Initial Thoughts About Americorps

Yesterday I arrived at the North Central Americorps NCCC campus in Vinton, IA, and it was exactly like what you would imagine a town of 5,000 people in the middle of Iowa to be like. Pretty flat, some rolling hills, and lots of fields of corn. Fewer trees than I would like. Found out the area was hit by a Derecho Event last summer that wiped out 90% of the trees in town.

 The campus that we are staying at is that of the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School, which was built in the 1850s. There used to be hundreds of children ages 2 – 21 staying at the campus in order to receive an education tailored to their needs, but over the years the campus turned into a headquarters for staff that would then travel to where the children lived, and so the campus slowly emptied out until Americorps arrived in 2008. All of the buildings are connected by underground tunnels, which will be nice when the weather is bad. The town itself, like I said, is small, some might say quaint. From what I hear there are dirtbike races every Sunday. And there’s a movie theater. And that’s about it.

Fortunately the campus has a gym, a weight room, a pool (which I have yet to check out, but rumor has it that it’s just a lap pool), a pool table, multiple lounges with TVs, a computer lab, kitchens, and 218 other corps member to keep me busy.

Anyway, I arrived at 2:30 PM yesterday and promptly went through a bunch of paperwork stations, and then got fitted for clothing and received most of my gear.

Trying on coveralls

Squat test

Rain gear station

Winter jackets. Always making a good face for the camera

Epic walking into the sunlight

Making sure I have all my stuff

 Later, I was able to unpack my stuff and get to know a little bit about my 4 other roommates. They come from all over, including Scott from California, Min from Georgia, Kyle from Nevada and Max from Wisconsin (a fellow UW Badger). I thought it was hilarious that we have Max and Min in our room, and I’m trying to nickname them “the limits.” It’s not catching on. We all hung out for a bit, and then went to dinner. Standard spaghetti with bread and salad, but it was good.

After dinner we had a community meeting in the auditorium, and all 219 corps members were in attendance. We got to know a little about the scheduling and such there, and then we had floor meetings for our dorms. These were pretty standard housing meetings that addressed quiet hours, drug and alcohol policies, etc.

Finally after all of that Max, Kyle and I did some exploring and found where the pool, weight room, computer lab and such is, and found out a little more about what the cooking arrangements are going to be.  Then we found a huge praying mantis.

It was seriously 6 inches long

 Each team shops and cooks together, which doesn’t sound too bad until you find out that people are really picky eaters.

The word around campus is that we will be training at the campus until September 29^th, at which point we will be going to Alabama to do FEMA-specific training for two weeks. After that we will presumably be heading out on our spike projects.

I think the next week or so will probably be pretty run-of-the-mill, mostly training, classes, and PT, so I don’t expect to be posting all that much. But if anything crazy or interesting happens, I’ll be sure to put it up on here.