Merry Christmas!

Happy holidays! I figured since this is the season of giving, I will give everyone the best present imaginable: a new blog post from yours truly. Now I know it's been quite awhile since you heard from me on this thing and I apologize for that. My greatest fear with starting this blog was that I would get lazy with it and forget to do it for awhile. Well, my greatest fears have been confirmed I guess so I'm going to make a New Year's Resolution that I actually keep up with this.

So let me bring you up to date with my work. We finished up our project in Galveston, TX on December 14th. Our work doing needs assessment was both an entertaining and challenging task. We personally got to see the many lives of people who were destroyed by Hurricane Ike which hit Galveston dead on nearly 2 months before we even arrived there. Homes were still not cleaned out, black mold grew on the sides of walls from where flood waters had got up to, and some houses with not much at all inside: no furniture or appliances. The actual information we collected from all the residents of Galveston was then put into a database where in the next few weeks a case manager will take over and work with individuals to get everything they still need. We did the job so quickly that we canvassed the whole Island about 2 weeks earlier than we were supposed to. So for the last 2 weeks we canvassed some surrounding areas and also got to muck houses. Mucking houses is basically gutting houses; ripping out all the drywall, tearing up carpets, and clearing it out so all the black mold and shaky foundation is no longer a problem.

It was a great first project and I really came to love my time in Galveston. The Island is really starting to rebuild over all. A couple of cool signs that Galveston is heading in the right direction are that two big annual events that take place in Galveston actually went on during our time there. The first is Dickens on the Strand, which is a Charles Dickens festival in the downtown area known as the Strand. The Strand was one of the areas hit the hardest by Ike with flood waters rising above 10 feet. The second was a giant biker rally that in years past as many as 500,000 motorcyclists flocked to town. This year it was a little scaled down but it still attracted around 200,000 bikers.

We left on the 14th and headed to spend the night in Austin, about 4 hours away. Austin has to be one of the most fun cities I've been to. Then the next day we headed north towards Oklahoma City, through Dallas/Fort Worth, then headed directly west through the Texas panhandle, and on to New Mexico, Arizona and finally California. We rode parallel to historic Route 66 for nearly all of the trip. The surprise of the trip was that we drove through blizzards almost the entire way through the Southwest.

To close, when I go back to Sacramento after Christmas break, I will be starting on my new project in San Diego, CA! We will be staying at Alliant International University that was hit hard by wild fires in 2004. We will be clearing brush, planting trees, and building a sustainable irrigation system that will act as a fire line. I am really looking forward to spending my winter in beautiful Southern California. And if my blog doesn't inspire you to want to volunteer, I just wanted to let you know that there is going to be an Americorps NCCC group volunteering in Hawaii for their next project. Enjoy the holidays and talk to you all in 2009.