Everything is bigger in Texas

I haven't written anything in so long. It's been a crazy week or so and the internet at the hotel we are staying at is not very good. I am also trying to get some pictures up on Facebook, and if I do I will post the links for those.

So we made it to Texas. We left last Monday and drove to Amarillo, TX in a 15 passenger van, stopping every two hours to switch drivers. We slept in Amarillo and were on the road again at 7:30 the next morning to drive to Austin. Through our whole drive in Texas, the landscape was pretty bleak. I did see a lot of cotton growing though, which I had never seen. I'd say that was the landscape highlight. One of the low points was driving through cattle farms where I thought the smell of poop would never leave the van. We got to Austin around 6:30 pm and sat around in the parking lot for about an hour while we figured out our room situation.

There are 2 men, 7 women, and one team leader on my team. The team leader gets his own room, the guys share a room, and the 7 girls are split up 3 and 4 to a room. My room has 4. Each room has one bed and one pull out couch. There are no dressers, and the closet is about 4 feet wide with no door. So, it is pretty tight, but we are making due. We also have a total of $4.50 a day per person for food, so we've been very creative in our eating. We also have to be creative because we have no oven and only two burners per room. Tonight was my night to cook and I made tuna melts and tomato soup, which I think turned out pretty well.

We didn't start our official job until the end of the week, so on Thursday we spent the day volunteering. In the morning we did Meals on Wheels and drove around delivering lunches to people, which I really loved doing. Then in the afternoon we went to a food bank that moved to a new location and spent about 5 hours painting their new place. We have to have 80 hours of independent service to finish Americorps, and we got 10 hours that day.

We are working in Austin at the Joint Field Office (JFO) which is basically the headquarters for disaster relief in the Texas gulf. Most of the teams from Denver got sent down to Galveston, but we are staying in Austin with 3 other teams. We work Monday through Saturday from 8am to 6pm in an old JC Penny's with no windows. Our job is to call those who have been displaced by the hurricanes to see what their current housing situation is and what their plan is for the next couple of months. If they do not have one, we provide them with "rental resources". Saturday was our first day and we mostly got training on the computer programs and shadowed workers. We also got our official FEMA ID badges...which we were advised not to wear outside of the building because so many people dislike FEMA.
Today we got our laptops and set up our desks, which are long tables inside of cubicles in what used to be the juniors department of JC Penny's. The best part of the day was going to the supply station and getting to pick whatever we wanted for our desks. It was like going to Staples and having everything be free. For the rest of the day though, we mostly sat around and waited for IT to set up our passwords, etc. We shadowed for about half an hour before we were called to a meeting for the entire department. During the meeting, 4 cranky women who run the department complained about all the things everyone is doing wrong and threatened everyone with various things if they didn't do their jobs right. It was a pretty terrible ending to a pretty long and terrible day. It is going to be a really hard 6 weeks manning a phone in a sunlight-less room.

On the bright side, the few times I have been to Austin have been really cool. On our day off (Sunday) a bunch of my teammates and I went downtown and explored around the UT area. Austin really comes alive at night. There are a lot of local vendors out and the bar crowd is huge. I guess the warm weather keeps people coming out, and they stay out late, so there's a really good energy all the time. It's a fun city and I hope to get to hang out there as much as possible to balance out these mind numbing work days.