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