would you care to build a house on your own

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it would be like to live life totally alone. I guess not totally alone, humans need interaction to survive. But what if you just had those day to day acquaintances, people you never fully got to know, like or dislike, love or hate. At times I think life would be easier that way. You wouldn't have to worry about being enough for someone. smart enough. cute enough. just all together enough. You wouldn't have to worry about disappointing someone. Unintentional broken hearts.
But then I thought that those relationships, even the difficult ones, are the ones that save our lives. I would rather constantly struggle maintaining a relationship than not having one at all. I use to say that Love Is Above All. Somewhere along the line I got scared. Somewhere along the line I decided that being alone was better than being hurt. Certain people have shown me, though, that being alone, pushing people away, shutting people out of your life, will not make you any happier.

monday. tuesday. great day. best day.

foundation.


framed that house in three hours.

grasp the power of motivated people.


wrappin a house... like a boss.

day two end product. amazed? yeah. me too.

'most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have remained unchanged for millions of years. some, however, grew feathers and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that had held them for so long. they didn’t become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.'

I woke up this morning and felt like I am a part of something big. really big.

We started working with Habitat for Humanity yesterday. And while all we did most of our first day was clear trash from work sites and move a butt ton of scaffolding to different build sites, I felt like the work I was doing was really worth while. We got to see a house dedication yesterday evening and it was really heart warming.
During the day, the owner of one of the homes, Ms. Stacey, came frantically in the truck where we were putting the dry wall scraps and other trash and she needed to find the pull chain for the ceiling fan, it had been left in one of the boxes. I searched with her and ended up finding it, and when I found it she was so happy. She gave me a huge hug and just thanked me about 12 times. It was simple. Anyone would have helped her look. But she was so grateful. Ms. Stacey seemed grateful for every single aspect of her life. She looked at her house with pride, she looked at all of the volunteers with love in her eyes.

I can't even express how much I love our house. Its older and it has a history. Grant gave me a sweet Christmas ornament and a Rugrats pillowcase he found in the trash. Seems crazy, but I loved it. The people who use to own this his evacuated during Katrina and just never came back. Habitiat did a lot of work for us with cleaning and fixing a lot of things around the house, but it still feels like it was abandoned. I always felt like buildings, houses especially, reflected the emotions of the people who lived in them. Walls can talk, if you will. And this house felt sad. I love being able to bring it back to life; to add our own River 2 touch to it. Tonight is Halloween and I really hope we get Trick-or-Treaters!

I get to go home for Thanksgiving!!! Orbits keeps sending me my travel itinerary and updates for my flight and I get so excited every time! I cannot wait to see my family and my friends. Goodness.

oh. this is three blocks from my house. no big deal.

my favorite chords

Spike project number one: check.

I'm really happy to be back from our first round project. I will miss the beauty of our surroundings and the amazing staff that we got to work with over the last few months but I am so excited to start our next project! After a week of debrief and clearance meetings we're gonna make our way to the coast! My team is off to Bay St. Louis to work with Habitat for Humanity! At first we were going to live at Camp Coast Care in a trailer with another AmeriCorps team, it seemed ok.. still a step up from some of our previous living conditions. Howeverrrrrr a few days ago we found out we will actually be living in a house! For us to live at Camp Coast Care Habitat had to pay some ridiculous amount of money so instead they got us a house! Its a 5 bedroom 2 bathroom (with at least one half bath) and a huge porch! We're only a few blocks from the downtown area and..drumroll.... the beach!!! I'm so excited. I cannot wait to work with Habitat and learn all these new crazy construction skills!

Strange though, when we got back to Vicksburg on Friday, I felt like I was home. Its odd to me how just 10 weeks ago I was a stranger in this town. I now have so many memories here. The Yazoo River is such a special place to me. It feels like home here. These people are my family. I love it.

learn how to use my hands not just my head.

over a month later! sorry guys.

ok. so our first round project is at this water "park"... its a camp site. not a park. very misleading here in the south. anyway. we've been working at Little Black Creek Water Park for the past 4 weeks. And honestly, that is why I have not been updating. I was a little disappointed with our project selection. Other teams were off to the coast, working with Habitat, building houses and changing lives... and here we are.. working on aesthetics for those who are fortunate enough to go on vacation here. Basically we've been either painting all day everyday or working our butts off in the hot sun clearing away brush from a dam or ripping roots out of the ground on a horse-trail. I worked hard. I pushed myself. I did things I had no idea I was capable of; such as not only having the courage to hold a machete, but actually use it to take out some intense thorn covered vines. However I still felt like what we were doing was kind of a waste of time. And it made my days difficult. It made my real desire to be here dwindle. Our team morale was low. We actually even had a team member return home. Our living conditions have been interesting, too. We are staying in a lodge hall that is about the size of a large classroom. We each have our own cot that is barely big enough for one person. We have about 3 feet of personal space before running into our neighbors cot. We cook there. We hang out there. There is one bathroom for 11 people. No Mirror. The shower is about a half of a mile walk. The closest town (internet access.. food...civilization) is at least a 10 minute drive. Its been rough.
Then, the other day as I was walking to our tool shed to continue painting signs for our horse-trail, I saw an adorable family picnicking on the dam that we had cleared brush from. They had an amazing view of the lake and they looked really, really, happy.
In that moment I felt pride.
I hope that the image of that family sharing a meal on land that was once covered with gross vines covered in thorns stays with me not only for the rest of this project, but for the rest of my life. Its easy to lose sight of what is really important. I forgot to enjoy the life that I am living right now. I don't have to sit at a desk all day. Or do homework. I get to be outside. Using my muscles and strengthening my body. How awesome!
I'm going from dreadfully saying that I live in the woods to excitedly saying I live in the woods!!!! I walk out of the lodge and see hundreds of trees. Since I have to be up at 6am everyday I GET to see the sunrise over the lake every single day!
Some days are a lot harder than others. And some days are the most amazing days of my life. Its a struggle. But its worth it. I hope you can look around and find things in your life that you are proud of. That you are excited about. And if you can't.. when you wake up in the morning and get out of your comfy bed.. think about how I sleep on a hard cot every night and say good morning to the 11 other people, thousands of ants, spiders, cockroaches and crickets that are my roommates and maybe you will feel better.

Lots of love.

let em know

boy, howdy! What an interesting past nine days it has been. Last Tuesday I went down to the river and hung out with two of my favorite people here, just talking and taking in our experience. We ended up jumping into the Yazoo River...which was absolutely disgusting, but a memory I am so thrilled to have. That night was so fun. Many things changed that night... for the utmost better.
The next day was absolutely horrendous though. We had PT in the morning at 5:30 and our day didn't end until a CPR training that lasted until 9pm. Well.. those were the plans for the day, at least. On my way to CPR I got the most ridiculous pains in my lower abdomen. My team leader, Nora, ended up taking me to the hospital where I found out I just had a UTI. I reacted very badly to the pain medicine they gave me and spent the entire next day in bed, hating my life.
The weekend came, though, and life was fantastic again. I hung out with Brit (one of my roomies), Teddy, and my team member Grant (see previous post for brief description). We ended up having a lot of fun down by the River. Grant and I have formed a connection that I cherish so much. He knows exactly how to cheer me up and make me smile, which is something that I have needed a lot of lately. Bonus: he is from Arkansas so he has the southern gentlemen innate quality within him... meaning he is fabulously nice to me, quite the change from those midwestern fellas. I like him... and am very excited to have him in my life. :)
My team had a meeting this afternoon where we worked out a lot of our built up issues. We are trying to communicate better as a team and let out frustrations that we might have with each other. We did this exercise where we wrote down things that were bugging us that each other was doing... it was completely anonymous so we couldn't write our names or the name of the person we were frustrated with with; so when our team leader, Nora, read them aloud I just listened as though all those things pertained to me. It was a compassion builder for me. I knew who most of those things pertained to though, but still listening to them as though someone was saying those things to me made me feel alienated, even though I knew I wasn't the one being called out on annoying behaviors. I made a decision that I'm going to try to be more of an understanding and accepting person. I think that I have a pretty open mind to alternative lifestyles, but I know that I can be very judgmental on people who have annoying quirks or act differently than I do... and that is something that I would really like to work on and change.

in summation, I love my life right now.


"I just think if we keep our hearts together; just think if we build on this trust that we have for one another, baby we can make this last a lifetime"

cause I'm a bear!

oh what up.

Let me start with our service project that we did on Monday! We went to Rolling Fork, Mississippi to clean up the town! This town is one of the most (if not the most) impoverished towns in the deep south. for real. We split up into groups and worked on fixing up the hospital, cleaning up the graveyard, and fixing up the gym in the high school. My group was assigned the hospital and we did a LOT of painting. My friend Britt and I painted this overhead thing outside one of the doorways. It was a pain in the behind for sure. I had to spend a good 45 minutes bending my back in as close of a 90 degree angle that I could get just to paint underneath it. It was one of the best experiences ever. The people in the town were so excited to have us there. The lady, Susan, who worked in the hospital was absolutely amazing. A lot of people got together and baked us a lot of goodies to snack on during the day and even made us goodie bags to take with us that some awesome random (like huge calculators and dry erase boards) stuff in them. It was really awesome. The rest of the week was just more training. Yesterday we learned the basics of taking off and putting a new roof on a house. I loved it. My friend Alliegh and I got to just bang nails back into the roof after the shingles were taken off and we got really into it. Money.

I've gotten to know my team better and I just have to say........ I love them! We get along so well and I can tell it is going to be a very, very fun 10 months. I feel very blessed to get to work with these amazing people. We got the dets for our first round projects! We are going to restore an old campground on a water reservoir. I think it is going to be totally legit. We get to make horseback riding trails and help restore parts of the campground that still have drastic hurricane damage from Katrina. I think its going to be eye opening actually seeing all the damage that is still left from Katrina that a lot of people have forgotten about; but on the flip side its going to be great actually being able to DO something about it.

I'm so excited to get things done!