mywildfrontier: December 2006

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Address

My address down here is: 327 E. 2nd avenue, Pass Christian, MS, 39571. I will be leaving Dec. 21st to go back to STL and then to Minneapolis on the 23rd.

A picture of me playing table-tennis and the girls (from L to R Cat, Meghan, Amy and Mia) playing monopoly

Hey all - I just wanted to write a little about the situation down here pertaining to the organizations and volunteers involved. The last 3 days we've been working with a home builder by the name of Walter; he's near 70, from Long Island Ny. He came down last November, saw all the destruction and poor without homes and decided then that he wanted to build 20-30 homes over a 3 yr. span. He's a great, jolly man and sadly has had so much trouble getting help from organizations and volunteers. He's a quarter million in debt because he's putting up almost all of the money for these people and when I asked him how he can do that he said,"The Lord knows about it, he'll provide". (There's another guy named Scott who works with Walter and has lived on $3.50 a day for the last yr. in order to stay down here as a volunteer. While I'm on this rant in parentheses the group of families we're building 4 homes for refuse to help us - today while we were busting our butts able men and women my age were out barbequing just watching us - they don't have jobs...). We're trying to partner with a lot of other organizations (Randy's Rangers, Operation Help Thy Neighbor, Persevere) but some have major ego problems and don't want a bunch of "kids" messing things up - the truth is we, Americorps run things a lot better than most of the organizations.
On another note the animals down here have been raising hell for us. Rats got into our tents a few died from poison, but unfortunately in a couch so it smells like death in our kitchen. There are also black widows in our tents and today a crew member named Cat got bit while putting on her pants and went to the hospital.
Don't get me wrong things are great - 99% of the people we work for are so appreciative and I've met some really great people - I'm just taking it all in - the good and the bad.
Peace, Kevin