Git 'er Done

I will get things done for America-

to make our people safer,

smarter, and healthier.

I will bring Americans together

to strengthen our communities.

Faced with apathy,

I will take action.

Faced with conflict,

I will seek common ground.

Faced with adversity,

I will persevere.

I will carry this commitment

with me this year and beyond.

I am an AmeriCorps member,

and I will get things done.

A couple of days ago, I started seeing story about Obama's address to students pop up on the news sources I follow.  I didn't pay much attention to it.  I thought it was a cool idea and figured I would have an opportunity to see or read it more closely when it actually occurred.  Then I started seeing pieces about the uproar by some parents.  And then I had to figure out what was going on.

"At 12:00 p.m., Eastern Time (ET), September 8, 2009, President Barack Obama will deliver a national address to the students of America. During this special address, the president will speak directly to the nation's children and youth about persisting and succeeding in school. The president will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning."

Okay, sounds harmless.  Except for the fact that this speech came along with optional lesson plans, which suggested that elementary school students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."  That's where people started to freak.  So the administration took it out.  Now it says that they can "write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term educational goals."  Sounds pretty harmless, especially considering the fact that all of this is optional.  No student has to watch this address and no teacher has to follow the suggestions in the lesson plan.

But people are still freaking out.  Honestly, I didn't understand the hoopla in the first place. The original suggestion sounded very much like Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you- ask what you can do for your country."  Is that dangerous?  Is that an attempt to indoctrinate the innocent children of America and mobilize them as a sort of Dumbledore's Obama's Army?  Regardless, I don't think there was this much uproar when Reagan addressed students in 1986, or when G. H. W. Bush did in 1991.  And it boggles my mind that so many people can forget that these two events happened and state that this is a daring new move by the Obama administration.

But the point is...are we being indoctrinated?  That's kind of a scary thought.  I sure hope not.  Granted, Glenn Beck did recently tell America that Obama is growing the AmeriCorps as his own SS.  And honestly, that offended me.  I did ask what my country could do for me, and the answer was that it could provide me with this opportunity to do something for my country.  And I'm doing it for a bare-bones living stipend.  No one has "indoctrinated" me into choosing this year of service.  And I have yet to be approached to fight for Obama's secret mission. 

Mr. Beck mocked the AmeriCorps pledge.

Now, I'll be honest, I did find it kind of amusing when I read this pledge in my binder on Tuesday.  But let's make this clear:  I read this pledge, I didn't take it.  I didn't actually pledge anything.  To me, this pledge is more of an idea, an explanation of what my goals are for this year.  And it doesn't seem all that unreasonable.  I do want America to be safer, smarter, and healthier.  I do want stronger communities in this age of isolation and apathy.  I do want to take action, seek common ground, and persevere.  And shouldn't it be everyone's goal to get things done?

I am a member of the AmeriCorps, and I am proud of that.  I tell everyone that I meet.  And it was my choice.  I decided to do this.  And no one can or should reduce that to an insinuation of brainwashing.

It's Arts & Crafts Time!

So I'm starting a Photo A Day project.  I really want to remember this year, and I think this will be the perfect way to keep up with my scrapbooking and perhaps improve my photography skills.  I already have some great pictures from this week:

On Monday night we made a delicious dinner of homemade pizzas and then played a rousing game of Uno.  It was a great opportunity to get to know each other before starting in the office.

We spent the entire day on Tuesday filling out paperwork, so it was really refreshing to get the chance to go out out at night.  I took the crew to Port Jefferson where we walked around on the boardwalk and ate some awesome seafood and gellato.

On Wednesday we went on a little tour which ended at the ReStore.  People donate all kinds of stuff that the ReStore sells, with the proceeds going back to Habitat.

Last night we went to the beach at Smith Point.  It was absolutely beautiful and gave my roomies a chance to see a different side of Long Island.

 Today we spent the whole morning talking to all of the people in the office, getting a idea of how they came to Habitat and what they do.   Even though I've been there a while, I learned a lot about everyone.

Roommates

It's been a while since I had a roommate.

I guess my first roommate was Aakash, my brother.  When he was born, I was 5, and I begged and pleaded with my parents until they finally agreed to put his crib in my room, even though he already had an entire room designated for him.  And I kicked him out after the first night because he cried too much.

My roommate for my freshman year of college was interesting, to say the least.  She was an art student, which provided enough weirdness in and of itself simply through assignments.  But she was also semi-nocturnal, choosing to only work late at night with bright lights, Korean soap operas playing on her laptop, and someone from Seoul on the other end of her cell phone.  Oh, and she was part of this crazy Korean gang that kidnapped all of the freshman every weekend and took them to New York to ingest weird alcoholic cocktails...or so we were told.

After that, I chose to live in a single.  But I suppose you could say that as an RA, I had approximately 35 roommates to love and care for.  Meh.

So, now I find myself in a house that I don't really have to live in, with three people I don't really know.  I'll admit that before I met them, I was reserving my decision as to how much time I would actually spend at the house.  But now that I know that we are all separately and collectively awesome, I'm pretty sure I'll be spending a lot of time here.

Katie, fresh from a year of NCCC at the Boulder, Colorado campus, is originally from Virginia, and is working in Construction.  Aaron, from Arizona, is a VISTA working with green building prospects.  Richard, who I went to SU with, is from Ohio and will be working in Family Services.

So far, we all seem to mesh really well.  We're really chill and seem to have similar tastes in entertainment, although we all do our own thing too..

And best of all...we all love food!  We've been cooking together a lot, and it has been absolutely fabulous!

And we're off!

Well...we're officially AmeriCorps!

On Saturday we all finally met each other.  Richard (Family Services) and I went to college together and know each other from Alpha Phi Omega.  Aaron (VISTA for Green Building) is from Arizona and actually went to summer camp for a few years with a friend of mine from grade school.  Katie (Construction) just finished a year of NCCC based out of Boulder, Colorado.  And..we're all absolutely fabulous!

On Saturday we all had dinner at the local Friendly's, and then came back to the house for conversation and a bottle of Summer Blush from Pindar, one of the local wineries.  The main conclusion was that we're all pretty chill people who seem to be on the same wavelength, which will definitely make living together a lot better.

Yesterday I moved into the house, for the week at least.  Aaron and I did some groceries, and when Richard and Katie came home, we all made dinner.  We had some really delicious homemade pizza with a great salad.  I'm really excited that, to some extent, we're all foodies.  We agreed that we'd love to have group dinners at least a few times a week.  The cooking is sure to be exciting!

Today was our first day in the office, and we (Richard, Katie, and I) spent the entire time filling out paperwork with Kathy while Aaron just looked on and laughed.  You wouldn't think that there would be such a drastic difference between the AmeriCorps programs, but Aaron is a VISTA and had significantly less paperwork, the majority of which was done online.   But we did get manage to get through it, and I think being stuck together in the conference room was a kind of bonding experience.

Four Years Later

As I'm sure you've seen all over the news media, this weekend marks the four year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina touching down on the Gulf Coast.

I first visited the area in December of 2007.  With a group from our campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity, I spent a week in New Orleans during my winter break.  We stayed at Camp Hope, originally a middle school in St. Bernard Parish, just outside of the city.  The school had been mostly submerged when the hurricane went through and had been reclaimed to house relief volunteers, with classrooms converted to bunk rooms, and showers added to the bathrooms.  Camp Hope's mission has switched gears several times since its inception, but since early 2007 it has been managed by the New Orleans affiliate of HFH, with the great majority of the volunteers staying there working on HFH projects.
We spent the week working in Musicians' Village in the 9th Ward.  The project was started by Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis in partnership with New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity to give homes to artists who had lost their homes and left New Orleans subsequent to Katrina.  There, we spent the week framing a house with an NCCC team.
There were two very significant things about that trip for me.  The first was an idea that was mentioned during our orientation.  The man speaking to us told the group that now that we were here, we didn't even have to raise a hammer.  The simple fact that we had volunteered to help was enough to make a difference.  I thought it was an absolutely crazy statement when I heard it, but over the course of the week I came to understand that it was true.  The people of New Orleans were so thankful for our presence.  People loved to talk to us, to give us free ice cream, to keep us out of trouble.  It was a simple picture of human compassion.  We were just a bunch of kids trying to do some good, and the people we encountered couldn't be more thankful.  We, as humankind, are dependent upon each other.  And the fact that we do indeed respond to these situations with a helping hand is pretty amazing.
The second thing was the disparity in repair.  My mental image of New Orleans isn't that of Bourbon Street or Mardi Gras.  It's of the FEMA trailers that are still there housing the displaced, sitting in between huge expansive homes.  The land there was so cheap after the hurricane.  Developers just bought it all up and put in these McMansions.  And people bought them.  And live in them.  Right next door to their neighbors in these trailers without proper plumbing.

My second trip to the Gulf was in December of 2008.  This time we went to St. Tammany Parish, just outside of New Orleans, an area so in need of relief after the hurricane that the one parish had two HFH affiliates, St Tammany East, and St Tammany West.  We worked at the later, where we helped out with an unfinished Carter Build project.  St Tammany was in need of assistance not really because of destruction cause by the hurricane, but rather because so many people moved there afterwards.  The area simply didn't have enough homes and the infrastructure was buckling under the sudden inundation.  It was interesting to get that view on a different kind of destruction created by Hurricane Katrina.
My time in St Tammany West was also when I decided that I wanted to be an AmeriCorps volunteer.  I spent the week talking to AmeriCorps about their experiences with NCCC and National Direct, and their stories really influenced me.  I was suddenly filled with a drive to serve my country, and I'm so glad that I am.

March of 2009 was my last time down to the Gulf, this time in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.  The work experience at that affiliate was probably my favorite.  It was a blitz build, and we were able to go from a concrete slab on the morning of day one to a practically finished house by the time we left.
It was also a great experience because it really made me think about a bigger picture.  When most people think about Hurricane Katrina, they think only of New Orleans.  And it's true that NOLA was and is very much in need of post-hurricane assistance.  But we forget that the entire Gulf Coast was ravaged by Katrina, and then again by Rita.  Although I wasn't at first, by the time my trip was over, I was really thankful to have gotten the opportunity to work in Mississippi.  Those families needed and deserved our help just as much, and there is no reason that they should be left by the wayside simply because they aren't in the city that received the iconic media coverage.

During my two subsequent trips, it was really interesting to see how so much had changed.  And yet, so little at the same time.  People are still living in those FEMA trailers.  Cans of water are still lying around.  People are still displaced.  And we forget about it, because it isn't in the news every day.  But we shouldn't, and we can't.  I will never forget the connection I felt to humanity during my first trip, and my sincere wish is for everyone to feel that at some point in their lives.