Brief

Hello everyone.  I have not been doing a good job blogging.  In fact, I have been doing a terrible job at blogging. I spent most of round one trying to figure out exactly how to be an effective corps member.  This round I am going to make an effort to blog semi regularly, probably a mixture of stories from last round and from the round I am about to go into. 

But for now, this post will be an update/ overview post to catch you all up to the basics of the life I have been living.

Basics: I am part of AmeriCorps NCCC FEMA Corps.  Lets break this down. 

AmeriCorps – I am volunteering for 10 months, with a small living stipend given to me by the government so that I can live and so that my sponsor organization doesn’t have to pay for me. 

NCCC – National Civilian Community Corps – a division of AmeriCorps for 18 to 24 year olds, which provides food, housing and transportation (a 15 passenger van) to small teams of volunteers so that they can be mobile and travel around the country.  Since NCCC members live and work together, we are encouraged to do other “good” things together like working out three times a week and do extra volunteer service together.  At the end of the program, if you get a certain number of hours of service you “graduate” and get a pell education grant. 

FEMA – Federal Emergency Management Agency – Our sponsor organization.  My team is working with the Public Assistance branch of FEMA in order to write grants to get local governments federal money so that they can repair from disasters.  We do not have helicopters to save anyone.  We just have money.

Corps (pronounced “core”) – There are 60 of us who trained together in Baltimore.  We are the Eagle Unit! I am in a team of eight corps members and a team leader known as Eagle 6. There are four other major campuses around the country, each serving different regions.

CTI: Corps Training Institute – One month of training.  The first three weeks were AmeriCorps NCCC training in Baltimore, Maryland (my assigned campus), which was basically how to coexist in a team.  This admittedly got tedious very quickly.  That being said, once you get out into the field it becomes obvious that working in a NCCC team is an extreme level of teamwork that is difficult to prepare for. But more on that later. The last week of training we drove down to Vicksburg, Mississippi for FEMA specific training.  Our team is public assistance, but every team has a different specialty role.  There is Disaster Service Assistance, Individual Assistance, Logistics, External Affairs, and Planning.

Round One: Colorado Springs! We spent seven weeks in Colorado Springs helping to repair damages caused by flooding earlier in the year.  We worked in the Area Field Office with some FEMA staff workers doing work varying from scanning to full out grant writing.  A great deal happened this round.  Stories from the round will probably come out in the next few posts.

Round Two: New York City. Probably. With the flooding in South Carolina, we might end up going there.  But for right now we leave tomorrow for NYC. FEMA Flexible!

Week 1

In freshman year of college, we had week one, were we did nothing productive except orient ourselves to the campus and try timidly to make friends with the people around us and wore dorky name tags. I was extremely hot and humid.

Between the heat and awkwardness, week 1 of FEMA corps feels a lot like that.

In some ways it is worse.  The food was much worse, we are perpetually stuck in a basement for all of our orientation speakers, and there seems to be less pressure for some of the speakers to make their material interesting.  Or maybe it is just impossible to make medical benefits interesting.

In some ways though it is better.  After four years of having to learn how to make new friends, and some spectacular failures along the way, I think I have finally made par.  There is now a good group of people that I feel comfortable talking to and hanging out with, enough so that I do not have to worry about who I will sit with at meals.  During college week 1 I managed to slip so far into the background that no one knew who I was.  That has not happened here.

I have a few more roommates than I am used to.  Our rooms sleep 16, and we are full.  I don’t know if this qualifies them as barracks, but they are nicer than the barracks you see in movies, with partial walls giving a little more privacy than just rows and rows of bunks.  I am on the bottom bunk and have taken using the sleeping bag we were issued to create a curtain and give myself some privacy. 

We are living in what was once a catholic elementary school.  Our bed rooms were old classrooms.  The building is old and it feels like it.  But we have air conditioning, thank goodness.  Classes and food are in the basement auditorium; we sleep on the top floor. That puts five flights of stairs between us and most of our activities.  There is an elevator, but we are not allowed to use it.  AmeriCorps seems unhealthily obsessed with getting us into shape.  Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, as I, along with many people here could probably benefit from getting into shape. We also have required physical training three times a week, and have to do a fitness assessment on Monday to get our baseline level health.  Bleh.

As mentioned before, much of our activities this week have been straight orientation.  Starting next week, we will get more specific training.  We are trained here for three weeks, then drive to Vicksburg MS for a weeklong FEMA specific training.  Then after that we are stationed different places with our teams.  I am part of Eagle 6 (Eagle – because America!), which will work in Public Assistance.  We will in theory be doing a lot of photography, talking to people and damage assessment so that FEMA can give people money.  My team seems very calm and chill. My team leader is amazing, fun and very understanding.

Starting on Saturday, we have to cook meals for ourselves.  We get about $4.50 per person per day.   We are not wasting taxpayer money on food, believe me! How this actually plays out is that we buy food together in the groups that we travel with.  We have standard breakfast and lunch stuff that we can prepare ourselves (think sandwiches and cereal). Each night, two people cook dinner for everyone else. So far it has been better than the food we were given during the first week, but it is a bit of an adjustment to have to cook myself for the first time really in my life.

Saturday we went to the harbor area of Baltimore, which I think can best be compared to Navy Pier.  There were shops and restaurants and public spaces.  It was a lot of fun.  On Sunday we went to the Minions movie, which was nice mindless fun.

I guess the final question that I have been getting a lot is how am I doing.  I am doing all right, but not great.  I miss family, friends, and my boyfriend.  But I have met some awesome people here too.  The problem with meeting awesome people is that it is not good motivation to work on med school applications.  Oh well, I will get everything done eventually.  On the whole, things have been good.

Signing off for now,

Andrea

Epilogue: What will you do with this?

I have enough drafts of this blog post in my recycling bin to kill a cybernetic tree.  It is a good thing I draft these on a computer.  Cyber trees can regrow quite quickly.

My Grandpa told me a story, that when he broke his ankle, all of his pastor friends came and visited him and offered their sympathy.  After they had all left, a chaplain nun came in and asked him “What will you do with this?”

Most people underestimate how much reentry sucks.  Even when you are warned, you underestimate it.  Even when you have been through it before (coming back from Holden) you underestimate it.  I figured that I had gone through 9 countries worth of culture shock.  There was nothing that America could come at me with that I hadn’t already been through.  How wrong I was.

The thing about culture shock in another country is that you, for the most part, if you come in with a fairly open mind and a desire to understand, you can learn a great deal.  And even if you disagree completely with something, you can comfort yourself in the knowledge that, if it was ever really THAT bad, you would eventually go home where things are normal.

So what do you do when you come into a culture that you already know, and find just foreign enough to be disconcerting?

The thing that I cannot seem to reckon with, no matter how hard I try, it the apathy that most Americans have for most social issues.  There is no engagement with politics, with social issues, with anything.  Every other country I visited (with the exception of Switzerland), when people weren’t happy they would protest.  We don’t even vote half the time!

But I guess the real shock to my system has come in the relative lack of excitement my life has.  There is very little to do in Northfield besides study or go into town, and the town is not that big!  I was used to doing something everyday.  Or if nothing else, encountering a different culture everyday, which took energy and was exciting even in itself.  Here, I do the same things everyday, and most of those things involve sitting.  I get so bored sometimes!  The problem is that my course load is heavy enough that I don’t have time to do much else, even if I wanted to.

I’ve had a good two-month pity party for myself.  The people around me have offered me sympathies as best they are able.  But that has not gotten me anywhere.  If anything, it has just made things worse.  The question now is what am I going to do with this? 

I don’t really know the answer to that right now.  In the long term I know I want to go abroad again.  But in the shorter term, it is a matter of figuring out what I have learned on global and applying it wherever I am.  It is a matter in finding the adventures around me, or making my own if I must.  But for some reason (and I would like to think that there is a reason), there has been lit in me a fire to do something.  What, I don’t know.  But I guess that is what I have to figure out.

Helena McMillan says that you never completely fully readjust.  And maybe that is not a bad thing.  But no matter what happens, it has been a life changing adventure, one that I will never forget.

A Temple to Call My Own

I did what I promised what I would not do: leave this blog post for months without writing it.  So I apologize for that.

Tokyo!  It is definitely not what I was expecting.  Despite the fact that it is the biggest metropolitan area in the world (30 million), it is one of the most calm, peaceful cities that I have visited, perhaps second only to Geneva.

You hear horror stories about the Tokyo metro, about how it is ridiculously crowded, and that there are people whose job it is to push you in.  While it is quite crowded during rush hour, it is pretty much on par with Hong Kong or Shanghai subway trains during rush hour.  During non rush hour, we were usually able to sit down, something that was somewhat rare on Hong Kong and Shanghai lines.  And in Hong Kong was the only place where we had to wait multiple trains before we could get on because there were so many people.

The people in Tokyo are really nice.  I mean, ridiculously nice.  I had some issues booking our hostel (I mistyped my email), so they found me on facebook and sent a message saying “were you the one who wanted to book with us?”  If you are ever looking for a hostel in Tokyo, that is probably the best, cheapest, least sketchy, place there is.  Except their breakfast is a rip off.  It is basically $3 for unlimited toast and vegetable soup.

We stayed at Sakura Hostel in the Asakusa area, which was relatively centrally located in Tokyo. I say relatively, because really you cannot go many places in Tokyo without taking a half an hour subway ride, no matter where you are located in the city.  We were about a five minute walk away from a station.  To get to said station, the most direct route was to walk through Sensō-ji, Tokyo’s oldest and most significant temple (Wikipedia’s words, not mine).  Though a Buddhist shrine, it also has Shinto elements and plays host every year to a major Shinto festival (yay Eastern Asian universalism!).   We got to know the temple grounds quite well, as we were there multiple times each day. The alternative was to walk around the site, which tripled our walking time (a mistake we made the first night while lugging suitcases). It became our little temple, where we could watch other eager tourists snap pictures while we would just casually walk through (we spent our first full day being those tourist, fear not).

The second day we woke up at 3 in the morning to get to the fish market at 5 am in order to watch the Tuna auction at 6am.  Early in the morning, fishermen bring in their catch of tuna, 2 to 3 feet long, and restaurant owners come and inspect them. Then the fish are auctioned off to the highest bidder.  After watching this, we returned to our hostel and slept (more than we intended).  We returned to the fish market for a sushi lunch, and thoroughly amused one of the women working there with our various reactions to different kinds of sushi.  Eel was the most controversial in our group, with me loving it and Cassie hating it.  Heather, who at the beginning of the trip said she hated seafood, enjoyed it a lot too.  It just goes to show that you should have good seafood before you decide that you don’t like it.

That afternoon we went up to the top of the Metropolitan Government Building of Tokyo to get a good view of the city.  It is free to go up, as long as you are ok with walking through very official looking government buildings in jeans and t-shirts, getting lost, and then having a friendly business women tell you that you are in the wrong building.  Oops.

Up at the top there were some nice maps telling you what you were looking at, a very expensive café, and a very nice tour guide woman who started talking to David and pointed out to all of us a few more sites that were not on the map.  Had this been India, I would have been very suspicious of her motives.  Heck, I was still a little on edge.  I don’t know if that is cynicism or being smart.

That evening, more to say that we had done it than anything else, we went up in the Tokyo Skytree ($30 total, which is a bit ridiculous).  The view was actually really amazing.  Unlike at the government building, there were no other tall buildings in the way of the view.  We ate dinner in the sky tree (surprisingly cheap – as cheap as anything on the street).  We lost Heather briefly.  I asked a staff member if she had seen a girl with red hair, and she jokingly pointed to a cartoon character on the brochure (yes, it was for sure a joke).  Later, when we passed her again, she felt obligated to apologize.  Conscientiousness to an extreme.

Honestly, the next two days kind of blur together, so I am just going to list the highlights.  We went to the Meiji Shrine, a giant park in the middle of Tokyo in honor of Emperor Meiji, who in the 19^th century modernized Japan in such a way as to save it from being colonized and exploited like much of Eastern Asia.  Walking through the park makes it impossible to feel like you are in a city, more like being in a forest.  Or maybe an arboretum, as it had better paths than a forest would.  In the center is a giant shrine to the Emperor (a temple like building that you are not allowed to enter). 

We visited the Yasukuni Shrine, originally established by Emperor Meiji to commemorate those who had died in Meiji Restoration and other “duty to your country” sort of things.  It has since expanded, and now has a very nice war museum.  I mentioned before that the Korean War museum was biased.  This blew Korea out of the water.  They had justifications for their colonization of Korea (they were basically a Chinese colony already) and for declaring war on the US in WWII (It wasn’t our fault!).  It conveniently left out uncomfortable truths like the poor treatment of Naijing during the Japanese occupation of China.  But at least they had some really cool WWII airplanes!

We also walked through the imperial palace gardens.  The imperial palace is still being lived in, so you really can’t walk through it.  We walked through Harajuku, a district known for its outrageous “fashion” and little boutiques.  I think Heather and I appreciated this significantly more than David and Cassie.  It was also on and off raining, forcing people indoors.  We walked through several other parks (parks seemed to be surprisingly prominent).  We went to a Japanese style tea ceremony.  The place was a relatively new section of a nearby museum, and in order to get their name out they offered to do tea ceremonies for relatively cheap.  Afterwards we went to the museum, which had a special exhibit about clothes from an ethnic group in Northern Japan (I’m sorry that I don’t remember it).

It became a running joke that David was always the last one up.  One morning, we told him that we were leaving half an hour earlier than we intended on leaving.  He wasn’t very happy about that.

On our final full day, we took a bus trip out to Mt. Fuji!  The sky was amazingly clear, and we could see the entire mountain.  That does not always happen!  On the trip, we met a guy from Australia, who had been to Fuji once before, but could barely anything because of the fog.  The one sad thing was that because there had been snowfall the day before, we could only go as high up the mountain as the first station (on good days the bus can drive half way up the mountain, in July and August you can climb to the top).  The day was nice, and the views were amazing.  I think I took more pictures that day than I had in the rest of Japan combined.  After going a little ways up the mountain, we had a picnic lunch, then took a boat across nearby Lake Ashi and took a cable car up Mount Komagatake (relatively speaking it was more of a hill).  We took the bus back through some amazing countryside.  When we got back to Tokyo, the bus driver offered to take us a little closer to our hostel (again, this is Japan, it isn’t sketchy).  When we got off the bus, our tour guide gave each of us four an origami Mt. Fuji! We found a sushi place for dinner.

The next morning we were up and out early to catch our plane.  The plane flight back was fairly uneventful.  When we landed in Chicago it was snowing so much that our flight was canceled (and good thing too, as we wouldn’t have made our flight anyways).  So for five hours we camped out in the Chicago airport, marveled at the fact that everyone spoke English, and slept.  Then we were home, and that was that.