"I used to live next door to a sewage plant..."

So said our project supervisor this afternoon. He thought the lovely smell eminating from our rain gear smelled almost as sweet as the odors near his old house.

We had a great day working out in the rain.

As promised, more pictures!

A group shot of Silver 6 at our farewell dinner. The Food Bank took all of us corpsmembers and staff out to eat to celebrate us leaving... I mean, a successful project well done :) All of our project supervisors were a little shocked to see us in our normal clothes.


Do you have tickets for the gun show?? Because Emily and I do! We worked in the warehouse and proved that girls are just as good at moving around heavy stuff. Steve, one of the drivers and kind donor of ice cream, got to liking us after a while and was eventually convinced of our fantastic girl-power.


I work in the warehouse alot, it seems. Joe and I try on some of the costumes that have come in the latest shipment of clothes to the Saca Center.


We wore our hardhats for the first time when we helped move the beautiful and very heavy Mother-Baby mural! Frankie, one of the teachers in the Women's Wisdom program, made this beautiful mural with the help of the ladies in the program. It's such a beautiful addition to the exterior of the building and will hopefully encourage the daddies to come in, too.

Sacramento Food Bank-- A Spike in Pictures

Friday was our last day working at the Food Bank and I can honestly say that I will miss working there. There are so many smiling faces, good people, generous donors, gracious recipients, and strong, helpful efforts aimed at improving people's lives at the Food Bank. It's a unique place and I'm glad that my team and I got to be a part of it.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, I thought I'd post a few pictures for you all to take a little peek into Sacramento and see some of the faces I hang out with on a daily basis.

Welcome to the Food Locker! We have plenty of staples here... maybe you can see the pallets stacked high with peanut butter and the white plastic bins filled with canned goods. Depending on what comes in the day's shipment from the local supermarkets' gleaning of the shelves, we also have dairy, eggs, fresh produce and other assorted items to give out to the clients who come for groceries.

Meet the kids of the After School program. On our last day, we made the kids a card and took a few quick snapshots with them. The girls that I tutor are looking uncharacteristically non-smiley in this shot. Alot of the kids who come to the After School program also live in the Food Bank's Havens Housing-- a program that helps homeless families prepare for home ownership by providing job training and affordable housing.

More pictures to come when the internet's not quite so slow...

Next stop...

Baton Rouge!

Beginning in early February, Silver 6 and I are headed down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to work for Habitat for Humanity! We're going to be learning construction skills and building houses. Accommodations are going to be at a local church (with hot showers and a kitchen!) that's located near the downtown area.

Before a sponsoring organization can have a NCCC team assigned to them, they need to fill out a rather lengthy application. Here's a snippet from our the Habitat for Humanity Baton Rouge application... sounds like we'll have a lot of great work to do.

3. How will the degree of success of the project be measured? Please list direct and demonstrable results of the project. This section should describe not only the system of measurement, but what approximate number must be achieved to describe the project as complete. For instance, miles of fence built, percent increase in reading comprehension tests, number of children immunized, square feet of walls painted, number of volunteers recruited.

To build a house with Habitat for Humanity in Baton Rouge requires the completion of 267 tasks. Of those, 147 tasks are designated to be completed by NCCC members and Habitat for Humanity volunteers.

To complete 30 houses in 2008, there are 4410 tasks to be completed by NCCC members. Among those tasks are:

• Meet 30 Habitat partner families and participate in 30 blessings of the build.
• Prebuild the headers for 672 windows and doors.
• Move 7,000 pounds of nails.
• Carry and use 5600 studs to frame walls.
• Raise over 1,400 walls.
• Raise over 1,120 trusses.
• Move and install 3360 pieces of roof and wall sheathing.
• Hammer 104 nails into each piece of sheathing for a total of over 340,000 nails into sheathing alone.
• Paint 46,800 square feet of exterior walls; and paint them twice!
• Paint 134,400 square feet of interior walls; and paint those three times!
• Install over 24,000 linear feet of interior trim and molding; and paint those too.
• Hang 392 doors.
• Move 30 sets, or 330 cabinets, into place and install.
• Lay 33,600 pieces of floor tile.
• Wreck the forms for 30 driveways.
• Pull, palletize, and deliver 30 electrical fixtures to each site; that’s 900 fixtures and the 1316 bulbs to go with them.
• Lay 70,000 square feet of sod on the front yards of each lot.
• Dedicate 30 homes and congratulate 30 new homeowners.

We get all kinds at the Food Bank

We turned away four small customers at the Food Bank on Tuesday. They'd been living in a cardboard box, were pink from the cold, but generally looked well-fed. Three were minors who showed up to the Food Bank with their mother, but as soon as we laid eyes on her, the mother scampered away. I don't know what that has to say about us, but we snapped a picture of the customers before they escaped too...

Who is your governor and what does he do?!

Look! Looklooklook! We met AHHNOLD! We met the Governator! We SHOOK hands with the Terminator and lived to tell the tale! The man is very friendly and understanding of star-struck kids swarming around him and asking for a photo op.

(You might not be able to see me so well, but trust me... I'm there. Look in the top left hand corner. )

He's also a good bit shorter than I had imagined. He also glows with an orange tinge that I hadn't expected, either. Either someone takes long weekend trips to San Diego or hits that bottle of self-tanner pretty hard...

So here's the story that surrounds the fateful evening when I shook hands with Arnold. Our team leader, Morgan, told us about a documentary screening that was taking place after work at a theatre downtown. This theatre is beautiful... it's big and old and has velvet curtains and these gaudily beautiful golden curlicue decorations all over the wall and overpriced popcorn in the lobby. (But vegan cookies were also for sale!) That night, the Crest had been rented out for the screening of a documentary about Sargent Shriver. "Sarge," as I feel comfortable calling him now, is the dad of Maria Shriver, and Maria Shriver is the wife of the illustrious Mr. Schwarzenegger. As a good husband should, he was in attendance at the screening, supporting his wife and her endeavors.

Sarge Shriver was a very interesting character. He was the man who got the Peace Corps up and running, started "The War Against Poverty," began a lot of community-based programs to help people hold their government accountable, and instituted numerous programs that gave people the tools and education to lift themselves and their children out of poverty. Some small setbacks like the Vietnam War made plans derail, but he was a very interesting man who had a serious, idealistic passion for creating change. The documentary took a look at his life, the politics that surrounded it, and the accomplishments that he made in a way that definitely made him the hero, but it was also very interesting to learn about some eras in American history that I know embarrassingly little about.

I don't think the Peace Corps is in the cards for my future, but I'd like to share some of the passion that Shriver had for making positive change in the world with others and make sure it is present in my own life, even when it sounds like a daunting task. There are opportunities all around us.

Happy 2008

It's my hope that along with flossing regularly, I'll be updating this blog more frequently in the new year. I'm not always successful with keeping my resolutions, but you dear reader, will probably see this blog more often than my teeth, so here goes...

We're back in McClellan, finishing up the last 3 weeks of our project at the Food Bank. It's such a wonderful place to work... I'm going to miss it when we are assigned another project. I've been getting a little antsy, since we are kept in suspense about our next assignment nearly up until a week before we leave. Even though I would love to go to Hawaii, I'll have to wait until 4th phase (or roughly the beginning of June) if there's there's a small chance of us being sent to the islands. More likely, we'll be going to the Gulf Coast, or staying in the Western region, which would be my first choice. I'd love to have a project somewhere in Washington State or Oregon... I wouldn't mind sunny San Diego.

But until we leave, I've been assigned to the warehouse in the mornings and the After School club in the afternoon. I've been doing some chatting with teammates and think that my warehouse assignment might be short-lived. Brad was asked to work in Playcare (0-5 year olds running around and being cute while causing trouble) in the mornings, and working with children is not his thing. I'm not sure how a full day of kiddies will be, but I think it would be a better fit than the warehouse. We'll see. Brad and I may end up switching jobs. I'd like to give the warehouse a shot though... my teammate Mike says that they'll let me drive the forklift if I'm persistent in my asking and bothering.

Today was a day for recovery, however. Some cold germs laid me pretty low over the weekend, so I thought I'd spend one more day resting and ensure that they were gone for good. Thanks to a gallon of apple juice, some homeopathic cold meds, and a bunch of sleep, I'm feeling much better.