jungle love.

I’ve been officially lacking on my Blogging duties. Time for quick catch-up… Round two ended with a great sense of accomplishment and a twinge of sadness. The work my team did is still hard to wrap my head around. I calculated that individually I worked on 45 and 47 Chambers Street houses (our Blitz Build homes) for 327 hours! Being that Moose 4 lost two members due to personal conflicts and switching teams near the end of round 2, we invested over 3,106 total labor hours on these homes. Putting that into a different perspective, it would have taken an individual person about a year and a half, 78 weeks, of 40 hours per week to equal the amount of time we spent on those townhomes in just two months! Ah, the power of national service!

It is a mind-blowing number that helps explain why it was so hard to leave that place.

I really started to get attached to all the great people at Habitat, our Newburgh friends, and that feeling that I was doing something that really mattered. It was an absolutely wonderful, humbling experience. But life in AmeriCorps doesn’t let you sit stagnant and daydream about past projects for long. Phoenix 3, my new fire team is already busy making new memories down in Suffolk, Virginia. We arrived Thursday at the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Reserve and got settled in the crew quarters, which we share with a few other seasonal employees. The housing allows for room to sprawl which is unheard of in AmeriCorps. There are four bathrooms, real beds, and a huge kitchen! We are living like royalty compared to our other teams. (Moose 4 is living in a “lean-to” in the middle of the woods, no electricity or running water with a 10 minute walk to the kitchen…so yea, I’m spoiled right now)  I adore my Phoenix teammates and love the new energy we have together. 

Maddi and I forging the river, returning from our firefighter duties in good spirits :)

Our first full day on the job there was a small wildfire on the 111,000-acres of forested wetlands where we live. By small, I mean miniscule. It was basically a smoldering tree, most likely due to a lighting strike a few days prior. But non-the-less it was still exciting! We suited up and headed out, bushwhacking our way through the hot Virginia jungle. Several hours later, absolutely dreaded in our own sweat, there was a "clear" path and a hose line laid out. The tree was doused in water and our work for the day was done. Now it is the weekend and we are in town catching up on internet and phone service... 

More stories to come.

sending my love.