Warehouse

Ford Center Complex
Beaumont, TX

Four-odd months after leaving Beaumont and swearing never to return...we are back. Naturally. This time, we're living in a MASSIVE tent set up behind the Ford Center Arena. It's relatively comfortable (for a tent, that is...) and the food isn't half bad either. Our place of employment is a huge warehouse up north in Kountz, which could possibly qualify for the title of World's Most Disorganized Distribution Center. It is full of thousands of pallets of various food items, paper products, cleaning supplies, household items, etc...all of which are intermingled and mixed with each other. Our job is to separate, classify, organize and inventory all of it, while at the same time trying to deal with dozens of incoming and outgoing truckloads of supplies. We're working with a dozen-odd Red Cross volunteers and the owner and several employees of a trucking company who have put their business on hold to transport these supplies around the Gulf Coast. It is physically demanding; entire pallet-loads of food have to be moved, transferred, and repackaged. The good news is that by the end of our deployment, I will most likely be an OSHA-certified forklift operator! Gotta look on the bright side...

But it's hard. I can't really understand why (well, I can, but I'd just rather not explain it) but I have been feeling down lately. It's a combination of exhaustion, the issue that I would rather not mention, and the fact that I'm so burned out on Americorps. It seems like years since I first flew out, and I've just had more than enough of all the bullshit. I want to get back to living my own fucking life without having to worry about people looking over my shoulder all the time, and dealing with being jerked around and treated like slaves. It's just worn on me, and the only thing that allows me to get up day after day and go to work is the thought that in less than three weeks I will be back in Denver, and in only a little more than a month I will be home.