An Introduction to My Team

For those of you who were readers of my blogs about Peru and Georgia, I feel like this one might seem a little dry. Instead of writing about tarantulas peeing on my face or about getting wine-drunk with my principal, I'm writing about scanning bills and reports into an archive file. Pretty exciting stuff. So for this post I'll take a break from the boring stuff and talk about something a little more interesting. The pack of hooligans that make up my team.

In order to protect the privacy of my team members who may not wish to have their names plastered over the interwebs, I will use appropriate nicknames for each.

Let's start with my Team Leader. We'll call her "The Biebs." She's a typical Long Islander. Loud and obnoxious. In the most endearing sense of the word, of course. She was in the traditional NCCC Corps last round and loved it so much she came back as a TL. She loves Billy Joel and every chain restaurant in existence. Favorite phrases: "Good stuff!" "HEELLLLLOOOOO!!" and "I don't WAANnnnnnnaaaaa!"

Next we have "B" from the Bronx. She's very professional and gets down to business, but every once in a while, her ghetto side (my favorite side) comes out. You never know when it's going to happen. I'll share one of my favorite stories as an example. We're sitting in training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in New Mexico, learning about FEMA Individual Assistance. As soon as the instructors announce that it's breaktime, she turns to the 3 of us at her table with an angry look on her face and says, "Yo! Who turned on the air conditioner in here?? It's freezing! Yo, some dude's sweatin' in here and I'm gonna find out who it is!"

Then there's "Quack Quack." He's what you would imagine someone from Washington to be like, walking around in his North Face jacket, always trying to stay in shape and eat healthy. In fact it's not uncommon to see him eating plain leaves of spinach out of a plastic baggie like a rabbit. Quack Quack is the team motivator, inspiring us to set all kinds of goals (learn French, watch educational documentaries on a weekly basis, start a book club, learn the Korean alphabet) which it turns out we have very little time to accomplish. But at least we have lofty dreams. And he's half Korean, so he's teaching me how to say really offensive phrases in Korean, which may be useful someday, because if Kim Jong-un ever decides to stop being such a turd and threatening to bomb everyone I would really like to teach English in South Korea.

My next teammate, I shall call 'The Enforcer.' She doesn't take no crap from nobody. If you tell her that someone is bothering you, she will tell you "Go punch 'em in the throat!" She loves driving the 15-passenger van, which is great because then I don't have to do it. She's also a bit OCD. Her part of the room is always impeccably organized and she will punch you in the throat if you double dip that chip. We've sort of made it our mission to break her out of it though, so we'll casually let it slip that we stuck our grubby fingers in the food that she's eating. Slowly but surely it's working. She borrowed my chap stick the other day.

Next up we have "Ron Howard." Ron, unlike most of us, actually has a degree in Emergency Management, so FEMA Corps was a logical life choice for him. He's like the dad of the team, walking around in his checkered golf sweaters and long khaki shorts with Birkenstocks, handing out sage advice. And if you ever have a beer with him, make sure you ask him about his theory of men and women. And then order another beer, because you're going to be there for a while. :)

The next girl on our team, I will refer to as "The Bird." Her signature dance move is the Birdie, and when she gets scared or excited, she tends to squawk like a bird. Ironically, she's terrified of birds. She's known for phrases like "Ako taco!" - used in awkward situations - and "Probs not!!" She's from a small town in Maine and is definitely the whitest girl on our team. (Yes, I am from a small town in South Dakota, and yes, she is whiter than me). She also has a strange phobia of being shot.

Next we have "Rye Bread." He lived in Guyana for the first part of his life and the moved to New York. He is simultaneaously the sanest and the weirdest person on our team. You can count on him to keep a level head in any situation, but you can also count on him to do incredibly strange things like make a Nutella and turkey sandwich. (He ate it, too). It's not uncommon for him to turn to someone in the van and ask a really profound question out of nowhere because he's "just curious." One of Rye Bread's great downfalls, however, is tuna. He eats a massive amount of tuna, and I've become very concerned about the amount of mercury coursing through his blood stream. Luckily, I've had an intervention, calculated safe levels of tuna consumption based on his body weight at http://www.ewg.org/research/tuna-calculator and am currently monitering his tuna intake so that his future babies aren't born with 3 heads.

Then there's the baby of our AmeriFamily, "Timmy." Timmy is a girl, just to avoid confusion. She's from the Buffalo area of New York, and is the only other person on the team who says 'pop' instead of soda. She is best known for her creepy habit of staring at people. It can be really unnerving. She's a sweet person in general, but in the mornings it's best to avoid her. I learned this when I roomed with her at FLETC. She would just stand, unmoving, glaring at me in the morning, for a really long time. I would finally say, in as unconfrontational voice as possible, "Do you need something?" She would just shake her head no and continue glaring at me. There's been more than one morning where I've feared she was going to murder me. We have a lot in common, such as our love for Harry Potter and Arrested Development, and we also make a great cooking team.

So those are my peeps for the next 7 months! I think we love each other as much as 9 strangers who live and work together can. We're much closer than most teams, and we've gotten to know each other really well after living in such close quarters at Camp Copass. Maybe too well. We probably look strange to outsiders because we find it entertaining to talk to each other in British or southern accents for days at a time, we cartwheel and tumbleweed in the lawn, and we have fake polygamous marriages. After weeks of spending every waking (and sleeping) hour with the same 8 people, you find that everything becomes an inside joke. You also find that this tends to scare off any normal human beings who may have otherwise wanted to interact with you. And then this isolation continues to make you weirder and weirder. It's a vicious cycle, really.

Why I Miss All of Grandpa's Phone Calls

Although sometimes I think he doesn't believe me, it's because I'm busy. Really busy.

Of course, there's work. We leave for work at 7:30 a.m. each morning and get home around 5:00. After work there's various things we have to get done.

PT: Three times a week we have to work out. Two of those are group PT and one is individual. We might play basketball or soccer, or do circuit training or an Insanity DVD. This lasts about an hour.

Laundry: We don't have laundry facilities at the camp, so we have to make a trip to the laundromat once a week. This usually eats up about 3 hours of our day.

Team Meetings: We have those once a week, but usually have them at the laundromat while our clothes are washing.

Grocery Shopping: I'm a Food POC along with 2 others on the team, so it's our job to make sure we're stocked up on groceries. We usually make Wal-Mart runs about twice a week. Since we're buying about $150 worth of groceries for 9 people with different tastes on a tight budget, these shopping trips usually take a while, too. And then there's the unloading labeling of food (we share a kitchen with 4 other FEMA Corps teams).

Cooking: Someone has to cook for everyone each night. Here, we're only equipped with a microwave, a grill or a propane burner, so this can take longer than usual as well.

Recruiting Events: I'm a CAPper (Corps Ambassador Program) which means I go to colleges, high schools, etc to recruit people to apply for AmeriCorps NCCC. We only do that every 2 weeks or so, so it doesn't take too much of my time in the evenings.

Cleaning: We have a rotating schedule for cleaning our bathroom and kitchen.

So basically, the weeks are jam packed. By the time you get done doing all your stuff and eating dinner, you have to make your lunch to pack for the next day, and it's probably about 10:00. It doesn't leave much time to do things like reading, skyping, watching netflix, or answering grandpa's phone calls.

However, I shouldn't complain, because this is nothing compared to what the Vinton and Vicksburg teams experienced when they were working Superstorm Sandy. From what they told us they didn't have to choose between sleeping or catching up on Mad Men when they got home. They had to choose between showering or eating supper, because they were too exhausted to do both.

And the National Weather Service says this is going to be a particularly active year for hurricanes, so I think busier times are in store for us.

Off to Work We Go

So here we are in the middle of our 3rd week working at the FEMA offices. Our team is working alongside a team from the Vinton, Iowa campus in the Response Division. The first 2 weeks were a little bit slow. The full-time employees have been very busy with different things, so they didn't have enough time to explain our project to us and help us really get going with it. However, a lot of our time has been filled with some interesting trainings.

The staff at FEMA are very good about giving us opportunities to go to any of the trainings they're holding for their employees and to come grab us if anything interesting is going on that we might want to see. They want us to be able to learn as much as possible while we're here. So we attended a 2-day training/simulation that focused on the Regional Response Coordination Center (RRCC), basically the regional support unit for the staff on the ground, and how it would function in the event of a disaster. We also attended a short training on the Endangered Species Act and how FEMA works with the Fish and Wildlife Service to make sure that any work they do will not have a negative effect on any endangered or threatened species or their critical habitats. Another training adressed social media and how FEMA is using it to reach the public. (You can follow FEMA Region VI - the region I work in - on Twitter @femaregion6 and you can also follow FEMA on Facebook to get updates of what the agency is doing). Next week, we're attending another training which will teach us about the different equipment that is used when working with hearing or vision impaired disaster survivors. They also grabbed us to show us how the IMAT team, basically the first team on the ground when a disaster hits, gets packed and prepared to deploy on short notice (they were conducting a drill).

The entire staff is very welcoming and friendly. I was a little nervous on our first day, expecting a lot of stiff, serious government employees, but they're always really laid-back and nice. They threw us a barbecue on our first day, they chat with us, they give us homemade cookies. It's great.


And the work is definitely picking up. We're beginning to archive old Mission Assignments by scanning them and storing them electronically. It will definitely keep us busy. And today we got to go on a field trip to the Fort Worth Distribution Center. This is one of the places where they store the commodities that they'll need in the event of a disaster. We walked through huge warehouses stacked from bottom to top, and front to back with pallets of water, food, blankets, tarps, plastic sheeting, etc. They explained to us the complexity involved with moving all those items and figuring out how much they'd need, how they'd get it there, and how long it would take. Not to mention getting it all back after the disaster efforts are completed.

The weirdness still hasn't worn off. Every time I look down at my blue polo with the Department of Homeland Security seal sewn in, or at my super official badge that says FEMA with the holograms and everything, I think "How did I end up here?" I never would have thought.

Arriving in TX & a Brief Interlude Outside the AmeriBubble

As you can probably tell by my lack of posts, it's been a busy couple of weeks. (Also, sorry about the lack of pictures, but it's not letting me add them to my posts right now, for some reason.)

On Wednesday, March 27th (ish), we left New Mexico and embarked on our short 8 hour journey to Ft. Worth, TX. If you don't think 8 hours is short, you should talk to the teams who had to drive for 5 days to get to New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Our lodging in Denton wasn't quite ready for us yet, so we hung around Ft. Worth at the La Quinta for a couple of nights. Oh the La Quinta, with it's giant soft beds, it's numerous fluffy pillows, it's amazing showerhead, it's ice machine, pool and hot tub. We soaked it all in, knowing that might be our most luxurious dwelling for the next 8 months.

FEMA didn't make us start work until Monday, so we enjoyed a relaxing 4-day weekend. And we needed it after 2 weeks straight of classroom time, trying not to confuse PPI with PII, or trying to remember whether a microwaveable is reimburseable or not. Not to mention trying to keep straight the multiple rules being enforced for the training center, which was not easy, since they changed them every day. Plus, Ft. Worth was a nice taste of civilization after being cooped up in Artesia, New Mexico, home of nothing. So we took advantage of our little break there. We went to the Ft. Worth stockyards, a historic center that was used as a livestock market in the late 1800's. Today it's a tourist trap and I loved it. It reminded me a lot of Deadwood or Keystone in South Dakota, so it was a nice taste of home. We browsed a cute little tea and spice shop, which was sadly way out of our AmeriBudget. We talked to the cowboys who were riding their horses or walking their longhorns up and down the street, and we went to a petting zoo. It was probably aimed at children under the age of 12, but remember that most of us have dogs or cats that we had to leave behind (my Macy, *tear*) so petting a baby goat was very therapeutic. Then we went to the thrift store, where we spent the entire time trying on Hawaiian shirts, coveralls, and muumuus and then taking pictures of ourselves. It kept us entertained for a good hour and we bought nothing. I'm sure the employees loved us. Afterwards, we were going to check out downtown Ft. Worth, but we can't park the van in parking garages, and couldn't find a spot big enough for our colossal 15-passenger, so we just headed back to the hotel.

On Friday, we were able to head to our lodging in Denton. However, 3 of my friends from my days in Peru were meeting up in Austin for Easter weekend, and I really wanted to join them, since we had the weekend off. Although my Team Leader is a self-described "worried Jewish mother" to all of us, she was nice enough to let me stay behind and grab a ride down to Austin with a friend who was coming from Arlington.

And thus began my first venture out of the AmeriBubble. This term is used to describe the tight-knit AmeriCorps community that is formed from the start of the program and the isolation, so to speak, from the outside world. You eat, sleep, live, work, and play with the corps. Contact with "outsiders" is rare. Contact with outsiders without another corps member within 20 feet of you is almost nonexistant. We live in our own little world of blue shirts and khaki pants.

On Friday I took a brief hiatus from that world, and it was both refreshing and really weird. I had a great time being around old friends and getting away from it all for the weekend, but I also truly did miss my team. It's strange to be around a small group of people for 6 weeks straight and then hang out with people outside that group. You start to make a joke about ground guiding or

My friend Joel had moved from Lima to intern with a company in Austin, and my friends Hannah and Carlin both lived in the region, so they decided to reunite for Easter. Luckily, Hannah saw on Facebook that I was moving to Denton, and I got the invite, too! It was a really fun weekend. Austin is a very cool city, and it was great to see friends that I haven't seen in a year and a half. We went up to Mount Bonnell, where we had great views of the city. We went to a park with peacocks roaming around. We ate delicious Peruvian food in a partially abandoned mall. We went to an outdoor grafitti gallery. And of course we enjoyed Austin's night life. I personally loved Rainey Street, a street where all the houses have been turned into bars and the backyards have been decorated with fire pits, torches, lanterns, and comfy chairs. It was brilliant.

Meanwhile, my teammates were arriving at Camp Copass, our new lodging until June 6th. The feedback I was receiving did not sound too promising. Cold showers, gross bathrooms, cramped living quarters. Rustic, to put it nicely. So I enjoyed my last shower in Joel's nice apartment, and braced myself to return.

I took the Mega Bus back to Dallas where my team picked me up and we headed to Denton.

Read my next post to find out if Camp Copass was as terrible as I feared...