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