The Bitter End

            On January 25th, 2006 at 6:00 in the morning, I nervously and sleepily boarded a plane that would take me three thousand miles from home.  At the time, I honestly had no clue what I was getting myself into.  I had had my eye set on this program called AmeriCorps NCCC ever since my senior year of high school and now, four years later, I was finally doing it.  I knew that over the course of the next ten months I had the potential to learn new things, meet new friends, and even have my life permanently altered by these experiences.  But these possibilities were just vague ideas in my head - the future was a complete mystery to me.  I didn't know then that all of these ideas would come true, tenfold.  I didn't know when I first pulled up to 1104 3rd Street that it would become home to me in every sense of the word.  I didn't know when I first met my housemates that they would become not only best friends, but sources of comfort, each one of them representing home in herself.  And I had no idea that first day I met my team that we would become not just a group of randomly selected 18 to 24 year olds, not just a team - but a family, a solid unit made up of eleven people who truly love and respect each other.  I had no idea that morning getting on the plane that I was about to begin the most challenging, emotional, and amazing year of my life.
            To try and describe the past year to an outsider has proved itself absolutely impossible, as I’m sure everyone who went through it with me has figured out by now.  Looking back on all we did this year, I feel like we opened the door to some secret little world, a world filled with people, experiences, and emotions that ten months ago we could have never, ever imagined knowing, doing, or feeling.  There are so many things I thought I knew about before AmeriCorps, that now I realize I didn’t have a clue about.  Before this year I thought I knew what sadness was.  But now I know that sadness is not just crying over an inconsiderate boy.  Sadness is not just something you feel when something happens to you or your family.  Sadness is holding a kindergartner while she cries because her mother refuses to come to her class performances.  It is sending an adorable, bright child home to what you know is a neglectful household.  Sadness is seeing firsthand the state of the public school system in poor neighborhoods.  It is watching a teacher struggle to do her best in a system that is stopping her from doing what she knows is right for the children.  Sadness is trying to explain to 25 teary-eyed five-year-olds why, after just six short weeks, you have to leave them.  Sadness is the first time you drive down Highway 90 in Mississippi and see a community frozen in devastation.  Sadness is the first time you come across a destroyed family photo album while gutting out a house.  It is the first time you meet a homeowner and hear their story from their own mouth, and watch them break down and cry right in front of you, not caring that you are a perfect stranger.  Sadness is knowing that there are people and communities suffering, while the government and the general public pretend not to notice.
            Before AmeriCorps I also thought I knew what being in love was.  But now I know that being in love is not just a feeling reserved for a relationship with one person.  It is holding that very same kindergartner and watching her tears turn into a smile because of your hug.  Being in love is helping a child sound out a word or figure out a math problem and seeing the look of pride on their face when they finally get it.  It is sliding down a slide with ten kids at a time, hearing their roaring laughter and letting them make you feel like a kid again yourself.  Being in love is walking through the cafeteria at lunch time and feeling like a celebrity.  It is the feeling you have after spending six weeks with the most genuine and loving people you have ever met – all of whom are under 12 years old.  Being in love is working side by side with a homeowner in Chalmette, Louisiana.  It is hearing them tell you how much they appreciate everything you are doing, even if to you it doesn’t always seem like much.  Being in love is the feeling you get when you step into a house that you de-molded several months earlier and see how far it has come – a house that was once just an empty skeleton of a building is now finally, over a year after it was destroyed, beginning to look like a home again.   Being in love is standing with a homeowner in her FEMA trailer and crying together because you both are so thankful for each other.  It is knowing that you truly are making a difference in someone’s life.  And being in love is most of all, what you feel for the ten other people that have experienced everything you experienced – every little bit of emotion, every inside joke, every moment in your life for the past ten months.  It is being perfectly content with spending eight weeks in a little cabin in the woods with these people.  It is the feeling of comfort you get every time you’re around them.  It is knowing that even when you are annoyed, frustrated, or downright angry at each other, you will always come around and remember why you love one another.  Being in love is every crazy van ride, every late night talk, every early morning hug, every tear shed together, every song sung together, every sushi dinner, and every uncontrollable giggling fit.  It is all those moments where you look around and suddenly realize how lucky you are to have met these people.  It is knowing that you have a group of people who understand what you have gone through and who you have become like no one else ever could.
            On November 9^th, love and sadness came together in a way that even in all my days of endings and goodbyes, I have never experienced before.  That day was so much more than just saying goodbye to people – it was saying goodbye to a way of life; to everything I had come to know and love in the last ten months.   It was knowing that I had to return to my previous life, but that now I was carrying an almost overwhelming amount of experiences and emotions.  And at the same time I had to say goodbye to the only people who would ever fully understand all of these things.  It was a heartbreaking day, but it was also a beautiful day because I think it was when we all really, truly realized how much we meant to each other.  I shed more tears that day than I knew I had in me, but I walked away from Perry Point with a smile, knowing that everything I had done and seen and everyone I had met that year made all the sadness more than worth it.
            In many ways I am the same person now that I was when I first joined AmeriCorps.  But there is no denying that I have been changed by all that I have been through this year.  I feel as though I have become closer to being the person I’ve always wanted to be.  And even though I’m still figuring out where to go from here, I feel content knowing that somehow I will continue to make a difference in the world, because now I know that that is something I can do, and have done already, in so many ways.  All of the things I did this year and all the people I met along the way have meant so much to me and taught me so much, and I will never forget even those who I only had brief encounters with.  But the people that have meant the most to me are the ones who have been with me through the whole journey.  And so to my beloved Doozers – Danielle, Kristen, Kyle, Marissa, Megan, Michelle, Nate, Schotty, Tasia, and Tosh, and to my amazing housemates – Audrey, Erin, Julie, Lisa, and Nicole – thank you all so much for everything you’ve done this year, you all helped to make it the best experience of my life.  I love you all and I will never forget you or all the times we had together, no matter how many years go by.

hi!!! i am finally back, after a very long time...but i have valid excuses, i swear! well at first it was just because i was lazy, but then certain events happened that prevented me from writing. events that will unfold starting now. SOOO we left hands on biloxi with more tears than we ever expected; our last night all of our frustrations and annoyances were washed away when the staff and other long term volunteers brought out balloons and cake and basically made this huge announcment about how much they had appreciated us over the eight weeks and how much we would be missed. by the time it came to give our goodbye speeches we were blubbering pretty badly. leaving mississippi was bittersweet; on one hand i was very glad to be leaving the south (four months of living in the midst of extreme devastation really takes a toll on you, not to mention the heat and humidity) and on the other hand it was incredibly sad to leave the community i came to love and the everyday feeling of making such a huge difference in peoples' lives. but biloxi will always stay in my heart, and i left knowing that i will return eventually.

being back at perry point was amazing, i have to say it was the best transition week so far. being reunited with my housemates felt awesome, and the weather was so perfect. julie (my roomie) spent most of the week sitting on our front porch in the warm sun and the cool breeze (with no humidity - i cannot even express how good this felt) and just hanging out with everyone...seriously i don't know how i got such a good team AND such good housemates, but somehow i did and i love it. but now we get into the part of transition week that happened to not be so great. the date is august 25th. the day before my birthday. julie and i are sitting on the porch enjoying some kozy shak european style rice pudding, just minding our own business, making plans for my birthday. we had the whole day planned out, and let me tell you, it was pretty much going to be the best day ever. little did we know things were about to change. from across the street we see tasia burst out of her house. i call to her to see how things are going. and she calls back, "um i'm going on disaster tomorrow." okay time out. let me explain what "going on disaster" means. so every so often, if there is a major disaster somewhere (hurricane, fire, earthquake, whatever) the red cross calls up americorps and asks for people to respond to said disaster. americorps headquarters has a continuously updated list of all of us members, in a certain order for when we will be called to go. the order is based on how many hours we have and stuff like that and it is always changing. so if you get called you have less then 24 hours usually to pack up and go. usually they just take a few people from each team, and everyone that was called makes up sort of a new composite team type thing. so it's some peoples' dream to be called for disaster, and some people would rather not be. anyway. so tasia tells us she has been called. this sets julie and i off. "WHAT??" we scream. then tasia looks at me and says, "yeah. and you're going too." now i am really shaken up. i am one of those who would rather not be called. not when leaving my team is the last thing i would ever want to do and not when the disaster is a hurricane and i just got back from four months down south and not when we leave for a dream project in a few days. so now i am freaking out, and julie is freaking out too. and just as julie is yelling, "but annie, you can't go, tomorrow's your birthday and we have all those plans," julie's team leader walks up and says, "don't worry julie, you're going too." so now we are all freaking out big time. we do not want to go. i pretty much immediatly start crying. so it turns out that from our team it's me, tasia, tosh, and nate - a very important chunk of our team. and it means that for the first time all year, fire 7 is being split up. "upset" does not come close to describing the mood of our team for the next 24 hours until we got in the vans to go to the airport. as we drove off, all of us in tears, we waved to the rest of our team (and the rest of julie and my house), who also were all crying. it was pretty much the saddest thing EVER and it made us all a little bit scared for graduation. it was kind of funny though, because everyone else was asking us what was wrong with our team, and we had to be like...well....nothing, we really just love each other that much. it was also funny because the "disaster" turned out to be pretty much nothing and after five very long days of sitting in hotel rooms and eating free food, we were reunited with our team.

and now we are in huntington, massachussetts, living and working at camp norwich, the second oldest ymca camp in the country. it is so beautiful here, i can't even tell you. we are in the middle of the woods, right on a lake, and it is amazing. we have been doing trail work, cabin restoration and roofing, and we'll be doing various other things like that. it's awesome, i'm learning how to do things i never thought i would know how to do and i love it. it's also awesome to be with just my team again, kind of like it was back in new york. although we have been facing some challanges; this is really the first project where we are all working together, all day everyday as a team, and we're finding that we are butting heads at work a little more than we ever thought we would. but at the same time we are such a family by now that even when we hate each other we still love each other and that is very obvious at all time. so i think it will be really good for us to have this project and really learn how to not just play well, but work well together. another reason this project is awesome though, is that our sponsors are really involved and pretty much hook us up with everything. not only do we get free ymca plasses, but we are also getting free dinner from a bunch of restaurants in town, and we have gotten to go to a county fair for free, and last night was the icing on the cake. not just the icing actually, the icing and cherry and the whip cream and the chocolate sauce and the caramel sauce and like 50 million other amazing toppings. so we got free tickets to the "big e" with is a huuge fair for all of new england. so um the day that we just happened to get the tickets for, the musical guest just happened to be none other that FOREIGNER. yeah. so um basically we got third row seats and they pretty much rocked the house harder than almost any other band i have ever seen. it was an amazing experience and i seriously have such a new respect for them and will rock out to them in a different way than ever before because of this experience. sersiously. it was amazing. seriously.

anyway that is about all for now, i have to go because we are all taking turns on the laptop at a wireless cafe, because we have no internet at camp. or cell phone service so i am pretty much cut out from the world. but that;s okay. alright love you all!

hi friends and fam. i have two bits of exciting news, one is that i finally got some pictures up, so go look at them now! the other is that we found out where we are going for our fourth (and final - tears) round project!!!! and pretty much it is going to be the most amazing project ever, just like all of them have been...but seriously. it sounds incredible. SO we are going to huntington, massachusetts to work at a ymca camp. actually huntington is just the closest town, because really this camp is out in the middle of nowhere, like in the woods and right next to a lake. amazing already, right? so we will be living in cabins (either one big one or a few smaller ones, we aren't sure yet), cooking our own food (that'll be the first time since the bronx, so that's exciting), and working to help build and maintain this camp, and sometimes doing some work at the actual ymca in town. and there will be a few weekends where we will get an oppurtunity to actually work with kids, which will be so fun. so we are so excited for this project - not only is it in the northeast (during the fall i might add) but it will be like we are ending our year the way we started - on the east coast, and doing a project where it will just be us. i mean we have loved being down south and getting to meet and work with people from all over, but it will be nice to get to end our year with just our team, so that we can really take full advantage of being together and working together. and i think that the administration at perry point has really recognized throughout the last few months how special our team is in terms of how well we work together and how much we love each other, and i think they are really rewarding us with this project...that's what i like to think anyway. but really, everywhere we have been so far, pretty much anyone that we have talked to has said that they have never seen an nccc team that has gotten along as well as we do. i seriously feel so incredibly lucky, i really don't know how i got blessed with this team but it happened and it is awesome. and graduation is going to be pretty much the most heartbreaking day ever...it's not even fourth round yet and megan and i can't even say two words about the end without both starting to cry. it's going to be bad news. but good at the same time.

anyway - even though i am really excited about our next project, i am still loving this one and getting pretty sad about leaving here in two weeks. i'm still leading mold teams, which is going well, although we have had a few problems lately. mostly just that it's been me, megan, tosh, tasia, and danielle doing mold almost every day for 6 weeks now, and let me just tell you, it is not easy. the thing is that they have no one else besides the five of us to lead mold teams, and so we've really had no choice in doing it - and i mean that is what we signed on to do, but when it's just assumed that you will do it every single day and there's no question as to whether or not you need a break, it gets really annoying. and there really hasn't been much acknowledgement of the fact that we have been doing it every day for this long either, so that just makes it frustrating, when we are working our butts off and not getting much respect for it. anyway - we ended up having a really bad day yesterday and we went and talked to some people about the whole situation, and they seemed to understand, so we got the rest of the week off from mold. which is an amazing feeling. so hopefully things will improve, and the other thing is that there are two new nccc teams coming on monday so we can start training some of them to replace us. so yeah...that's about it workwise.

so go look at those pictures!!!

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/whatisrude/my_photos