PICTURES!!!

I apologize that these pictures are in no chonological order or any order in general. You're just going to have to take these pictures as they are. Most of these pictures were stolen from my team mates.This is a picture of the ride home back to Sacramento, CA through the blizzard. This is in the southwest, either in Arizona or New Mexico.
This is me tearing down some dry wall covered in black mold with a sledge hammer. I harnessed the power of Thor.
This is downtown Sacramento. Our training in October took place about 15 minutes from here.
During out training, we had a short retreat up to Mendocino, CA in the heart of the Redwood Forest.
Here are a couple of signs outside of abandoned homes in Galveston, TX.
It seemed like these people loved looters.
Here are a few pictures of the destruction on Galveston Island.
More damage.
Debris scattered across an abandon house's lawn.
A destroyed garage.
A typical tag on houses around Galveston.
This is my team's Christmas sweater picture. It's a little dark but I'm near the top in the red sweater.
This picture at the beach was taken the day before Thanksgiving. How many of you got to go swimming at Thanksgiving?
This is my team mate Nick and myself enjoying a turkey leg at Dickens on the Strand, the event I talked about in my last post.
This is me dressed as Patrick from Sponge Bob Square Pants with my team mate Nicole as the elf. This is during a Christmas event at the Moody Gardens (the hotel, museums, and pyramids right next store to where we were living) that we got to volunteer at in Galveston.
This is my team mate Andrew, Big Foot, and I at our retreat in Mendocino.
This is our team with a resident of Galveston, who's lawn and garage we cleaned up after it was ruined from the storm. Also in the picture: Michael Jackson.
My team with a Methodist Volunteer in charge of organizing groups to clean out houses. We mucked out the house behind us.
My team at the sea wall. The sea wall, which is about 15 feet high, was built after the massive hurricane in 1900. The sea wall construction actually raised the elevation of the city and before Ike, protected it from countless amount of hurricanes.
This is my team doing the best High School Musical impression. That's the gulf of Mexico behind us. My team from left to right: Kristin, Me, Nick, Louise, Claudia, Sara, Andrew, Lindsay, Nicole, and Debbie.
These are my friends Mike, Sierra, Chris, and Billy on Halloween which took place during training in Sacramento.
Here is some of my team next to the base of the redwood tree I pictured earlier with our team leader Brittany in the green sweat shirt.
Here is some my team on a scavenger hunt during our training in Sacramento. We are currently eating chocolate covered insects.

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.