Happy New Year!

Dear Internet,

Happily, the work here in Joplin has increased a LOT! We have a couple of big volunteer groups coming in next week, as well as a surprise group for the past two days, so Ali and I have been scrambling to line up work for them to do, coordinate with homeowners, and update our databases. But it's a good kind of scrambling :)

We've also been dealing with a few problems over the last few days - oir only working truck,  Pickle, breaking down twice; our workers messing up homeowners' property, getting in crashes, messing around on the service site, being unreachable by phone - but when I say "we," really I mean Ali and Cody. I've been able to NOT have to deal with it, which makes me very happy!

So I've been really enjoying full days and meaningful work, the feeling of actually getting important things done for Joplin. The three of us are currently flying along the highway in Cody's Jeep, heading back to STL for New Year's with our ERT buddies who will be back in town. I get to pick up Will at the airport tomorrow, which I'm really looking forward to, and I get to see a lot of other neat people that I've been missing. This is going to be a great weekend and a great new year!

I'll just leave you with this photo - last night Ali and I went to visit our ERT friend Marty and his family in Springfield. They fed us a great dinner, including sending us home with some red velvet cake, which we ate about an hour ago while driving down the highway.

xoxo,
Liz

G- G- G- Glamorous

Dear Internet,

I hope your Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/etc was wonderful. I was able to fly home to see my family in Virginia, which was great! I was just there from Friday night until early Monday morning, but it was great to be at home, kicking it in my pajamas with my dad on Christmas morning. We ate a lot of food, we opened a lot of presents, we baked a cheesecake ("adventure pie;" we'll pretend it really looked like this), we played Bananagrams. It was a great weekend.

Adventure pie.

Aside from teasing you with this delicious Salted Caramel & Vanilla Baked Cheesecake, I wanted to post a few other pictures of my home and office here in Joplin, since I haven't really done that yet and Mom asked me lots of questions about "living arrangements." So, Ma, here you go: the glamorous world of disaster relief.

Our humble abode. Technically it belongs to the city and I
think referees at the nearby baseball field used to use it to change
before/after games, so it was unoccupied most of the time. We're
pretty sure some unsavory types used to hang out on
the front porch there...

The office, from across the street.

Volunteer Reception Center

AmeriCorps Recovery Center (ARC) = the official name for
the office.

One of our regular volunteers, Chuck,
carved this for us.

Volunteers signed the banner

Our job boards - for debris removal, tree work, or special projects.
There's lots to do!

My desk!

AmeriCorps St Louis <3 s Joplin

xoxo,
Liz

Holidays are Surreal in Joplin

Many of you probably know about the EF5 tornado (EF5 being the highest ranking on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, meaning that winds were in excess of 200 mph) that hit Joplin, MO on 22 May 2011. It was one of the deadliest tornadoes on record, causing around 160 deaths and destroying a 1-mile by 6-mile strip of the city. I’m proud that ERT responded within 8 hours of the tornado, arriving in Joplin around 2:00 the morning after the tornado, and is still there.

I’ve been in Joplin for about a week now (with AmeriCorps friends Ali and Cody), but what with the holiday season upon us and the cold weather, there is not very much going on here. Going into the affected areas or looking at photos of how it used to be is simply unreal - this doesn’t feel like a disaster site, it feels like an office.

I guess I should back up a bit and explain what I’ve been doing. In general terms, ERT manages the volunteers in Joplin. The city set us up with an office and housing for our members, and we receive volunteers who come in to help out on a daily basis.

Of course, this involves a good bit more - coordinating with homeowners on what needs to be done, acting as a liaison between homeowners and the city, keeping track of all volunteer hours, tracking down heavy equipment to perform demolitions, and these days, taking applications for and planting new trees at homes.

Getting ready to plant our largest type of tree, the silver maple.
It was so big it didn't fit in Pickle's (the truck's) bed, but
instead made Pickle a unicorn. Clare, Cody, and Ali ready to go!

Since the tornado and up until about November, we would regularly have 300-400 volunteers on a weekday and up to 1,000 on weekends.

Not any longer.

Since I’ve been here, we’re lucky to get one or two volunteers a day. According to our databases, this is just a holiday slump and the volunteerism should pick up again in early- to mid-January.

My job specifically is to handle homeowners’ applications for new trees, and with cold weather fast approaching, there are very few new applications coming in; many people just want to wait for the spring planting season.

What we do at the office when there's nothing else to do,
apparently. Chuck, his son Brandon, Rolla Wayne, and
Chainsaw Wayne are regular volunteers with us, and Keith
(in the driver's seat) works here.

So with the exception of Cody, who as our only AmeriCorps-certified driver, still has enough to do in the field, Ali and I have mostly been hanging around the office every day with not a lot to do. There is some paperwork to be done, but to be honest, it’s dreadfully boring and I take frequent breaks... possibly too frequent.

But then every once in a while we go out to the field - to help Cody plant trees, or to help an evicted family move out of their FEMA-issued trailer, or to visit Cunningham Park, where the tornado hit and where a memorial was built - and seeing the destruction still there is simply surreal. It’s worlds away from my mundane office life and difficult to reconcile the two, but it does remind me of why I’m here. This need is incredible.

A hospital building that was shifted 4 inches off its
foundation during the tornado

At the memorial in Cunningham Park; a list of those killed
in the tornado

Cody and Ali looking at the displays made of debris and a
dedication to the volunteers rebuilding Joplin

"A Tribute to the Volunteers" at Cunningham Park

Some of the destruction near Cunningham Park. Many
structures were not even standing anymore

A specific tribute to AmeriCorps - note the "A" on the helmet.

A reproduction of the Rebuilding Joplin wristbands, dedicated
to "The Miracle of the Human Spirit." I got one at the office
and plan on wearing it for some time.

So, mostly for Joplin’s sake but also for the sake of my sanity, I really hope we do start getting a little busier soon after the holidays. Besides Christmas weekend (I fly home to Virginia this Friday-Monday!) and New Years’ weekend (Cody and Ali and I will drive back to St Louis to celebrate with the rest of ERT), I’m probably going to be in Joplin until mid-January. It’s enough time, I hope, to start seeing a little more action out here!

Christmas spirit (and Ali scootering around) at our housing

Community

Dear Internet,

One of the great things about ERT so far has been the community we’ve built. Sure, it’s kind of weird and involves a lot of Cheez-Its and references to the movie “Stepbrothers,” but it’s a place where we all, for the most part, fit. I realized this yesterday. But let me start my tale where I last left off.

Over the last few weeks I’ve done two back-to-back ten-day spikes, each followed by four days off. The first ten-day was at Peck Ranch doing chainsaw training (see previous post), followed by some excitement. We were supposed to go meet a crew working on a part of the Ozark Trail, but as we pulled out of the parking lot at Peck Ranch got a call from the director of ERT, Bruce, saying that conditions were very good that day for a wildfire and that we needed to be on fire standby in cell service range. We all put on our Nomex (a set of fire resistant clothes we were issued to fight fire) and fire boots and spent the day, uncertain, spraying invasive species at the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) office in Eminence, MO.

It turned out that no one set a fire (arson is a big problem ‘round these parts) and we proceeded to drive to the Ozark Trail to meet the other group. It was kind of a relief and kind of a disappointment... we were so ready to go, you know? We probably won’t see fire till the season for it starts in late winter/early spring.

We hiked in to the campsite, where this other group had been living for about a week while they built the trail. We arrived to find them dancing around a huge campfire, waving tools and chanting - just to freak us out, but it was pretty funny. We reunited with our friends, had some dinner, and settled into tents for the night.

The next morning we woke up and hiked to the next part of the trail that needed work done and merrily worked for about two hours, until the gunshots seemed too close.

For. Real.

Hunting season was at that point in its last few days and the land we were working on was not protected. At one point we heard six shots in quick succession -  a semi-automatic not really aimed at much in particular, it seemed - just over the next ridge from us. Our team leaders opted to get us out of there, thankfully. We all hiked back to the campsite, packed up, and drove back to Johnson’s Shut Ins.

At the Shut Ins, the excitement was pretty much over as we spent a few days maintaining another part of the Ozark Trail before heading back to St Louis. It had been a long ten days and everyone was relieved and happy to be back for Thanksgiving!

My Thanksgiving weekend was pretty relaxed and fun. Besides talking to my family on the phone and cooking/eating a lot of food (at a friend’s Thanksgiving feast for those orphans who didn’t go home to their actual families for the holiday), I got to hang out in St Louis a lot, which was pretty nice. I spent a lot of time with my boyfriend Will (a second-year ERT member), going ice skating in the park (it was far too warm and there was a layer of water on top of the ice after a few hours), seeing the Muppets movie, and visiting the zoo. If I couldn’t be at home in Virginia, it was the next best thing :)

My next ten-day spike was at the same campsite and working at the same part of the Ozark Trail we had left a week ago. Hunting season was over but snow had arrived! I could not believe that it snowed on us the first night we were there, but the next week or so was not too bad - frosty in the morning but clear and crisp during the day while we worked.

Snow at our campsite

Snowing one morning - we had to cross these relatively
unstable "stepping stumps" to cross the smaller
part of the river...

...so we could use this bridge to cross the bigger part of the
river. We were pretty sure for the entire spike that
someone would fall in but no one ever did...
knock on wood for the next crew to go there!

The last few days were rainy and we even saw some sleet/hail, but we were able to take a half day of work and go to Eminence to warm up in a certain gas station with delicious fried chicken when the weather got really bad.

The river area behind our camp, with the bridge in the back.
Camp is on the right side of the photo and the trail on the left.

Amelia, me, Jason, Saul, and Sam

The work of hacking a trail out of the side of a mountain is not terribly exciting - in fact it’s pretty repetitive and backbreaking - but it’s satisfying and gives a real sense of accomplishment. You can literally, at the end of the day, walk the trail you worked on all day. Plus, when the view out of your “office” is a forest and a mountain, when you’re breathing all that fresh air, when your lunch break is spent exploring a cave you found in the woods, when you’re looking forward to roasting your dinner over a campfire on a leaf rake - nothing is too bad. Life is simple, life is good. I might not have said exactly that when I couldn’t feel my toes every morning, but looking back, it was a great week.

At work one morning on the trail

Getting back to St Louis was a relief for the simple joy of taking a bathshower - you guessed it, a combination bathing experience complete with candles. That second ten-day spike was, I’m sure, the longest I have ever gone in my life without showering and I had developed a really attractive “hairmet” - hair greasy to the point of staying in place... much like a hard hat.

Since my bathshower I’ve spent the last four days relaxing and hanging out with friends and Will, pretty much just enjoying some (well-earned) time off. Yesterday Will and I decided to go to Memphis, TN, just for something interesting to do. We met up with my friend Amy from college and did a lot of walking. We visited the gates of Graceland

Will & I at Graceland

and a really cool museum about the history of fire in Memphis, committed a minor crime by jumping the fence to visit a place called Mud Island (with a scale replica of the Mississippi River and the cities that line it!),

Amy and Will walking the deserted pedestrian bridge
to Mud Island

watched the ducks march out of the fountain in the lobby of the famous Peabody Hotel, ate gumbo, and listened to some live music. What a day :)

Memphis skyline from Mud Island

I guess it was in talking to Amy about life in ERT yesterday that I realized how much of a community we’ve built up. ERT has its own stories (how about the time Dee went to sleep in Sam’s bed?) and sayings (“Firewall!”) and jargon (Pumper, Nomex). We see each other all the time and know way too many details about each others’ lives. I guess it could be invasive or cloistered but it’s oddly comforting. It’s like having a gang. A gang that knows how to operate chainsaws.

At the same time, I kind of like that my apartment is about two miles from Soulard, the neighborhood where almost everyone else in ERT lives. I hang out in Soulard, I can step back and have a life outside of ERT at my apartment in Shaw. I rarely do, but at least the possibility is there :)

Long story short - the people in ERT are great, and are quickly becoming family. I can already tell that saying goodbye next August will be weird and prickly and difficult.

xoxo,

Liz

P.S. Sorry for the lack of photos in this post. I had to get my camera cleaned, but I will try to snag some from other people's Facebook albums and put them up. Toodles!


P.P.S. I took some photos from Ivy's Facebook - thanks Ivy!