So occasionally in Americorps NCCC you get these events that come up out of the blue that disrupt your normal work schedule. This week was weird to begin with since we had Memorial day off making this a four day work week. Tuesday was really the only normal day of brush clearing and hard trail work we had for the week.
About a week or so ago, a member of another Americorps program discovered we were in the area and invited us to an Americorps appreciation day. Now at first, our team thought this would be some fancy dancy awards ceremony we'd get to sit on, cool, this is what we bring our formal black and white uniforms for! But we soon discovered that we wouldn't need to wear our formals at all! Why? well Wednesday our team went to a place called Lake Compounce in Hartford, Connecticut. Ah, but despite the name, lake it is not! It is an amusement park! We were able to go expenses already paid to this event! We sat in and listened to some speeches which were really cool and got to learn about and meet some people from other Americorps programs that we hadn't known about. After that we were fed lunch and for a few hours got to ride roller coasters ( I think I speak for the team when I say a big wooden roller coaster called Boulder Dash was our favorite) Quite an exciting day! It was definitely a nice break from our normal routine.
Thursday was back to work, but this day we went to Bridgeport to help with an organization called Kaboom! To shortly describe it, what they do is build playgrounds in various cities around our country as well as several other countries. The actual whole building of the playground takes place in just one day Our team was there to help prep for the actual build day, (which is Saturday) doing work that they can't do around kids on the actual build day. We worked alongside several other volunteers digging holes and cutting wood as well as organizing hardware. While digging in this empty lot, we discovered many things! Such as, pieces to a truck, a seat to a car, a shopping cart, and also a fridge. Quite interesting to say the least! It did make work a bit more complicated, but the volunteers were able to get the machines necessary to take it out of the lot.
Today, we helped finish the rest of the prep work in preparation for tomorrow. Our team definitely wishes we could be there for the actual playground build, but Kaboom! already has over 200 community volunteers that will be working in this small lot so it was decided that having an an extra ten people wasn't necessary.
However, tomorrow........
Our YMCA sponsors are taking us to BOSTON!!!
I'm definitely excited (Even though I'm completely broke! But there are plenty of free things to do there!) I hopefully will be able to make it to the Fire Museum since it is one of the oldest ones, other than that I'll probably just wander and see what I find, that's always a good way to do it!
I definitely know I'm not hitting everything in these blog posts! But if you have any specific questions I'd be happy to answer them! Just email me at hgorman93@yahoo.com!
Until then,
<3 Heather G
