Our First Day!!

Hello everyone!! First let me apologize for the limited number of exciting blog entries. Our camp site was scheduled to have a wireless connection and it does not currently have one. (This is a problem we are working to fix.) So any blog entries need to be posted from public wireless access sites and there are not a lot of them in this immediate area.

We all arrived. A special kudos to our international volunteers who had missed out on a lot of sleep during the course of their travels to the MS area. Each of them worked very hard yesterday and it was awesome to meet them!!!

Anyway……. Yesterday was our first day at work. As previously mentioned our group was split into two main groups – one working with Habitat for Humanity and one working with Camp Coastal (our host camp).

I was on the Habitat crew. It was nice to see all of the same Habitat staff that we worked with last year. They remembered the few of us who were returning – which was also great. Our group is working in Waveland, MS – which is the town next to Bay St. Louis. Habitat is doing much good work in this particular neighborhood. There are two houses we were working on right now – immediately next door to each other. Our group of 25 is working with some members of the Americorps team and other house has volunteers from Habitat / Seattle, Habitat / Wisconsin and some other Americorps members. When we arrived on the job site yesterday morning our house had framed walls and the other house was only a foundation. After the end of a long (hot) day one could see lots of progress. On both houses, the roof trusses were up and the first layer of wood was going on. The walls were covered by wood and Tyvex and the inside framing was taking shape. A number of us also had the opportunity of working with the family that will be purchasing the house – which is exciting.

The Camp Coastal crew was split into a few teams working on different projects. In general Camp Coastal offers less oversight and thus the volunteers have the opportunity to be more creative regarding what they do and how they do it. One of the other authors associated with that team can get into more detail on their projects soon.

A number of people learned new skills yesterday and did things that they had never done before and, certainly, do not traditionally do during their standard SEI day. It is exciting to see the differences that we are making already. One of the major skills needed to be successful in this setting is team work. SEI has great team work and it's very evident down here!!

We went straight from the work site to a BBQ hosted by an SEI bank client. They are headquartered in that area and graciously hosted us last year and were pleased to do so again. It was awesome to see friends and business associates again. In a brief conversation with three bank employees I learned that one had completely lost her home in the storm, another had 2 feet of water and another was barely touched. The storm had dramatically different effects on many different families. Due to the timing of the gathering we had to attend directly from the work site – dirty, grimy and smelly. :)

I think we have collectively made about 10 trips to Wal-Mart. There are tons of little things that we need to get to make life a little bit more comfortable.

It’s 6:30 am here. About 15 of us are eating breakfast and milling around. One of the Camp Coastal work crews plans to leave in a few minutes so they can avoid some of the late day heat. We’ll blog again soon. Hopefully we’ll get the internet connection issue solved so you can hear from a variety of our blog authors throughout the course of the week and see some of our pictures.

As always – we welcome questions.

- Robb