End of Day 3

We're back at the hotel after our third day on the job site. It was another day with rakes and shovels in our hands, making the neighborhood of 28 houses look as livable on the outside as they do on the inside. Like I said in my previous post, this is a completely different experience from the previous two years except for one big similarity...the fact that we are making a home for people that lost theirs 3.5 years ago. We're still sweating in the southern heat and humidity, just with shovels and rakes in our hands instead of hammers and cat claws.

Our supervisor Ken told me on the side that our group has been working so hard and so quickly that we have finished the work he planned for our four days here in just three days. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows the people in this group. We all take our work seriously, and our volunteering work even more seriously. We will make up some of the other group's work tomorrow, and possibly some of next week's crew's duties.

Personally, I've loved walking up to a backyard of one of the houses in the morning at 8am, seeing nothing but embedded tires and large rocks strewn across the hardened, tire-marked clay earth, and walking away a few hours later looking at a cleanly groomed yard ready to be sprayed for grass. It's amazing what you can find in the ground of a plot of land that had previously been owned by someone who did nothing but work on cars and drink beer, but it's also amazing to see how that same ground can be cleaned up by a few hard working people. Even though it's also been fun planting trees and digging trenches, I've especially enjoyed making sure these yards are clean enough for kids to run around on when they move in later this year.

On the side, I've adopted a large 30 ft. tall tree that was in very bad shape when we showed up. We're fixing a few things about this tree that aren't happening to similar trees around the lot. It had a hand-held fishing net growing out of the trunk since the tree was much, much smaller, so we ripped it out. The tree also had a few large branches broken off and hanging from other intact branches, so we laddered up and worked those branches down out of the tree. Lastly, it had vines running up the trunk of the tree from the nasty weeds growing on the ground, so we ripped them off the trunk. All in all, it was in much worse than the same type of tree across the street. Ken thinks it isn't growing any leaves or shrubbery because of salt from the storm's 30-40 ft. surges, but we think it can make a comeback, so we're doing what we can to help it come back to life. I can't wait to visit in a few years and see if it has made any progress.

Alright, time to order some pizza so the group can hang out at the hotel tonight and play whatever drinking game comes to mind.

I hope all is well back home. I miss Tania and everything/everyone else back in LA, but knowing that we're doing such a good thing eases the pain of being away. But only for a couple more days, then we'll be back to everything we love back home.

Night.
Craig