Time to start our 3rd project!

Lets give you the details.

For the next 6 weeks, our team is working at Phillips School in Annendale Virginia. This is a school that focuses on special needs students and students that are working to earn life skills to function outside of their home. Those skills include learning how to pay for rent, folding clothes, grocery shopping and maintaining an apartment housing. But for the other students, its basicaly like your average elementery/middle school class. You have your reading and math times, science and social studies, and even recess breaks here and there. But all of the students have at least one learning or emotional or handicapped disability. Some kids have autism, others with severe emotional or attention needs, and lots of kids have anger mangagement issues as well.

Our team was split up seperately to be put into approxamately 9 different classrooms, with most of them having to deal with the mentaly handicapped students. My classes deal specificly with kids with attention problems and anger related issues as well. We are put into the classrooms to act as mentors to help the students with their homework and to assist the teachers in doing some of their "erhem" bitch work, aka correcting tests, correcting and sorting homework, making copies etc... But all in all, I'm really liking the project so far.

Not too much is going on here back at the village. Some people once again got caught drinking, but one person actually fessed up to it. Everyone that didnt fess up didnt get punished, but the person that did admit that they did drink actually got fined and a 72 hour suspension. I sorta think that isnt fair seeing as how that the person actually confessed to it and got punished, and the people that didnt confess got nothing. Sigh.

I guess that's all that has happened this week. Just a tiny update. Imma hackin the internet here at DC Village to post a few updates, the 1 post below this one i wrote in my room.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, we just did a week long project for our tribute to MLK.

The project that we did was this. We went to Lock Haven Pensylvania to do some work for an organization called PennServe. They had us do different work every day that we were there, except for the strange twist that during the whole week we were there, we only did 3 days of actual work, which, was strange to me.... But anyways, here's what we did:

First day of work - We worked at the towns only Homeless shelter by painting various parts of the interior of the building itself, mainly the dining area, living area, the stair hallway and 2 rooms in the upstairs portion of the building. I thought this was the most relaxing work that we've done so far, i enjoyed myself and found out that i'm actually pretty good at using the roller "Although painting itself really isnt too hard, especially when you're painting a house, its still fun".

Second day of work - Our team went to a youth center to prepare a lesson plan for approxamately 10 kids, ranging from ages 5-14. The lesson plan we developed involved us teaching the kids about martin luther kings life and the work he was involved in during the civil rights movement. Of course instead of it being purely educaitonal, and due to the kids' age range, we toned it down to their level and made it fun. I mean comeon, who can resist the call of MLK history bingo :P.

Last day of work - The last day of work was pretty fun as well. We worked at some sort of art center in the middle of town, working to convert some of the old unused rooms into useful rooms to store supplies, or to house new pieces of art. The part I helped to work on was to take a completley empty room, and add 3 shelves to the room and a computer desk area. We cut wood and drilled the pieces of wood into the wall to create all the shelves and the computer desk. By the time we were done with that, it was time to go back to get our stuff and head home.

And by going back, where did we go to stay the whole time we were there?

A quaint little school called Lock Haven University :D

The university itself is a nice campus. It has a great rec center that had a bad ass rock climbing wall, weight room, indoor track, tennis football and raquetball courts and various tredmills and cycling machines. The cafeteria also was pretty sweet as well, awesome food every day which made it even better, BUT the thing that made it even better? We got to eat there for free!!!!!!!!! w00t AmeriCorps.

As for our living quarters, we stayed in one of the Dorm buildings. The dorms were alright, the rooms we stayed in were the study rooms, which had bunkbeds and desks in them, so they were made to accomodate multiple people obviously. As for the general college populaton, there was a fare share of the usual partiers, jocks, and whatever you would normaly find in the college gene pool.

As for recreational wise, on our off time, we took a trip down to Penn State to check out their world renound Creamery, and partook in some tastey delicious ice cream and milkshakes, then wandered around state college, which is actually a town, and checked out the bookstore there and bought a few things. Late evening, the 21+ over crowd went and got plastered at a nearby Saloon in downtown Lock Haven, while the under 21 crowd went and saw 2 movies, Hostel and Fun with Dick and Jane. I saw dick and Jane and meh, it was an alright movie, but what can you expect with Jim Carrey? I would have rather gotten plastered if possible due to the unfortunate accident that happened to my Niece.........

Oh yeah, about that......

I posted about this on my myspace, but anyways, yeah. My niece Jocelyn was hit by a truck on January 6th 2006. The accident caused critical damage to her, and she later died from her Injuries. I found out about this the day before the Funeral was supposed to happen, which was the day we left for Lock Haven. I talked with both my sisters at great length to find out what happened, and from what I was told, the driver was not under the influence, but he was at fault. Im not sure if my sister Ann is going to press charges or not, but as I said I don't know the full details. So you can expect that last saturday was a really shitty day for me.

But now, our team is back in DC, preparing for our next project, which is working at Phillips Charter School. 6 weeks we will be staying in the village, all by ourselves and with some other teams that are going in and out from their Disaster Relief Phase. Most likely this entry wont be posted for a few weeks due to this strange policy about not being able to hook up your laptop to the network because people are retards and dont know how to use Anti Virus software. But you know what...

I do what I want, I work for the government

Back into the fray, once again

7 months, No more breaks...

So finaly I'm back in DC. Winter break was alright, didn't really do that much. Mainly just sat around at home, ate tons of mexican food and played lots of CS:S and WoW. Which I guess is a good change from what I was used to from the 3 months previous, as in lots of personal time. Thats one thing AmeriCorps doesn't really offer you in the program, which is lots of personal time. You only get 3 alloted personal days to take in the 10 month period, including holidays, winter break and spring break, which really isnt a break at all. Spring break is like 4 days, aka an extended weekend which is bullshit. But I guess you have to take what has been given to you.

So the world of portland has changed in my 3 month absence. For example, Kuppie Kone, an awesome 50's style burger joint, is getting replaced by a starbucks, what the hell is up with that? Also Phoenix Pharmecy, a place by my house, apparently went out of business while I was gone, which sucks cause I always went there to get cards and candy for those special occasions. Then PhatWire also went out of business, which I actually expected to happen. But it's getting replaced by another LAN center, which ironicly, is being headed by someone I know. He's also getting some of my friends employed there as well. So I might see about getting a temp job there when I get back.

As far as the winter break went, the exciting thing that happened are that I got to run spotlight for basicaly a TV production of Chris' church services for Christmas Eve. That was an awesome experience. I had a headset and everything, and got to see how the live shows you see on TV are made, while at the same time, get to be a part of the experience as well. We had camera crews that work for Mira Television. That company is responsible for providing the camera crews to networks such as ESPN and also for big expositions, like MacWorld for example. They didn't really pay us anything, but last tuesday, Ed, the person in charge of the event, took us out to dinner at Izzys and the main director "I think" of the choir, gave us all $20 gift cards to starbucks. Extremely badass, seeing as how I bought coffee in phoenix with it. Other then that, I went to a LAN downtown on new years eve, was pretty fun. Saw 2 movies, Memoirs of a Geisha and Munich. Munich was a bad ass movie for sure.

As always, that is the breif recap of my life as of today. Back into the war........