Hillbilly Tough

Today was our final work day!  It is such a bittersweet end to our work week.  We are all so excited to not be covered from head to toe in dirt for once this week, and we are glad to give our muscles a break.  But at the same time we are so deeply saddened by the damage still left after we would leave.  I always thought the hardest part of AWOL was all the manual labor, but boy was I wrong.  The entire trip has been filled with difficult moments, but the most difficult thing I have faced this week is not being able to finish what we have started.  With disaster relief there is only so much you can do in one day, there is not way we could have cleaned up all the debris at the ranch or build the entire house for Habitat for Humanity.  It is so hard to see the beginning of a project, but be left wondering how it will end up.  We won't be able to see the Ranahan Ranch all cleaned up and running.  We won't be able to see the family move into the Habitat house.  We won't be able to meet the family of the first house we dug mud out of.  So I have been struggling with the idea of just leaving Colorado the way it is.  I want to help more.  This flood has caused a tremendous amount of damage that may never be completely fixed.  It almost seems as if our efforts haven't really made a dent compared to what is needed.  But tonight that all changed.

We all left a little piece of ourselves on the ranch!

  After spending another full day at the Ranahan Ranch moving rock and pulling up the floor boards in the barn, we took some time to walk through the streets of downtown Estes Park.  Then we headed off to another community dinner at the Mount Calvary Lutheran Church with 50+ other volunteers from around the country.  We had groups from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Missouri (they stayed at UNC with us all week).  After dinner we had a presentation of some of the workers and the places they worked.  After the short presentation they asked a few local community members to get up and tell their stories. The first one was a little old man from Glen Haven who, instead of just telling his story, wrote a song about his experience with the flood, which moved some of us to tears, just thinking about this little old man having to escape his home with his dogs. But the most mind blowing part of his song, was the laughter it brought amongst the other flood victims.  As we cried, they laughed.  They had managed to find light in the darkness of the flood and this gave us hope that they would be okay after we leave.  This really set things into perspective and made us realize that we had accomplished something.  Our work actually meant something to these people and that is what made everything worth it for us.  We could finally understand what our help meant to them.  We gave them hope.  And that is the greatest thing in times of darkness.  They touched our hearts the way that we touched theirs and we could feel their gratefulness for all of our work, even if it seemed so minimal to us, it meant the world to them.

Here is a link to the video of the elderly gentleman sharing his song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7cOzFqCkI&feature=youtu.be

Lots of Love,
Ari

Let's Build a House!

  It's Habitat for Humanity day!! You know what that means...we're going to help build a house!  Many of us were very excited for this day.  We began our morning very early as we drove to Dacono.  Once we got to the house we went through a little introduction and some safety measures.  As soon as we got our hard hats (brain buckets) on we began our work!  I learned how to dry wall!!  Yupp, we had a group dry walling a bedroom and closet! Then we had another group down working in the crawl space below the floor.  After working for a few hours we had lunch courtesy of the Habitat for Humanity folks.  We had some subs, chips, and fruit.  Very refreshing!  We then had a brief presentation in which we learned about the actual organization, Habitat for Humanity.  After about a half hour we went straight back to work.  Once the people in the crawl space finished they moved up stairs to help us drywall.  Overall we dry-walled two bedrooms, two closets, and started a bathroom and another bedroom.  So overall, a good day! 

Lots of Love,
Ari

Wait...So this isn't mud??

So as you probably could have guessed this blog will be about more of this weeks adventures!  So let's begin!  This is Work Day 3!

Adventure 1:  Elkhorn Lodge

     So this adventure began EARLY Tuesday morning as we set out for Estes Park in search of the Elkhorn Lodge where we would be working all day.  The damage of the flood was so apparent the entire drive to Estes Park.  Here are some of the pictures from all the damage along the road. 

These are just a few of the hundreds of houses destroyed by the flood last September.

   So as you can imagine we all saw these houses as a sort of motivation to work harder each day, even if we couldn't help all of these victims, we could speed along the process so someone else could move on to their houses.

Adventure 2: Elkhorn Lodge, Cowboys and Mud (or is that mud?)
 
    Our work site for the day was a the Ranahan Ranch up in the Elkhorn Lodge.  First let me start by saying that I met a REAL cowboy!  :)  Within minutes of meeting the two owners of the ranch, Andy and JT, JT decided to pull out his guitar and play us a song. Country music of course! :)  And he gave us all a copy of his CD.  Then they sent us up the hill to go start some debris removal, where we got covered in mud...I am not so sure it was actually mud and not something else (horse poop), but I just keep telling myself it was mud.  We began to sort anything from twine to complete light poles into movable piles.  This is what we continued to do ALL day!  We even had to dig some out of the frozen ground! But the real challenge of the day came when Deven, Sammi, and I tried to dig a 5 foot fence post out of the frozen ground...The post was only sticking out of the ground about 8 inches when we began.  Although we ran out of time for that project and didn't get the post out from the ground, we had a blast!  In fact, here is a link to see Cassie's documentary of the post removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2HgNonE_d0&feature=youtu.be  

Our work site.  We moved almost all of the debris.

Adventure 3:  The Stanley Hotel

  




     Yupp, this is exactly as the title says.  We saw/took touristy photos in front of The famous Stanley Hotel where Stephen King stayed and wrote "The Shining."  No one really knew what The Stanley Hotel was, besides Andrea, one of our adult leaders, who of course screamed of excitement the entire time.  So of course we had to pull over and take pictures with it.  And here are some of those!

Group photo in front of the mountains!

Good night and Lots of Love!
Ari

Lots of Bloggers!

Good Morning everyone!  I was thinking about our trip last night and realized that you all might want some other perspectives on the trip.  So check out Bea and Cassie's blogs to read about their experiences this week!

Bea's Blog
   Beatricebidenfeld.wordpress.com

Cassie's Blog
   Creatingcassie.wordpress.com

Sun Burnt and Shoveling

Yes, I know I am a day behind in this whole blogging thing, I apologize.  I am trying to keep on track, but sleep is important after working hard all day (especially if you aren't used to working hard :)).  So you all are probably wondering what happened on Work Day 2 (Monday). So Adventures from Monday included the Weld County Food Bank and a fish farm.

 Adventure 1: Sort and Safety Check

Our group getting a tour of the Food Bank!

We began our day around 8 am as we traveled to the Weld County Food Bank in Greeley, CO.  Once we arrived we were given a tour by Cheri. We learned about the 9 million pounds of food the food bank provides yearly.  1 in 3 children (1 in 6 people) will go home hungry each day in Weld County alone, but with the help of Weld County Food Bank and many volunteers like ourselves, these people will have food on their tables each day.  Among the many operations going on throughout the food bank was the "Sort and Safety Check."  We got the privilege to do this job for a few hours.  This included checking the expiration date on HUNDREDS of cans, as well as checking for any dings or dents in the can.  Then we would sort the cans into the corresponding labeled box.  We managed to finish off three big containers full of cans.  The picture off to the right shows our group trying to fit into one of these containers, now imagine that full of cans just waiting to be checked.  That was our job!  Below are some more pictures of the sort and safety check process!

Part of our group removing debris.

Adventure 2: What's a fish farm?

   After a morning at the food bank we traveled to a local fish farm where a family needed our help to remove debris from their tree line.  We jumped out of the van and immediately grabbed our rakes and shovels to remove the multitude of foreign objects, not to mention some live critters!  Yeah, that's right we found a few mice and a couple toads amongst the debris!  AH!  We continued on working to clear out all the debris from a section of trees. After a few hours and hundreds of branches later, we went to go tour of the Fish Farm.  For those of you who don't know what a fish farm is, don't worry because I didn't either.  But a fish farm is basically like any other farm where animals are raised to sell for certain purposes.  In this case fish are being sold to stock lakes or to sell to local restaurants.  The fish farm we went to had over 30 tanks (100 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 4 feet deep) full of fish. Each individual tank contained 30,000 fish, about 160,000 in the "big fish" house and well over 300,000 in the "small/baby fish" house.  We got to walk through each house, carefully because we didn't want to fall into the tanks and watch them feed the thousands of fish.  SO COOL!  After learning a tremendous amount about the business of fish farming we went down the road to meet their cattle and pigs before heading back to campus.  And who knew one could get sun burn when there is still snow on the ground?  Not me! And that is the reason my face is completely burnt!  Spring Break is Hard.

This cow and I are BFFs.

Thousands, of thousands of fishies!

The Big Fishy House.

Piggies!

Our group and the family we worked with today!

Well, its time to head to bed.  We've got another early morning ahead of us tomorrow so,

Good night and Lots of Love!
Ari

A Week of Adventures: Day 1

Ad.ven.ture: 
   (noun)
     1. An exciting or unusual experience

When you first hear about AWOL (A Week of Offsite Learning) trips, you hear about how AWOL trips are full of adventure.  Personally, I think the A in AWOL is for Adventure.  Many adventures that we all experience for the first time.  In my case the first Adventure of the week was flying in plane.  Well, Service Day 1 came with a whole other set of adventures.  


 


Adventure 1:  Who knew water could do that?
   This adventure is all about the flood.  In September of 2013 Colorado was hit with an average of 22 inches of rain within days.  Many people completely lost their homes, while others have been fortunate enough to just have some minor flooding indoors.  Wow, that just doesn't seem right to say someone with water flooding their basement is fortunate, but in the dozens of houses we saw today these people were fortunate.  We saw so many houses that couldn't even be fixed and would have to be completely rebuilt.  We saw complete roads and bridges gone due to the large amount of water and the boulders that water had pushed down the side of the mountains.  And the most heartbreaking sight of the day was that of a house sitting near the edge of a river and on the garage door in bright green spray paint it read, "We R OK."  We weren't able to snap a picture of that one, but we all sat in awe as we passed through these towns.  This water had torn apart houses, bridges, roads, and many lives.  Which is why we are here and cannot wait to begin work each day!
    In fact the house we would work on had a house on both sides of it, that had been completely damaged.  The house on the right had been hit by a boulder (no small rock!)  and the boulder tore through the back side of the house all the way through the kitchen and out the front of the house.  The house on the left side had been hit so hard by mud and water that the entire house was moved at least a foot off its foundation.  These people really needed our help, and probably will for months and even years.  Nothing will ever really be the way it was before the flood.  As many of the folks we talked to said, "Colorado is not prone to flooding.  No one knows what to do with any of this."  Well, that's what we are here for!

One of the houses and its bridge that were destroyed.

The house that moved off its foundation.

This house used to line up with the cement foundation layer.

All Boarded up like dozens of houses we saw.

The house that was struck with a boulder

There is no back wall anymore and a HUGE hole on the front side.

18 inches of mud covering the garage floor...Challenge Accepted!

Belongings all stuck in the mud.

The mudslide had completely broke of the door and flooded the garage.

The porch on the house we worked on had collapsed.

Adventure 2: The work, and lots of it.

The cabin we worked on.  We worked in the garage on the right

   Our morning began promptly at 8am as we packed up the van and headed to a nearby town called Lyons (about an hour away).  In Lyons we picked up our volunteer coordinators for the day, Edward and Claudia.  Then they led us another 20 minutes away to Big Elk Meadows.  We ventured up the mountain to a small community of houses.  We would be spending our time on just one house for the day.  This house was a BEAUTIFUL log cabin (pictures below) which was struck by a mudslide and had five feet of mud packed against the back side of the house, as well as a foot and a half of frozen mud covering the entire garage floor.  This was our big goal for the day, get the mud out of the garage.  We immediately grabbed our shovels and began to chip away at the mud.  We would then take the wheel barrow full of mud from the garage and use it to fill in bumps and dents in the driveway.  By the end of the day, (4pm) we had filled the wheel barrow what seemed like (and probably was close to) 50+ times.  

 Some Pictures during the work Process:

 









Adventure 3:  Peeing in the Woods.
   Just reading this you know exactly what this adventure holds.  Yes while up in mountains we had no access to a working toilet, considering the house we were working on and the ones around it had no running water.  So as Edward, our coordinator for the day, informed us of our predicament we all looked at each other with shocked looks on our faces.  We have to go where?!?!  Well for anyone like me who doesn't necessarily go camping, EVER, this was quite a far fetched idea.  But after a certain point and 3 water bottles later, no one could hold off any longer, so we had to face our fears.  And for those of us who had never done this before, our lovely group members made a little tutorial and gave tips on how this process works.  If you would like to watch this little comedic tutorial check it out at, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksrYNhys1XQ   (Everyone in this video is fully clothed)


Well, its Good Night and Lots of Love from Colorado!  Enjoy the photos below of our first day's happenings!

Ari.

The foot and a half of solid mud that we dug out. 

Almost all mud removed from the garage!!

WE DID IT!

Spring Break is Hard...Hard Work Preview

Today was Day 1 of our 5  work days. And we are very exhausted and ready for bed so I plan to blog both today and tomorrow's adventures sometime tomorrow.  But I will leave you with some sneak peaks of today's happenings...

1. Who knew water could do that? and The reason for the trip!
2. The work...and lots of it.
3. Peeing in the woods.

And the many pictures of today's events!  :)

So I will leave you all in suspense until tomorrow... So until then,

Good night and Lots of Love,
Ari