Written on 4/10

I left out a very important piece of information on my last post.  WHERE I’M STAYING AT.  The YMCA camp my team and I are working at is located in Augusta, MI.  The biggest city I’m near is Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.  I’m on the southwest side of Michigan.  A big difference I see between southwest Michigan and California is the amount of woods in Michigan.  On the freeway, on the side streets, in people’s backyards, in their frontyards, there are woods everywhere.  It doesn’t look really pretty right now because it’s not spring yet.  But I imagine that it must get pretty green once spring hits.

The schools in Augusta and the surrounding areas were on spring break this past week, which meant that my team and I got a one-week break.  While I was not working with campers, I was doing maintenance work for the YMCA.  Over the course of a week, I spent about 7 hours raking maple leaves.  I chopped some logs into firewood for four hours and then picked up some fallen trees (which had been chainsaw-ed into logs) for the rest of a work day.  I helped finish a dirt trail, leading from the dock to another site.  This consisted of sawing off fallen trees, leveling uneven ground with a shovel, and making dirt platforms.  A few of my teammates and I also installed some hand-rails along a trail that was pretty steep.  I learned how to put in a metal post and how to burn through climbing rope with a propane bottle.  By the end of the week, I was pretty sore.  It was good, physical work.  It was also the type of work that I expected to be doing as a part of NCCC.  There were some moments where I just wanted to rest and chill.  But I’m glad I got through it.  It will definitely help me adjust more quickly if our next project is a more physical one such as trail-building. 

Friday was a pretty scary day.  My team leader got a call from the Iowa campus informing her that if Congress didn’t come up with a budget by midnight, we would have to leave Michigan immediately and head back to Iowa—once we received a phone call.  It definitely caused all of us some stress.  Throughout the night, I kept on checking the time, hoping and waiting for my team leader to text us any updates.  Luckily, at 11:30 pm, I received a text from my team leader letting me know that a budget deal had been reached.

Today, I watched the news and read the paper, trying to find out what kind of deal had been reached.  It’s kind of weird that I wasn’t able to find anything.  It’s interesting that what may have been an important issue to NCCC—being a federally funded program—may not have been as important of an issue to the outside world.  My team and I were literally on the edge of our seats, anxious to hear about what was going to happen to us.  I’m glad that what sounds like a temporary deal has been reached.  It means I don’t have to pack up everything and leave for Iowa. 

But this whole government shutdown mess truly doesn’t make sense.  It was Republicans and Democrats fighting over planned parenthood and the oversight of the EPA.  While these are important issues, I feel that they have no direct connection to the economic recession, which is what politicians were all talking about before this all happened.  It really was annoying to know that so many people’s lives would be affected by so few people.  While I am interested in working in the government/public sector, this shutdown scare opened my eyes to the fact that a government job can also be unstable.  In a lot of ways, your job is dependent on the politicians and lawmakers and the decisions they choose to make.

After an eventful week, I’ll be working with the campers again.  Time to gear up.  I’ll keep ya’ll updated.

-David