Home Online Journal 10/20/02

October 20, 2002

It has been two weeks since AmeriCorps*NCCC started, and I must say that I love it. It definitely feels like we have been in Sacramento ("Sac town" if you will) for more than two weeks, probably because they keep us so busy. So what is this place like? Well, we are located on the McClellan business park, which a few years ago was the McClellan Air Force Base. It still looks like an Air Force base, except for the lack of Air Force people (though there are some Coast Guard and Forest Service people around sometimes). We live on a corner of the base in two three-floor dorms, and the NCCC office is right across from the dorms. We live in doubles and each share a bathroom with another double. The room size is okay... it has been a while since I have been in Branscomb, but the room size reminds me of a Branscomb double.

NCCC brings together an interesting mix of people. We started out with about 270 Corps members, 28 team leaders, and maybe 20 staff members. There are three NCCC campuses that start in the Fall, and they assign you to a campus, but their policy is to place people as far from home as possible. So, a huge majority of the campus is from the East Coast, and maybe 10% of the campus is from west of Cincinnati. At first it seemed a little strange, with all these East Coast accents on the West Coast, but I don’t think about it any more. The largest group of people here is 22-year-old college grads, which I pretty much expected. There are quite a few 18-year-olds right out of high school, and another chunk of 20- and 21-year-olds who have done a few years of college and are either taking a break or dropped out. There are only a few 23- and 24-year-olds, who did something after college. Most of the people are white, but it "feels" very diverse to me, probably because of the wide variety of experiences that people have had before coming here. Economic background is hard to gauge, but I would guess that it’s a majority middle and upper-middle class group. I could be way off though, because class doesn’t seem to enter much into our interactions... at the moment we are pretty much all just poor students and ex-students who will continue to have very little money because we only make $80 a week.

But enough with demographics, what are the people really like? To be specific, I think the people here are really "cool." Just a lot of friendly, open, normal kids. There aren’t a ton of hardcore service people here, but most people seem to have a real passion for just doing something good and worthwhile. It’s a little strange (yet refreshing) that sometimes you meet someone who seems like your stereotypical frat guy or sorority girl, but when you get to know them you usually find out that they really do care about something bigger than themselves. I meet a lot of introspective people, and plenty of intelligent people, but it’s not like being at Vandy where pretty much everybody around is relatively school smart. There are a few hippies, and a lot of liberals, and almost everybody is a Democrat or an Independent. There are also some total toolbags, where you wonder why they are here and how they got into the program. You can split the toolbags into two groups: those who seem to have some serious problems (a small group), and those who are just way too immature for a program like NCCC. But that’s not a big deal, and so overall I’m very happy with the people here. I have just found a lot of people that I really enjoy spending time with.

They have been keeping us pretty busy so far, to say the least. We all have four weeks of training, which is a lot of sitting in a classroom (and I thought I was done with college). We have learned about stuff like disaster relief, safe van driving, tool safety, service learning, NCCC policies, and other stuff like that. It’s all pretty boring (I am occasionally bored to tears), and they are really good at taking up many, many hours to present a simple concept. Training goes from about 8:30 to 5:00 every day, but we also have PT (physical training) four days a week at 5:30 a.m. (ugh). I guess it’s nice to have someone whipping me into shape.

Outside of training, I have been having a great time. I have been spending a lot of time just wandering the halls of the dorm, meeting and talking with people. There is a bar really near campus, and so those of us who are over 21 hang out there sometimes. Last weekend, I went to San Francisco with ten other people, which I really enjoyed. We did a lot of walking around the city, saw a Blue Angels show, hung out at some bars, rode the cable cars, and stayed at a hostel in a sleaze district. My favorite part was walking across the Golden Gate Bridge one morning as the fog rolled past. Today I went biking with some friends on the American River Parkway Trail, which is an awesome 32-mile paved trail near Sacramento. But as I said, they keep us pretty busy, and so there’s not much free time except on the weekends.

For the first week of training, we were all on temporary teams. During that week, I took the pack test to be on one of the four wildland firefighting teams, and I passed. Then on this past Monday, I found out that I made one of the fire teams!!! That means that we will do the same service projects as other NCCC teams for most of the year, and then near the end of the year we will probably be deployed to fight forest fires with the Forest Service for at least a couple weeks. I met my permanent team on Monday (Team Blue 4), and they are just so incredible. I couldn’t be happier. Not only is my team leader awesome, but my whole team is packed with really neat and interesting and passionate people, many of whom I would want to hang out with anyway. Most teams only have around three guys (out of 12 people), but since we are a fire team there are six guys and six girls. There are two 18-year-olds and two 23-year-olds, and the rest of us are 21 and 22. I feel so lucky that I don’t have a bad team leader or a couple of toolbags on my team. I feel bad for people who aren’t happy with their team, because you will be spending the next ten months with these people. Actually, quite a few people have quit NCCC already, either because they don’t like it here, or they miss their significant other, or they failed the drug test.

Two weeks from now, teams deploy on their first project. Projects usually last between four and eight weeks, and every team has one project in Sacramento. My team’s first project is a four-week project at the Sacramento Food Bank Services working on some kind of collection drive, which should be great. About nine teams (out of 24) have their first project here, so the campus will still be hopping for a while, and I will get a chance to know Sacramento better. After this project, all of the fire teams will have two weeks of firefighting training, and then we have Christmas break.

I’m going to end this entry with the AmeriCorps member pledge, which some people think is cheesy, but I think is really quite inspirational.

I will get things done for America – to make our people safer, smarter, and healthier.
I will bring Americans together to strengthen our communities.
Faced with apathy, I will take action.
Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground.
Faced with adversity, I will persevere.
I will carry this commitment with me this year and beyond.
I am an AmeriCorps member, and I will get things done.

I hope that you are all well, and that you are "getting things done,"

Kevin