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.