Dear Family and Friends, 

Contrary to popular belief, I did not freeze to death during the early weeks of my first Midwestern winter, and I am still alive and well (if somewhat pastier and chillier) here in Iowa. As far as I can tell, the only reason I haven’t met my untimely fate at the hands of hypothermia is because I haven’t allowed myself to be outside for longer than it takes to dart from our van to the bar in several weeks. I once walked outside with wet hair and within seconds my curls had frozen to the consistency of uncooked Top Ramen; besides a sledding outing where I adorned myself in so many layers that I couldn’t touch my arms to my sides and had to waddle up the hill like an over inflated gym rat, I haven’t risked the well being of my vulnerable Californian flesh in these God awful conditions since. 

On Tuesday we leave Monticello, a city in the eastern part of the state where we have been working since mid-October, to head back to our headquarters in Vinton. During our first two weeks in Monticello we worked for the Jones County Conservation Board (JCCB) on an overhaul of several sites they manage near Iowa’s Maquoketa river. I didn’t find this project particularly meaningful since our main duty was clearing very old, magnificent trees to help accommodate for the hundreds of people that flock to the Maquoketa during the summer for drunken canoeing, but as a person who has participated in her fair share of intoxicated boating, I felt it was my duty to give it my all. 

We started by destroying two outdoor camping structures near the river to make room for additional parking spaces and a canoe port being built there in the Spring. It is a classic sponsor move to totally underestimate the amount of work a team of AmeriCorps members can accomplish in a given amount of time – a typical sponsor will ask assign a ten minute, one person task to three corps members and then be totally shocked when they return in an hour to find it finished: “Wow, you guys already nailed those two boards together? You need to slow down!” – and Jones County was no exception. Obviously unaware of our prior demolition experience, the Conservation Board expected our full team to take at least a week to tear down the shelters; my five person crew had both structures completely destroyed by the second day before the other half of our team had rejoined us. 

As punishment for our efficiency, we spent the remainder of our time with the JCCB dragging trees to a wood chipper amidst “snow flurries”, a unique weather condition that it is apparently wimpy to complain about because while it is characterized by precipitation that is white, frozen and the cause of dampness and misery, it melts when it hits the ground and is therefore NOT snow. In the words of the park ranger John, the slightly terrifying former military officer who felled the trees we wrestled into the chipper, “Wutareya cold? Shit, if I wasn’t chainsawin’ today I’d be in shorts right now!” (One thing I’ve learned about Iowans is that they are disgustingly proud of their cold weather and ability to endure it. Nothing makes an Iowan happier than telling you about last winter’s record lows or about how this winter is supposed to be the coldest yet. They also enjoy cheerfully agreeing with you when you half-jokingly suggest that you will perhaps die before Spring since you are shivering in the warmest outfit you own and it’s only November.) 

As if our foul weather deforestation wasn’t unpleasant enough on its own, we also had to endure the frightening experience of working alongside John and another ranger named Derrick. John and Derrick are of the “old school” ranger variety which means if you’re not chainsawing sans protective gear with a Marlboro dangling from your lower lip, you’re probably some sort of pussy. One day the chipper jammed and after several minutes of unsuccessful jimmying with a crowbar, John jumped into the tray of the chipper, took a long drag of the cigarette clamped beneath his pencil ‘stache and said, “You didn’t see me do this”, before sticking his chainsaw between the massive metal teeth of the chipper rollers and hacking away at the obstruction. 

The rangers didn’t always find it pertinent to warn us when the tractor bucket or a thirty foot elm was crashing our way, and we spent two weeks dodging their vehicles and power tools in genuine fear for our lives. Once I was prying metal panels off the roof of a shelter when Derrick, who was working below me, got frustrated and took a sledge hammer to the underside of the beams supporting my weight. I immediately dropped to my knees as I began to bounce toward the edge of the roof, horrified that I was going to end up a paraplegic because this impatient, twenty year old jackass would rather be bow hunting, when the hammering stopped abruptly and Derrick’s head emerged from between the beams: “What’s the yelling about? Did I rattleya?”. Yes Derrick, when you recreated the quake of ’89 while I was perched precariously on a magic carpet proportioned piece of tin several feet above the earth, I found myself slightly rattled. “Nothing a beer wouldn’ta fixed” he grinned, cigarette dancing. 

We all managed to survive our two weeks with the Conservation Board and began work with Camp Courageous, a facility in the same county that provides recreation and respite care to people of all ages with disabilities. Camp Courageous prides itself in offering an experience comparable to one a “normal” camp would offer, and even campers in wheelchairs with extremely limited motor abilities enjoy activities like spelunking, zip lining and rock climbing, just to name a few. We stayed at Camp Courageous the entire time we were in Monticello, and our housing included four bathrooms with showers, wireless internet and access to a pool and a basketball gym: as far as AmeriCorps living standards are concerned, I was staying at the Ritz. 

Unfortunately our actual job with Camp Courageous didn’t involve any interaction with campers, but it did teach me a wide variety of skills that will ultimately make me a better homeowner. We remodeled an entire dormitory building used by counselors and volunteers, replacing trim, doors, cabinets, outlets, light fixtures and carpet, installing suspended ceilings and painting countless walls. Since Camp Courageous operates almost exclusively on donations our free labor was obviously a great help to them, and it was wonderful to contribute to an organization that to me seemed so wholly good. 

At the urging of the counselors, we tried to spend as much of our free time with the campers as possible and our interaction with them proved to be the most rewarding part of the experience. My favorite activity was Thursday night dances in the camp barn, lovely social events that mark the first time since high school that I have had a good time dancing without first consuming copious amounts of hard alcohol. Campers were very forgiving of my sub par dance skills, and were even impressed by throwback moves such as “raising the roof” or more current go-tos like the “the angry face”. (I hope my Comber buddies still remember that sweet maneuver). At one dance I did the Hand Jive and played air guitar with a camper for at least three songs and not one person pointed and laughed. Amazing. 

All lessons about appreciating a low pressure dancing environment aside, I do think it was a low point in my boogieing career when I spent a good chunk of a dance with a camper who was completely deaf and didn’t realize it until the end of the night. In my defense, he was wearing a homemade paper mask that he dramatically tore off at the end of the evening to reveal his face to me as if we were at a masquerade ball, eliminating all chance of conversation, but I guess I should have figured it out when he didn’t stop dancing in between songs. Still, I must have made quite an impression, because the next day my masked friend James presented me with a homemade beaded necklace with a paper star on which he had neatly printed, “I love you is a Marea”. It is literally the nicest thing a boy has ever given me. 

Now I hate to switch gears after such a sweet story, but after reviewing of some of my previous email updates, I realized that overall I may be painting too rosy a picture of AmeriCorps. Don’t get me wrong, so far much of this experience has been amazing, but I don’t think it would be fair to share all the fulfilling bits without also mentioning the things suck. So bear with me for a bit… 

When you spend literally every second of every day with nine other people, you lose a sense of what real life is like. On those rare occasions when I am separated from my team, like when we’re back on campus between projects or I take a weekend trip, I miss them in a dysfunctional way, like I don’t know how to be with my own thoughts without their noise interjecting. I feel like the character from Shawshank Redemption who is released from prison after a long sentence and then tries to get himself re-incarcerated because he can’t handle the freedom. 

I suppose this is sweet in a way, but it’s also a little gross. And it’s especially frustrating when we have to interact with “normal” people, because our condition makes us so socially awkward. Let me give an example: another perk of living and working in confined spaces with the same group of people is that basically exist in an incubator of disease. Every project we all come down with some terrible illness that we can’t get rid of because our proximity never allows us to stop passing it back and forth. This project our illness was scabies, a microscopic mite that burrows under your skin causing bumps and itching. Our entire team had to undergo two treatments that amounted to smearing pesticide all over our bodies and spraying down our apartment with heavy chemicals. If you’re thinking right now, “Marea, that’s disgusting and entirely too much information”, you’ve picked up on the point of my rant. Which brings me to my scabies related revelations: 

1) AmeriCorps and perhaps all situations that force you to live as part of a sort of inward facing commune causes you lose all sense of social etiquette. I can maybe come to terms with the reality that I contracted a disease so foul that even its name is basically the combination of the words “scab” and “rabies”, but I cannot stand the humiliation of my team talking about it publicly like it’s a common problem to be a member of a ten person pest farm. When one of the counselors invited us out to the bar and my teammates loudly reminded me that I couldn’t attend because I would be too greasy from my “treatment”, I knew they had officially forgotten how to interact with the outside world. When my team leader casually discussed our trip to the pharmacy to pick up our pesticides over lunch in the presence of visibly horrified Camp Courageous personnel, I actually yelled out loud, “This is not okay to discuss in real life!” My teammate Molly just giggled and said, “Marea just had her first ‘outburst’!” a word that has come to describe my teammates’ frequent overreactions to minor annoyances. Our leader ignored me and went onto discuss the status of another teammates who was at home in bed “having trouble keeping food in from both ends, if you know what I mean”, and I shouted, “Where am I?! Why must we be Team TMI?!” before slamming down my tray and excusing myself from the table. 

2) According to several online sources, scabies is actually technically classified as a sexually transmitted disease, a cruel irony considering that my current living situation makes getting laid a near impossibility. 

3) AmeriCorps is determined to give me cancer. Between the asbestos in our campus housing, our constant sun exposure, the creosote from the bison fence that routinely coated our skin and clothing at our last project and now our chemical scabies treatments, I am fairly certain that my cells are mutating at an alarming rate and that I am adding extra limbs to my unborn children all the time. 

Just a few more beefs with AmeriCorps that I need to get off my chest: 

1) AmeriCorps is an organization with countless rules that are almost always created reactively. If a minor incident occurs, you can bet that AmeriCorps will immediately enact a new, very specific regulation to further restrict our already repressive situation, just in case. If a corps member say, chokes on some lentil soup, AmeriCorps will certainly ban the consumption of all legumes. These reactive rules are the reason I can’t drive for more than two hours at a time (someone once fell asleep), use even a screwdriver without the use of safety goggles and gloves (someone once got a scrape operating a paint roller), or do anything even marginally AmeriCorps related without being in full uniform, even if a uniform is totally inappropriate and awkward, like at a Camp Courageous Christmas party (someone once had an independent thought). 

2) AmeriCorps has successfully ruined almost every one of my weekends since I arrived in July. The AmeriCorps higher-ups seem to think that our mandatory 1,700 “direct service” hours – the cumulative time we will spend at our actual jobs – and our eighty “independent service hours” – the time we spend volunteering outside of work – are not enough to keep us occupied, so they routinely plan other activities such as “Make a Difference Day”, which I think is short for, “Attempt To Find a Volunteering Project of Substance in the Podunk Town We’ve Stationed You And Succeed Only in Killing Your Entire Saturday With Meaningless Busy Work at a YMCA in Nebraska”. They also won’t allow you to drive the van an hour to Vinton to access your car or an airport so you can be with family or friends on Thanksgiving because of a “budget crunch”, but will require that you spend a different Saturday making the same drive for a ten minute photo op with Iowa’s Lieutenant Governor. They will also require that you stand in group picture formation holding an AmeriCorps banner and greet her in unison with the words, “Welcome Lieutenant Governor Judge,” an act that is not only silly and embarrassing, but impossible to execute without sounding like a large, collective mumble or a scary robot chorus. 

Okay, now that I have gotten that out, I can move this email in a more productive direction. Which brings me to my last, unrelated to scabies revelation: 

4) I am ready to work with people. I enjoyed the physical nature of my last two projects immensely, but I see now that my pleasure was largely selfish; while I found myself connecting with the work itself, I was very disconnected from the overall mission. AmeriCorps’s role in a long term environmental planning project or a small, behind-the-scenes remodeling in a massive facility is such a minuscule part of the bigger picture that it is easy to lose sight of who or what your labor is benefiting. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I do believe these small actions in their culmination ultimately contribute significantly to an overall cause, no matter what one’s motives are – but I do believe it’s important that I associate my work with something greater than my desire to improve my chances with the ladies by being good with tools. (I do still find value in this byproduct however, so please spread the word that my newest claim to fame is being the team expert on door frame and trim installation. I make house calls). The few opportunities I had at Camp Courageous to interact with campers reminded me what it’s like to actually see the difference we are making which is why I got involved with this program in the first place. 

Luckily, this revelation is coming at a good time as our next project is taking us in this direction. Our only requests to the AmeriCorps administration for our third round project was to get us the hell out of Iowa, preferable to a warmer climate and they managed to come through on one of the two. After Christmas break I will be undergoing an undoubtedly painful week “retraining” in Vinton before relocating to a YMCA camp near Kalamazoo, Michigan until the end of February. I have limited information about our situation right now, but I do know that our shifts will be from 5:30 PM to 10:30 AM, meaning I will have days off, but much of my life will be spent in a cabin with campers around the age of ten. If my own childhood camp experiences taught me anything, it’s that I’m going to have to booby-trap the place to make sure the little bastards don’t sneak out at night during their wild games of Truth or Dare. Seriously though, I’m very excited to be working with kids and I’m especially excited to have access to a gym and train that will take me to Chicago on weekends. 

But enough about my new project…a much more important event is rapidly approaching: my return to California for a few weeks for Christmas! I’ll be in Hayward from December 20 to December 30 and in San Diego until January 4. I know it seems silly to send a mass email right before coming home for a visit but I thought if I updated all of you on the details of my life now I could spend my valuable West-Coast time consuming disgusting amounts of Mexican food, visiting shopping establishments that aren’t Wal-Mart, soaking in the mild California “winter” and being genuinely shallow in every way possible.
 

I miss all of you terribly and can’t wait to see your faces! 

Love, 

Marea