Recent News, A Day In the Life, etc.

Interesting stuff starting to happen around these parts. We’re getting information about what Alabama is going to be like, what we’ll be doing there, what our living situation will be and a lot more. Also induction is this coming Friday, the 28^th. I’ll get to all this stuff later. Right meow I want to talk about other stuff.

So about a week and a half ago my teammate asked me if I would go to the Governance Council meeting with him and be our team’s secondary, so I went. I had wanted to go to the previous meeting but we had been on our mini project and really hadn’t known about it, so I thought I had missed my chance. Anyway, we went. And my teammate is kind of an impatient person, and the meeting was kind of stagnating with different temp checks and votes so he up and left because he had other stuff to do. So suddenly there I am basically sitting as Spruce 4’s primary representative all of a sudden. And it was interesting. And we talked about electing officers which are president, VP, and secretary, and I decided that I would run, because, screw it. Fast forward to this past Sunday. I gave my little speech to the council, along with two other people running for president, and then we all voted. And I lost, by what I’m told was a very, very small margin (so I’m thinking like 2 votes). BUT! Then I decided to run for VP, and won that, so that’s pretty cool. And so now I am the vice president of the Americorps NCCC FEMA Corps Class XIX Governance Council, which sounds awesome. My duties include attending all meetings (duh), being the hammer, assisting the president with stuff, and delegating responsibilities to other council members and checking on their progress. How neat is that? That’s pretty neat.

“Neature Walk” is being quoted frequently here at the moment, I don’t even know why.

So then at the community meeting on Monday, which the entire 240 member corps attends, I had to get up on stage and talk to everybody about what the governance council does and why it’s important and why every team should be represented and blah blah blah. It was kind of nerve wracking because I don’t like being in front of large crowds, but I don’t think I made a fool of myself. I’ve decided that public speaking is going to be a thing that I work to improve while I’m here.

And now a lot of people address me as “Vice Prez” or “VP” when they see me on campus and it’s kind of embarrassing and kind of funny. Also, the staff and the rest of the corps has started holding me to a higher standard of conduct, so there’s a little more pressure to not mess up than there used to be. Some people have started coming to me with questions about stuff. I tell them to attend governance meetings. That should get attendance up.

One of the duties/privileges of being an officer of the council is that the three of us get to meet with the regional director of Americorps in person to talk about corps morale and get questions answered about various things. An example of this is that some people were concerned that we wouldn’t be getting rain gear because there wasn’t enough room in the budget. So we brought that up at the meeting with the director and he told us what was going on, and then we informed the council so that they can disseminate that information to their respective teams. Turns out we’re getting rain gear here in Vinton, and they’ll ship us the boots if we end up needing them. In case you were wondering or worried. Thanks, by the way.

SWAG SUIT

ANYWAY

Some people back home have been texting/emailing me asking me to lay down what a typical day at Americorps is like. This is where I’ll do that.

I woke up at 5:00 yesterday morning to get ready for physical training. Ate an energy bar (thanks Mom), drank some water, brushed los dientes, got dressed and headed to the gym. As a unit (Spruce Unit) we did the new workout routine that the Army recently adopted, which included a lot of lunges and leg raises and such. We finished at about 6:20 and were out of the gym by 6:30. We then had an hour and 20 minutes to eat breakfast/nap/shower before our unit meeting at 8:00. The unit meeting went until 8:45, then we had a professional accountability training at 9:00 led by the regional director. That was scheduled to go until 10:00 but I feel like he has been pretty busy this week with induction coming up and the meeting only went until 9:30. I went and made brunch in our kitchen, and then was able to type some of this after that before I had to be at a meeting for corps ambassador programming (recruiting) at 11:30. I don’t know if I mentioned this in an earlier post, but if you’re not early for your meetings here, you’re late. So really you have 10 minutes less time during each break than is on the schedule, because you have to make sure you have your uniform all perfect and then you have to walk there, and then you have to be 5 minutes early. Anyway, after that we had a Member Opportunities seminar from 12:30 until 1:45 in which we were able to sign up for online classes for certification or college credit in different areas of study, such as service learning or non-profit management. Following that at 2:00 was a meeting where shit got very real. It was called Psychological First Aid, and the speaker was a funeral director from Cedar Rapids who has been volunteering with the Red Cross since 1989. He worked at Ground Zero after the September 11^th attacks, he has done hurricane recovery volunteering, he’s been around the world volunteering. For three hours he was so brutally blunt about the loss and sadness and occasional horror that goes along with working in disaster recovery that a lot of people at the seminar were in tears. It was a lot for many people to handle, but when it was over everyone agreed that those 3 hours of training did more to prepare us for what we’ll be doing than all the other training we’ve done. That meeting ended at 5:00, but we met as a team after that until about 5:40 to talk about the meeting and go over how certain people felt about it. From there it was dinner prep, and I had to eat at 6:30 before the rest of the team because I had to be 15 minutes early for the Governance Council meeting that was at 7:00 because as VP I had to meet with the President and Secretary to create an agenda for the meeting and talk about some of the issues we would be going over. I am now the POC and supervisor of the event planning committee for activities this Saturday, which means I basically just make sure they’re getting stuff ready, but I don’t actually have to do any planning. It’s a pretty neat gig. That’s pretty neat! Sorry. So the council meeting went until 7:55, and I had to run to my room to get changed into basketball attire because the 5-on-5 corps-wide basketball tournament started at 8:00. I was on a team with 2 of my tall friends and 2 of my athletic friends. We played and won 2 games, which, with the lopsided bracket due to an uneven number of teams, put us into the championship game, which is tonight. It’s double elimination so the team we play will have to beat us twice in order to win. So it’s looking pretty good for us. I’ve never really been a baller, but I pulled my own weight, scoring 2 baskets in each game to 11 points, where each basket counts as 1 point. Throw in a few blocks and steals and it turned out to be a really satisfying night. The tournament went until around 10:00, and by the time I showered and got ready for bed it was almost 11:00. Then I went to bed, because on Thursday mornings I get to “sleep in,” which means I get up at 6:15.

So there you go, a day in the life.

So induction is on Friday, and I guess it’s a big deal. There’s going to be a bunch of big wigs attending and speaking, including the senator that basically created FEMA Corps, the CEO of CNCS (Corporation for National Community Service) which runs Americorps, the president of Americorps (I think), and so on. So it’s pretty exciting. I am one of 3 corps members in my unit to be hand picked by the unit leader to be interviewed for induction. I’m not really sure what that means, I think I might be getting put in the induction video? I’ll report back on that after it’s done I guess.

I’ve rambled on too much for one post, so I’ll include details about Alabama (Bamalama) in my next post, which I guess will be after I’m settled into the campus there.