Week 11

This week I only got to work on my rehab house one day, and I spent the whole time measuring and cutting shoe molding for various parts of the house. It was slightly dull up until the end, when I got to use a propane powered finish nail gun to put all the pieces in place, and that made everything else more than worthwhile.

Our last workday in Mobile was a big community project where my team worked with 100 high school students to build 150 bird houses. A few of my teammates and I spent the entire day before the event prepping, which involved cutting a ton of wood and getting tables ready with wood pieces, wood glue, hammers, nails, etc. This event was our Project Outreach for our Mobile work round, and since this is my specialty role on my team, I was involved in setting it up and seeing it through. It went over really well, so I was very encouraged!

The students nailed the blue bird houses together and primed them, and then in the spring, Habitat is going to take them to local VBS programs and have kids decoratively paint them. They’re going to talk to the kids about how Habitat is a program that builds houses for people to live in, just like how the blue bird houses give the birds a place to live. It seems like a neat idea, and I was glad that my first community project was such a fun one.

We went out for a team dinner on Thursday night and then cleaned our house, packed our stuff, and headed back to Vicksburg. As soon as we pulled onto campus, we immediately unloaded our stuff, cleaned our van and had a debrief meeting, one right after another. I wrote a little song for the creative closure they encourage at our debrief, took my guitar in and played and sang it, having the whole team sing the chorus. It was really fun, and everybody really liked it.

After that, we had pretty much the entire weekend off, and it’s been so nice to be able to get a ton of sleep and rest and reunion time. It’s so strange to think that I’ve only known these people for only a couple months, and yet, they’re some of my best friends. Getting to come back and see everyone and catch up on everything from the past 6 weeks has been incredibly fun and refreshing.

Now it’s Monday, and we were up at 5am for Baseline, which is our exercise progress check held out at the Military Park. I did 17 more push-ups than last time, so that was kind of cool. It’s now just after 8am, and I’m getting ready to leave for the first event of the day, which is setting up for a fish fry to take place this evening for the whole corps. Huzzah!

As always, I love and miss all of you guys desperately, and though I’m really enjoying myself, I’m counting the weeks until I’m back in good ol’ KY for Christmas. I can’t wait to eat some of the new batch of applesauce, so make sure you save some for me.