This week we had the reveal for our next AmeriCorps spike, and on January 11 we will be moving down to Indio, California, a suburb of Palm Springs located just outside Joshua Tree National Park. During the day, we will be working with an organization similar to Habitat for Humanity that builds houses for low-income families, and at night we will be helping run a bilingual after-school program for disadvantaged youth. Truthfully, this wasn’t my first choice. I was hoping for an environmental project, but I had to remind myself that going to Baton Rouge hadn’t been my first choice either. But as our five weeks of service here come to a close, I realize that I have learned quite a bit. So here’s a few things that I’ve learned during our first spike and that I hope to expand upon in future spikes.
1. Minimalism Is Everything—
There were more than a couple houses that we worked on that required several days of removing and consolidating personal belongings before we could do any deconstruction. I’m not trying to say that these people were especially materialistic. They were the average Americans, but I don’t think that we ever realize how much stuff we accumulate over the years and how much this stuff holds us back from other endeavors. It took having to clear out people’s entire life’s worth of belongings to see the epidemic. Even in my 22 years, I feel that I have more stuff than I really need or want. One of my first tasks after this year will be decluttering my life and making sure that I am not being held back by my things.
2. Knowing When to Just Jump In—
I’ve always been someone who likes to plan everything out before I start a project. Improvisation and spontaneity do not come easily to me. I mean, just look at article. I had to lay everything out in a list to keep myself on track. But doing construction work taught me that sometimes you can’t anticipate how a task will go until you just try it. I could look at a cabinet trying to figure out how to dissemble it, but no matter how long I spend planning I won’t know if something will work until I try it. There were so many tasks that I didn’t know how to do prior to the spike. For example, I had never removed a toilet or bathtub before, but all the studying how to do this at the end of the day won’t remove the toilet or bathtub. You just need to jump, get your hands dirty, and see what works, because what works in one house is not going to work in another house and sometimes you need to get creative to make something work. And no textbook or course is going to teach you problem-solving.
3. There’s Always Going to Be People You Don’t Like—
Never before AmeriCorps have I encountered so many people that I genuinely dislike and fundamentally disagree with. This is a sad, but true fact. Usually my method for dealing with these type of people is to put as much space between us as possible, but this wasn’t really possible during this spike when we were all practically living on top of each other. The people you worked with were the people you ate with and the people you lived with. If there was someone you had a problem with you just had to deal. This was not easy for me and is probably the biggest life skill that I will take away from this program. I found small ways to give myself space from these people so that I was able to continue to work with them. I took long walks, listened to music, and read whenever possible. Being an introvert on this program is incredibly difficult, and in a strange way I feel like going on a disaster spike broke me. I want personal space and time to myself, but I don’t need it anymore.
4. Question Everything—
My first instinct is to never question authority. I am not by nature a particularly rebellious person, but during this spike I learned to not take the word of my superiors at face value. There was a minor controversy/scandal during our time in Baton Rouge. The higher-ups at AmeriCorps hadn’t had our respirators properly fit-tested nor did we have testing to determine our lung capacity. Therefore, we were never entirely sure if the respirators were doing anything at all let alone possibly hurting us. I assumed that they had our safety in mind and that if they weren’t worried I shouldn’t be. Thankfully, the Team Leaders advocated for us to have us fit-tested. Upper management was at first uncooperative, but upon realizing that we were concerned for our safety and that we would not work until we felt safe, they conceded. I learned that despite any “Imposter Syndrome” I might be carrying below the surface, I should speak up when I feel strongly about something, because your superiors often don’t know anymore that you do. And in this case, since we were the ones putting our lives at risk, we actually knew more than they did.
5. If You Can Take It, You Can Make It—
If you recognize this quote, I kind of took it from the book, “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand, which I read during this project. It’s about a man in the Air Force whose plane goes down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He spends several months floating at sea, barely surviving, before being capture by the Japanese and sent to a prisoner of war camp. There he is treated inhumanely and subjected to all sorts of torture, and yet somehow he stays positive. This book came at a good time for me, because it showed me that while the body may ail, the mind is stronger that you could ever imagine. It can withstand horrible, horrible things. The living and working conditions of this project were hard, some of the hardest I’ve ever encountered. I kept telling myself that if I could stay mentally strong, I could overcome any obstacles and disappointments. So, remember, that if you can take it, you can make it.
So those are all of the personal revelations accomplishments, but there were also quite a few tangible, quantitative accomplishments. During our project, which lasted 36 days, we worked on 15 homes, completing 13 of them. Two had to be abandoned due to excessive damage that would have required professional work. We removed nearly 25,000 lbs and 189 cubic yards of debris. As a whole, AmeriCorps NCCC completed work on 677 houses, more than any other organization that provided aid. I am proud of our accomplishments, but I take them with sobriety, because 146,000 homes were damaged. There is still much work to be done.
Only some of the debris we removed from a house