ourselves and the world around us in what small way we could. 

Delta 1 on one of our last days at the warehouse

               We’re on campus in Vicksburg now for 10 days before redeploying for our next project. I was ecstatic to hear we were not going back to Baton Rouge but instead will be spending approximately two months in and around Rainelle, West Virginia, a small town that is also still feeling the effects of recent flooding. We’ll trade boxes for hammers and have a chance to help rebuild a community for the long haul. We are also very excited to be outdoors again and to be working in a close knit community nestled within West Virginian Appalachia. We complete briefings on each project we do, but we never really have a solid idea of what to expect. I’m sure it will be a different kind of education.

               A key difference between the last round and the upcoming one is that the role of assistant team leader has rotated. I took on the job for the first round and though if given the chance I would absolutely make the choice to do it again, I am already happy to have handed it off. I’ve never held a leadership position before and was thrown abruptly into the fire with new people, in a new place, doing unfamiliar things. Through all those long, stressful days I realized strengths I never knew I had and weaknesses I didn’t want to acknowledge (over-stressing being one of them). I was not without failures, but overall I am thankful for the support of my team and a successful experience as ATL. Now there are others on the team with the ability and drive to do the same, so I am happy to go back to being just me.

Until next time!

-Dan

Sunrise in Baton Rouge

The exhausted team after Day 1 on Disaster Response

There are some moments when the most comforting thing in the world is simply
a warm bed in a small room.

The famous balconies in New Orleans' French Quarter.

N'awlin's Jackson Square Cathedral.

The All Saint's Episcopal Chapel on campus.

The former headmaster's house is now privately owned and occupied.

I met this vicious ball of fluff at the Vicksburg Humane Society.
Worth every scar.

A pilot doing tricks at the Vicksburg Air Show.
Photo credit to my friend Regina Pineda

The Old Mississippi State Capitol museum in Jackson

I'll admit the content might not be thrilling, but come on, frontier-era books!

Photos don't do justice to the 19th century architecture in Mississippi's largest city.
Well alright, my photos don't anyway.

Delta 1 joined forces with a River team to help spruce up an elementary
school in Vicksburg for National Make a Difference Day.

"As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another."

Proverbs 27:17

Round 1

Sunset outside the warehouse in Baton Rouge

Blog post #1

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to follow this blog! I’ve never kept one before, but I figure it’s a better way to keep interested family and friends in the loop than bombarding email inboxes. My goal is to post an update at least once a month, on the 1^st of the month. However, because life in AmeriCorps is sometimes lived by the day or even by the hour, that schedule may not hold up in reality.

Though AmeriCorps is not an educational program in the traditional sense, each incoming group of corps members is referred to as a class. I’m a part of class 23. We came from all over the nation to converge on the Southern Region HQ in Vicksburg Mississippi at the start of our roughly ten-month term of service on July 19th. Though it was only about two and a half months ago, it seems like an eternity. I and many of my teammates and fellow corps members are already very different people than we were at the outset.

Team Delta 1. From left to right: Carlos, Sedrick, D.M.A.C., Devin, Shane (Team Leader), Lindsey, Sky, Dan (me!) Not pictured: Jessica, far left

I joined this program with a few expectations. I’d spent a year working in corporate America as part of two internships at Hasbro Toys and Packaging Corporation of America. While I learned a ton, met unforgettable people, and at times had more fun than anyone should ever be paid to have, my experiences left me looking for a more fulfilling way to use my education. My hope is that my work with AmeriCorps provides me with real world perspective on pressing material and social problems that I can help solve after graduation from RIT.

It’s important to me that the value of my life’s work will be found in the good it accomplishes on behalf of other people. However, contrary to the popular saying it really is a very big world we live in, and I have sampled only a very small portion of its places and more importantly its people in my relatively short life. My biggest hope for my term of service here was that I could gain a better understanding of the people I would like my work to serve. I haven’t been disappointed.

I expected that perspective to come from the people our work directly aided – the families to whom we distribute donated food or the homeowners whose lives we carry out onto the street as we tear out the walls of their flooded houses. Instead my emotional and social education has come almost entirely from my own teammates: the 8 other 20 to 23-year-olds with whom I share every day from beginning to end.

We came from every corner of the nation – Oregon, California, Illinois, Georgia, Maryland, Florida, and of course New Jersey. We grew up in vastly different economic and social situations. We have very different personalities and beliefs. In normal circumstances, Delta 1 would be a group of people who have no business being together – or so I might have thought a few months ago. The beauty of this program is that it forces people to not necessarily learn to like each other, but to get to know each other and get along - or go through ten months of inescapable hell living in close quarters.

I’ve spent a long time listening to my teammates, and now friends, tell their stories. We’ve worked through deep issues together that required all of us to change the unshakeable worldview we may have held for all our lives in order to understand another person’s point of view. From this process I have learned so much about what it means to be a good person, a good friend, and a good man – and gained a deep respect for my unlikely new friends.

That is a process that has been allowed to take place only because of our mutual participation in the work that AmeriCorps does. As the final line of the half intolerably cheesy, half actually pretty serious AmeriCorps pledge states, we are all here to “get things done for America!”. We joined for a multitude of different reasons, but at the end of the day we’re all doing the same job.

After completing our three week training program, my team’s first project (referred to in AmeriCorps lingo as a “spike”) was to be in Jackson, the capital city of Mississippi, helping out at a children’s home, school, and developmental center for children from difficult backgrounds. We spent a week there cleaning up the school playgrounds, clearing brush, organizing one shed and demolishing another. Our sponsor, Mississippi Children’s Home Services, were very excited to have us and treated us wonderfully, and we for the most part enjoyed the work.

At about 12:15 in the afternoon on Saturday of the first week of what was intended to be a month long project, we were given word that we were to deploy to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to help with the flood recovery efforts there. Disasters of any kind (though usually natural) take precedence in AmeriCorps, so within 4 hours we cleaned our rooms, packed all our belongings into our van, and hit the road.



Though we were given very short notice, we knew redeployment was a possibility, as some AmeriCorps teams from our campus had already been pulled at the start of our project round a week before. The city of Baton Rouge had just endured what was supposed to be a once-in-a-thousand years flood event that has been compared to Hurricane Katrina in its scope and severity. Though thankfully far fewer lives were lost, more homes, properties, and businesses were destroyed or damaged by the flood than had been affected by Katrina. Thousands flocked to shelters set up by the Red Cross or other volunteer agencies. Thousands more were and are homeless on the streets or still living in their ruined houses, watching as toxic black mold creeps up their walls.

The very next morning, Delta 1 drove through flooded neighborhoods to reach our first assignment: one of scores of damaged houses contributing to the endless piles of roadside debris. We spent the day tearing out soggy drywall and carpets, carrying it to the curb for eventual pickup. Since deployment, somewhere around 400 AmeriCorps members from all around the country have removed hundreds of dump truck loads of debris from scores of homes around the Baton Rouge area.

Video: AmeriCorps September 11th National Day of Service - Mucking and Gutting

After our first day however, our team specifically was reassigned to a multi-agency disaster relief warehouse run by a volunteer group called Adventist Community Services Disaster Relief, an arm of the international 7^th Day Adventist church. I’m not sure how they settled on warehousing as a charitable activity, but they’ve been at it for decades and are good at what they do.

As assistant team leader, I work with ACSDR volunteer staff to help run the sorting warehouse floor. I’ve never been responsible for tasking so many people or ensuring a system of this scale runs smoothly, so it’s been quite a learning experience for me. Some of us, myself included, got forklift certified. Days spent on the forklift are a break from responsibility on the sorting floor and a chance to play with heavy machinery, which is a rare treat. Some of the team has gone out with ACSDR several times (I got to go once) for a Mobile Distribution Unit to hand out supplies directly to flood survivors.

When I joined AmeriCorps I had a vague idea that each bright and sunny morning, someone would hand me a pick, a hammer, or an axe, point me in the right direction, and I’d spend the day swinging away in the sun getting the best tan of my life. Our team has spent the last 6 weeks in warehouses sorting mountains of donated goods and supplies beneath almost ghostly white fluorescent lights. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s an important one.

One of the stranger items that have come in to the warehouse

The box kingdom in all its kraft brown glory

Since our deployment, we’ve lived in 6 different housing scenarios around the area. We’ve slept in a museum, a high school gym, a civic center, bunked at a Baptist summer camp and stayed at a Red Cross staff shelter. We’ve landed on cots in an upper room at the same warehouse we’ve been working at the whole time, which makes for a wonderful morning commute. Our kitchen is in the break room of another warehouse, and we’ve been showering in portable shower trucks. All in all, it’s been a wild ride, a difficult but fulfilling job, and an unforgettable experience.

There are two weeks left in our first deployment. I’m ready to go back to home base in Vicksburg for ten days of much needed R&R. Til next time!

Dan

A reflection video I was featured in that shows some of what we do at the warehouse:
https://www.facebook.com/AmeriCorpsNCCCSouthern/videos/1141802389245692/

Red Cross staff shelter. Also featuring thumb!

Louisiana State Capitol Building, Baton Rouge

Comite River Park. A welcome break from concrete and cardboard.