MADE IT!! We arrived here at our church we're living in on Monday after lunch. We got a tour of the area we will be living and then headed to Walmart for essentials after dinner. We are living on a stage in a gymnasium... the eight of us girls are blocked off by plywood from about 30 volunteers sleeping on the gym floor (on air mattresses). The thin plywood also separates the girls from the 3 guys on my team and 3 interns that are working for the Fuller Center. Now when I say thin I mean THIN. We can hear everything and worse yet everyone can hear what we are saying... which is not what they want to be hearing I'm sure. We have taken advantage of the gym with some volleyball and lightning, there are also a few rooms upstairs that we are able to use with N64 (which I have already used... brought me back to being little) and a TV we will be able to watch DVDs on with the help of our computers. However, there are about 90 volunteers living in the building that usually only holds 50 so there are people in every nook and cranny. They said this has been their busiest week and that it should settle down after this, but heck the more volunteers the better!!
Our work day starts with being ready for breakfast at 6:30 (so the MANY alarms begin around 6 in the morning), then get our work assignments around 7 and head to the work sites, we usually get back around 5 just in time to change for PT dinner, shower and then we have been so pooped we just hit the hay by the time it's lights out at 10 pm. We have been assigned groups within our team that we work with on different houses. The groups and houses have stayed the same over the week since there are so many volunteers to account for. I am with my friends Jess and Ashley... we have been putting the siding up on a house. The first couple days have bee pretty discouraging since we we're just thrown into the job not knowing anything about siding and told to the the section just by the front door. We had to redo a lot of our work due to our site supervisor not telling us exactly how to do things... but he takes the responsibility for it and always says he's sorry but it's just a bummer that the rest of the volunteers see that we have to redo things and think less of us. It is also a bummer how evident it is that people think we are less capable because we are females, that is something that will be very hard to get used to.
Unlike our last round in AR we are all split up throughout the day which is a really big bummer but probably will turn out to be for the better since we live in such tight quarters. I am just glad we had the AR project when we did because it gave us the chance to bond. We sleep in bunk beds with air mattresses that aren't that bad. I just have this Ameri-issued sleeping bag that is a mummy one so there is little room for my legs to move apart and I am a very big fan of moving what I sleep. We will see how that goes. Most of the groups that come here are church groups with a couple college ones, and I am proud to say that they get a TON of their volunteers from MN!!! They say we come down very often... there is even a group here right now from the Mankato area but I am not assigned to the same house so I am unable to really get to chat with them. But, my teammates who do work with them really like them and think they are wonderful so that's a good sign.
So far so good, with little time to come on here and write as much as I would like. Hopefully after we get more into the swing of things and catch up on some sleep I will have more time. I also would like to post pictures so hopefully I will have time for that too. Along with explaining more about where we live and the eating arrangements and stuff. Speaking of eating... time for dinner!!!
Love, Nicole
Oh I almost forgot... I'm not sure if I wrote about the fingernail I smashed in AR pulling a tree... well let's just say the nail is no longer there... pretty gross :-)
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