Disaster - Day 12

As of today, all casework for this assignment has been officially completed! That means we visited all destroyed and majorly damaged houses over 10 counties. Hurray! My whole team has the day off tomorrow, and then we'll be working in the Chattanooga Red Cross chapter warehouse on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday we head back to campus for 1 week, and then home!

I was teamed up with Jacquie today out in the field, so that was a great way to end this disaster project. We visited over 30 houses and some sites that no longer held anything other than former house debris. Part of the area we covered was out in the country, and let me tell you, this area of TN is absolutely beautiful. At one point, we drove past a vineyard, and we decided to stop for a few minutes, because it was too beautiful to just speed by and not properly observe and soak it up. Isn't it funny how those odd moments of beauty can undo all your previous stress and worry? I didn't realize how much I needed to let it all go until I stared across those grape vines and studied the green mountains beyond. The sun was shining and bright, but there were billoughous gray clouds in the sky as well, threatening rain. The combination of light and dark was so wonderous, I knew it was a moment that was temporal. One of those times where you wish you could hold onto the moment so you could describe it later (as I'm attempting here, though failing miserably), but you know it's too much to process, so you just soak up the feeling as best you can so that you can at least hold onto that.

This evening, I decided to try an MRE for dinner out of curiosity. My particular "Meal, Ready-To-Eat" was a BBQ veggie burger entrée with fruit punch, dried cranberries, wheat snack bread, iced tea mix, and a chocolate banana nut muffin. The wheat snack bread was disgusting, but everything else wasn't too bad, and it was fun to chemically heat up my food. Also, the meal came complete with laxative gum, mini Tabasco sauce, wet wipe, salt packet, matches, and toilet paper. The veggie burger kind of tasted like beef jerky, so that was weird. I didn't try the gum or use the toilet paper, so I'm not sure I quite got the full experience, but close enough. I definitely wouldn't want to eat one of these every night, but I can see how it would be a nice thing to have if you didn't have electricity and wanted a hot meal.


Well, I don't think I'll be writing daily any more, since my job is normalizing again, but I'll definitely have another post up next weekend when I'm back in Vicksburg.

I hope you're all well, and I can't wait to see everyone in just a few short weeks.
love,
 k