2/23/2011

Hey everyone!  This is going to be my official blog for the 9 or so months I’ll be in Americorps NCCC.  I appreciate all those who are going to be following me as I learn and experience different things. 

So I’ve been in Vinton, IA for about a week.  Things are going pretty well.  A lot of it has just been settling down—learning dorm policies, kitchen rules, things of that sort.  For the first week, I was in Team G—all of the corps members were placed into temporary teams based on their last name.  It ended up being a pretty good group.  I think we all generally had a very chill personality.  For example, we had to come up with a grocery list for 3 days worth of food, which went really smooth.  No one really had any restrictions and we didn’t really have any preferences.  Something that’s pretty cool is that we were probably one of the most diverse groups.  Understandably, the majority of the corps members are white.  In my group, we had me, a Filipino, someone who was Columbian, someone who was African-American, about 5 Caucasians, and a girl who is half-Croatian and half-African.  On that note, another thing worth mentioning is it looks like there are only 2 Filipinos in the whole program—and the other girl is half-Filipino. 

I’m surprised at the diversity of the corps members in terms of education level.  There are quite a few of everything it seems—no one group outnumbering the others.  A good mix of folks who just graduated high school, folks who graduated from college, those who are taking 9 months off from college, and those who are in their later 20s and are still considering whether to pursue higher education at all.  I actually have to give props to those who just graduated high school.  I remember when I graduated from high school.  It didn’t really enter my mind of doing anything but going on to college.  These people will definitely be entering college with a unique experience that should serve them well in college. 

I’m currently starting my second week in Vinton.  I was assigned to my permanent team, which I will be with for the next 9 months.  We are Maple 3—Maple being our Unit.  I’ll try to diagram the order of command in the next post.  I think we are also a good group.  We should be able to feed off each other and make this year pretty good.  I also like the Team Leader we got.  Her name is Molly.  She’s one of those folks who may be physically small but packs a lot of punch.  My team and I will be in Vinton until around March 17^th at which time we will depart for our first project.  I still don’t know what that project will be and will probably not know until sometime in March.  I’ll keep you all posted.

Thanks again everyone!  Now that I’ve pretty much settled down, I’ll try to blog probably once a week, twice a week maybe.

Best Wishes