I spent my second round of AmeriCorps in Mecca, California. Mecca is a small farming community about an hour from the border, and almost all of the jobs in the area are farm laborer jobs. My team and I stayed in an apartment in a migrant farm worker apartment complex called Las Mañanitas. We didn't exactly know what "migrant farm worker community" meant, but we came to realize migrant farm worker is just the official title given to American campesinos, and I am convinced it would be difficult to find a job tougher than campesino.
Fortunately, our work was quite a bit easier than farm work. We worked with Coachella Valley Housing Coalition, a non-profit that builds affordable houses for low income families. And each family looking to buy a house through CVHC puts in a share of their own time to work on all the houses in their future neighborhood.
I guess once you've got a whole bunch of families with no construction experience working for you, it's not much harder to train a few AmeriCorps kids to join in. I expected construction to come with at least a day of AmeriCorps' typical extensive safety training, the kind you try to stay awake through by blinking your eyes and stretching every two seconds, the kind that is usually taught by a teacher with a soothing lullaby voice who incites such deep sleep that drooling on your desk becomes inevitable.
Our orientation was not what I expected.
Safety training, tool training, intro to construction, all it consisted of was our superman sight supervisor Fernando jumping on a truss and shouting
"Who wants to get on the roof?"
My fear of heights only kept me from joining in on the roof fun for a few days.
Within two weeks, I'd hammered, sawed, drilled, gotten tan, grown calluses, learned how to swear in Spanish, and everything else that comes along with building houses in the desert.
Round two was TOO incredible. I'm going to have to list the highlights here.
I went to the National Date Festival and saw Lifehouse in concert, which was like seeing a childhood celebrity crush in real life. It was pretty incredible, just a few years too late. I was also in a hypnotist show, and I'd like to formally admit to my teammates here that I faked being hypnotized, because I can't suffer your disappointment face to face. I'm just kidding around here guys, don't worry. Kind of kidding. I don't know about the rest of those people on that stage, but that hypnotist act didn't do a THING to me. I also watched a camel race and an ostrich race and petted a weird Australian rodent-thing. By the way, the National Date Festival is held in Indio, California, which is the date capital of America. Not date the dinner and a movie kind, date the squishy brown fruit. Also, there were no dates at the National Date Festival. No dates the squishy brown kind at least, I'm sure there were many of the other kind. I thought it was interesting that the twenty first century National Date Festival didn't have any dates.
I rented bicycles with a couple of friends and biked down the east shore of the Salton Sea, saw the sunken and ruined Bombay beach, and was dead tired and sore the next day and felt great about it.
I got free tickets to the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells. I was with the group of young adults holding expensive tennis tickets and trying to figure out the rules of tennis during the middle of the pro match.
I went to LA! I took pictures of the Hollywood sign, and explored the beach and Santa Monica College, the community college I'll be attending next year.
I hiked in the Painted Hills. I can't believe I'd never heard of them before, because the ladder canyon trail hike definitely made my top five list of most beautiful hikes.
I got a free kayak rental and a guided tour of the oasis east of the salton sea by doing independent service projects with the Salton Sea state park. The work included picking up dead fish, and doing landscaping around the visitor center, which I'm great at.
I also enjoyed buying 45 cent pastries from the local gas station that was also a carniceria and bakery, and 99 cent tacos from the taqueria. Most of all I enjoyed having sunshine and being in the sun all winter long, and entirely skipping winter.
The area and the weather were great, but the project wouldn't have been the same without the amazing people I met in SoCal. Our sponsor was wonderful, and spent quite a bit of time getting to know the team. Of course my team is great too, but if I went into detail on that topic I would have to change the title of this blog. I have to tell you about the local kids. I spent one afternoon per week working for the YMCA after school program at Las Mañanitas. I am 99.9% sure that no adults stayed at Las Mañanitas during the day and that from dawn to dusk it was entirely inhabited by flocks of squeaky Mexican kids that would only ever refer to me as "Miss." When I fall asleep at night, all I can hear is an urgent meeees, meeees, meeees! Meeeeeeesssss!!!!!!!
Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. The adults can be seen outside every weekend. If I spent enough time talking on the phone outside on a nice Sunday, I'd usually return home with free vegetables. The adults come home from work with too much free produce, and seeing as I am a girl above the age of 12, I am obviously proficient at the preparation of vegetables.
Well, I'm not complaining. Any free food is welcome when you live on a food budget of 4.74/day.
Okay, I guess that was a complaint.
The lack of healthy good food is perhaps one of the only downsides to AmeriCorps, but it's bearable. I've gained so many odd new skills. I keep wondering if I can put on my résumé:
"Can shop for 10 people for 1 week with under $200"
It was a fantastic round. I learned a lot, but most of all I learned that I should pursue a career in shopping and state park visitor center landscaping.
