Release

Ah, finally...good news from the government. After more than five months bumming around the country with little in the way of time off, we're finally being given a break. On Saturday morning, we will head out of Franklin...destination Denver. We will arrive back at campus on Monday morning, barring any major catastrophes en route (seriously, this is not the time for that shit to happen) and at 7 PM, Mountain Time...I will be on a United Airlines plane on my way back home to Pittsburgh for seven days off! I am beyond excited. Seven days back in my city, with its Primantis, O-fries, the best pizza on earth on Ardmore Boulevard in Forest Hills, my friends and fellows, my little Celica with its manual gearbox, my cats...god, I need this time off.

Right. Overzealous anticipation aside, some updates regarding the past week or so. The chaos of our first week and a half here has faded into...well, the only word to really describe it is boredom. The list of homeowners that needs volunteer help has receded to a half-dozen or so, from its peak of forty or fifty. That's good for two reasons. First, it shows that dozens of families are making progress on their rebuilding and recovery efforts. Second of all, our flow of volunteers has slowed to just about nothing; we sent a grand total of two people out to work today, not counting members of my team. It's good there are not many people depending on our efforts anymore. But christ if it ain't been exhausting.

By our (slightly fuzzy) count, my team and I...

-dispatched over 800 volunteers
-sent volunteers to or worked ourselves on 45-odd addresses
-unloaded and sorted 25-30 semi-trailers of furniture, appliances, and other donations
-sorted 300 pounds of food
-delivered 4 vanloads (around 300 gallons) of water to an isolated mobile home park
-conducted assessments on 125 houses
-made/received over 1000 phone calls in the operation of the volunteer center
-helped a couple desperately poor families move out of cramped hotel rooms or trailers on the edge of collapse and into decent, albeit temporary housing
(We know all this because NCCC teams are "encouraged" to keep track of quantifiable accomplishments; we keep concrete numerical records of the work performed).

All this in 21 days. It's been a long couple weeks.