Cabinet slinging, and Texas style Thanksgiving,

Have you ever moved a shipping container full of cabinets onto pallets, just to have them transported to another warehouse where you were expected to put them up on shelves? I have. It might not seem like a very demanding task but shipping containers look a lot smaller until you are inside one and looking backwards at hundreds of cabinets. It looks like it won’t be that bad until you are covered in bruises from slinging cabinets all day. Habitat for Humanity of San Antonio (HFHSA) is a mega conglomerate of your typical Habitat. They have built the most houses of any habitat affiliate in the US and they built the first habitat home (that’s right, before the founding Habitat in Georgia.) So, HFHSA knows how to get things done, and part of that is ordering cabinets in bulk and storing them until they are needed. So inadvertently we were helping them to help others. Sometimes it’s easy to forget when you aren’t doing the work or finishing houses or watching the houses be dedicated to forget all the other stuff that goes into it. It was nice to be able to see that at the front and then get this grunt work at the end. Seeing the end product, the happiness on the faces of the families and knowing that people will be in their very first home for the holidays is worth slinging cabinets for 6 hours. Overall our team had a really great day that day. We were all working hard and we were all working together toward a common goal. It was something that we had yet to do. Before then all of our projects had been a little disjointed with people helping out on different tasks, and a lot of the times at least one person (often me) was missing because the office needs volunteer coordination help. Which leads me to my next topic… when I am not painting, caulking, using power tools, or cleaning up houses, I spend 2 days a week in the office with the volunteer coordinator helping her to stay organized and on top of things and one day a week on site with her signing in volunteers and coordinating their experience. This in general is something I’m very passionate about anyway because I have often been frustrated by the lack of coordination organizations have with volunteers. HFHSA has it down to a science though. They have 14,000 volunteers serve with them a year! That is huge. The next largest organization in the city with volunteers is the San Antonio food bank (which I’ve failed at getting an ISP set up with for 2 weeks now) who has I think 6-8 thousand a year. Habitat has almost double that! So it should be nice to get to see how to manage that many volunteers and how they find them, should play well into my possible non profit future. So I don’t really have that much experience working yet because we have had the past week off for Thanksgiving. Everything is bigger in Texas, including their Thanksgiving break.  Over the past week our team hasn’t really done all that much, spent some time catching up on much needed sleep, ate a bunch, did some getting into the spirit of Christmas things, and just hung out. We did complete an ISP at Haven for Hope which is an AWESOME compound in San Antonio that provides services to homeless individuals. It is really neat, there are health and dental services on site, shelters, soup kitchens, and even kennels for homeless individuals pets! It’s amazing and when Dalen and I are millionaires we will recreate it in Charlotte.  So overall I have been getting to know San Antonio a bit and enjoying my time here. The weather has been absolutely gorgeous and the people are friendly (of course because it IS the south) 

Texas knows food, but not BBQ.

Long time no talk guys! Sorry for the delay in blog posts but it’s been a crazy week+ and I don’t have wifi anymore so McDonalds and Starbucks have become my best friends. We made it down to San Antonio and have been working with Habitat for the past week. It’s been really great, I’m working in the office part time with the volunteer coordinator and on the site part time caulking and painting (for now, putting up walls in a couple weeks). We’re getting peoples homes ready for them to move in to by either Thanksgiving for some or Christmas for others. So 16 families will be in their very first own home for Christmas this year in San Antonio. It’s really exciting. The best part of this week was the dedication where we got to meet all the families who were moving into the homes. They were all so grateful and it was a very emotional morning. There were lots of joyful tears and thanks spread throughout the day. The homeowners further showed their appreciation during their open house where they cooked food for people who were at the dedication. There was tons of awesome Spanish food since there are a lot of immigrant families. It was a great way to sample some Texas food.

I am super excited about being back in the south where I can find sweet tea. Though, Texans do have one thing wrong BBQ. Texans consider pretty much any meat with BBQ sauce on it BBQ… I got really excited about some pork BBQ when they told us that we were having BBQ for lunch and then I remembered that Texan BBQ is Brisket. While the brisket is good, I prefer my NC pulled pork BBQ. Reason number 345 why NC is the best state ever ;).

 

Oh, also they played gone to Carolina in my mind at the dedication… incase I wasn’t emotional enough. 

Ready to GO!

I’ve been spending my last bit of time in Denver exploring and experiencing as much as possible which has left me utterly exhausted, so excuse me for the lack of blog posts. I spent the weekend mostly doing ISP (Individual Service Project) stuff at Habitat for Humanity Restore as well as an animal shelter. I got to do lots of moving, lifting, and cleaning between the two days. I think it’s getting me prepped for what my next 6 weeks will look like. 

 

This week is pretty relaxed but there are a lot of important things in the mix. Today my team is doing our brief, which is where we explain to the staff what we’re going, where we are going, and what our general plans are. We also have induction this week on Thursday.  We had a talent show last night that showcased the amazing talent that we have here on our campus. And today all of the teams on campus introduced themselves and did a skit about what they would be doing.

 

On Friday we leave for San Antonio and are driving 17+ hours over 3 days, which means we get to stay in a hotel twice! Living the high life in NCCC. I’m pretty nervous about riding in a van that long considering my history with getting car sick and my history of throwing up… but hopefully it’ll work out and I won’t puke on anyone.

 I’m also going to a Denver Nuggets game tonight, which is exciting because I’ve never been to a professional basketball game before. Like I said, just trying to get all my Denver time in before Friday!

 All in all I am sitting around waiting to GO!