Occupy Sam's Club

*Note: The phrase "Occupy Sam's Club" was originally coined by Ana Canizales. If I don't give credit where credit is due, she will punch me in the throat. 


You have probably always wondered what it is like to live in an empty Sam's Club. Who hasn't? Let me enlighten you.

Originally, when we deployed to this disaster, we just stayed in our rooms on campus. Since my team was in the Longmont DRC, it made for about a 2-hour commute every morning with traffic. That was unfortunate, but the living situation was nice. I had a dorm room to myself, a mini-fridge and sink in my room, and my car on campus. Then, we had to move out to make room for the new class of traditional NCCC that would be moving in. (Because of the furlough, they never actually moved in yet, but at the time that was the plan.)

The next place they moved us was the fairgrounds in Longmont. This was a pretty good set up as well. We were within walking distance of work, which meant a lot more sleep. Our living quarters were basically a giant auditorium. We were sharing the fairgrounds with the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers, so they had their cots set up on one side, and FEMA Corps (there were a ton of us, not just our team) was on the other side. The Baptists cooked breakfast and dinner for us and set out food to pack lunches, so it was nice not having to worry about that either. There were pretty nice showers and bathrooms, too. But that only lasted for about a week.

Then came Sam's Club. We weren't given a lot of details about it at first, so there were a few questions running through my mind, like, Are we just setting up cots in the aisles? Do we have to pack up our stuff in the morning before the customers get in? Will anyone notice if I steal bulk cases of Starbucks coffee?

When we arrived, I realized it was a Sam's Club that was no longer in business, and was empty except for some stacks of wooden pallets. So basically just a giant cement floor and a vast expanse of fluorescent lights. So I picked an open spot on the far wall and set up my cot.

The first night was a little rough. No one knew how to turn the lights off, so they stayed on the entire night. Since the they've been dimmed. It's never actually been dark in here. Another unfortunate piece of news was that there are no showers here, not that we expected showers in a Sam's Club. However, the Rec Center, about 5 minutes down the road, and the YMCA, about 15 minutes away have been nice enough to let us use their facilities.

It's been interesting to watch the evolution of the Sam's Club. At the beginning it was just cots lined up around the perimeter, but then people started innovating. There were a few shopping carts lying around so some people snagged them to put some of their stuff in or hang clothes on. People got very creative with the pallets. I used them as shelves because I didn't like having all my stuff on the floors. Since it never gets dark at night, people got the idea to put 2 pallets up vertically on each side of their cot where their head is and put another one on top, and then cover it with clothes so the light doesn't come in through the slats. Someone else decided to buy some PVC pipe, and make a roof frame over the pallets, which they then covered with the AmeriCorps NCCC table cloth that they use for recruiting events.

The major breakthrough came when the first person put up a tent in here. Campus has some tents to rent out, so a bunch of people got them. I'm using the one that I took camping. It's amazing what a difference the tent makes. Just to have some form of privacy. I don't like sleeping in giant concrete and metal rooms, either, so the tent makes it a bit more cozy. I have my cot set up inside, and a little chair to use as a shelf. The girls on my team arranged our tents in a little circle and we have our "courtyard" in the middle. It's pretty great.

There are some silly problems with living in a Sam's Club. Little things, like the fact that the sinks in the bathroom are automatic, so when you're washing your face the water is constantly turning on and off every time your hands move. Or the fact that the automatic doors sometimes stop working so you have to pry them open with your fingernails. Or the fact that it's a huge area, so making coffee takes 3 times as long in the morning just because you have to walk so far to fill the water then go to the coffee pot then come back and get ready, then go back when it's brewed. (This has since been solved, since our tent circle is right next to the outlet and hence the coffee pot.) Then there are some bigger problems like when the roof leaks in like 8 spots. Luckily I was not one of the people that woke up with water-filled shoes.

People in the community have been great, though. The only cooking facilities we have here are propane camp stoves (and I'm not sure you're really supposed to use those indoors), so our team mostly eats out or buys stuff at the grocery store conveniently located next door. Hearing of our situation, the grocery store and Panera Bread have both donated us food, and Kohl's is planning on baking for us as well. We had some donated water and snack food to begin with that I believe came from Sam's Club. And the locals have been absolutely amazing to us. Different organizations have set up schedules to come in and bring us dinner. Churches, schools, Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts have all come in to grill for us, have casserole night, a burrito bar, a crock-pot buffet. We've had delicious homemade pies. Random people drop in to bring us fresh-baked cookies. They've been really sweet to us.

Today at the grocery store, me and a couple girls were pooling our money to buy some groceries. We were standing at the check out counter pulling money out of our envelopes that carry our $15/day food stipend, and the lady behind us told the cashier that if we were short anything, she'd cover us. People stop us in the grocery store or the Rec Center to say thank you, school kids made us Thank You cards. The community has been awesome and we really, really appreciate it. There's nothing like some homemade green bean casserole and apple pie to make you feel a little bit more comfortable when you're living in a warehouse.

So what do you do all day when you're living in a Sam's Club? People have found some roller blades at thrift stores and some people had skateboards, so you take advantage of the giant concrete floor. I drink tea and crochet a lot, because I'm 80 years old. There's like 10 teams here, so you can chill around the dinner table with some nice company.

It's really not that bad. This is actually a bit nicer than Georgia was. The bathrooms are indoors, and it's an actual toilet and not a smelly hole in the ground. Plus, it stays fairly warm in here, as opposed to my bedroom in Georgia, where my lotion and face wash would actually freeze in the bottle. The only part of it that makes it a bit hard to swallow is that the Reservists, who do the same job as me, are being put up in the Hampton Inn with about a $60 per diem to my $15. Not to mention the fact that they get paid. That's been one of the hard parts about this year, and probably one of the bigger differences between traditional NCCC and FEMA Corps. In traditional, you're usually working for non-profits. Basically, if you weren't there to do the work, it probably wouldn't get done, because they don't have the funds to do it. It's easier to do that work for $3 an hour, because you feel like you're making a difference. In FEMA Corps, the work would still get done, they would just have to pay people to work 90 hour weeks. (Which really they should, right?) And they would have the money to do it. (Maybe not anymore.)

On the bright side, I've gained amazing work experience and life experience. And it's always hilarious to see the faces of the Reservists I'm training when they ask me where we're staying and I tell them "in a tent in an abandoned Sam's Club."

Plus how many people will be able to tell their grand kids about that time they lived in a makeshift tent city in an empty warehouse for 6 weeks?

What the Furlough?

The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency, which means the furlough has left it's mark on AmeriCorps.

Right now we're living in an abandoned Sam's Club (I'll have a whole other post about that soon).

Payday is on Thursday, so if it hasn't ended by then, I won't get my $157. Unfortunately, that means I'll have to hold off on buying that property in Martha's Vineyard.

Graduation is on November 20th, so if the furlough doesn't end by then, they won't have any money to send any of us home. They also probably won't have any money to feed us, since they didn't budget that for anytime past the 20th. They also won't have any staff.

What will probably happen is we will be stuck in the abandoned Sam's club for forever. We won't have leaders so our own warehouse society will probably evolve. Leaders will rise and fall. Empires will emerge and collapse.

We will have no money for food so we will probably form a gang of thieves who will sneak into the Albertson's dumpsters next door, scavenging for day old bread or dine-and-dashing at the Chili's across the street.

As the years go by and the warehouse population grows (either as a result of AmeriBabies or homeless people wandering into the unlocked doors), we may begin to have territory wars between the North Side Perry Pointers and the South Side Denverites. The winners (Denverites most likely) will become the elite and the losers the oppressed.

Eventually the Denverites will have to implement some sort of Hunger Games to maintain their powers over the Pointers. As the years go by and the rest of the country has fallen into chaos or been destroyed by the zombie apocalypse, our society will move past its concrete walls and begin to bring order back to our nation. But it will not be the freedom that we have known until know. Instead, it will be the dark, corrupt rule of our Panem-esque Denverites. Until a Katniss-like figure emerges (maybe from Vicksburg?) the nation will only know oppression and sorrow.

Just something to think about, Congress.

Passing the Torch

When I last left off, I was at the Longmont DRC. For the first few days there, we were slammed. Then they sent another FEMA Corps team, and slowly the Individual Assistance and DSA reservists began to trickle in. And soon we were faced with a very overstaffed DRC, and a decline in the amount of people that were visiting it. It was frustrating.

Not only were we left with too little work, but we were still not allowed to shorten our hours or get days off. I asked for one day off to hang out with my mom while she was in Denver for meetings, and such a big deal was made out of it that you would've thought the DRC would crumble without me there. I finally did get the day off, and lo and behold, the DRC was extremely slow that day and my teammates only talked to about 3 people each the whole day.

Usually I don't mind the long hours at the beginning of a disaster, but usually I'm working them outside. This time we were under the bright fluorescent lights of an empty store that used to be a JC Penny or something in the Twin Peaks mall. So I was sitting all day long, only seeing about an hour of sunlight a day on the  hour and a half long commute to work, and feeling useless. It was rough.

And then, while I was drinking cocktails with my mom at her hotel, good news came. Our team was out of the DRC. As the team who had spent the most time in the field doing DSA, we were chosen by the DSA folks from Headquarters to pass the torch to the incoming FEMA Corps and to do some refresher training for the Reservists. As I may have mentioned in another post, DSA (Disaster Survivor Assistance) used to be called Community Relations. Basically, they updated the program and made a lot of changes. The very first time DSA was tested in the field was with our team in West, TX. A lot of the Reservists have been doing CR for years, so it's a huge change when they get sent on disaster now.

First off, there's the iPad. That was also put into use for the first time in West. Before, if a CR team knocked on someone's door, and that person wanted to register with FEMA, they would give them the hotline number to call or tell them to go to the DRC. With the iPad, we can register them at their door or pull up their case if they're already registered to see what's going on.

The iPad also has a GIS app that allows crews in the field to mark the streets that they've hit and enter data about things they observe in the field to avoid duplicating efforts.

For the 18-24 year olds that are in FEMA Corps, learning how to use the iPad is a breeze. We've grown up with all these technological advances and they're second nature to us. However, a lot of reservists are retirees, and haven't spent the years of their lives texting or playing Candy Crush while sitting in class. They're not all as familiar with the technology, and it's a bigger learning curve.

Our job, basically, is to go out in the field and visit different crews while they're working. We can follow them around while they're canvassing or sit with them at a DRC and go over the mapping application, the registration and inquiry process, and how to access and utilize the tools available for them out in the field.

I love this job. The crews are spread out all over, so we've gotten to go to places like Sterling and Colorado Springs to work with them. The Reservists that we've worked with so far have been a lot of fun, and it's cool to meet the FEMA Corps from the Vinton, IA and Perry Point, MD campuses and swap stories.

Also, my team of trainers is awesome and we rock and we're awesome.