Hi, is this gas station clothing optional?

It is impossible for me to talk enough about how much I love Habitat for Humanity. I took my first week-long Collegiate Challenge trip my sophomore year to Eastman, Georgia and had the time of my life. The people I've met on Habitat trips, whether from the SU volunteer group, or the members of the local community and H4h affiliate, are always the most delightful. A week bonding with new people, doing something good, meeting local homeowners, and working up a sweat is my idea of a perfect vacation. It is oddly freeing to let your mind wander away from textbooks and deadlines and focus on a particular, unfamiliar task at hand. I always chuckle finding skills I never knew I had (roofing!) and the things no one should ever allow me to do again (using a nail gun--my inner Terminator took over when I mistook it for an automatic weapon and fired four nails into one hole).

Last week I spent my spring break in Palm Beach, Florida working on a 27-home build. So much happened, I can't possibly recount it all (though you can read some of my play-by-plays on Twitter). We know I love a good list, so I'll recount some of the top highlights and lowlights for you here.

HIGHLIGHTS
- I took my first H4h trip all by myself. Quite the leap of faith, but I made some great friends and was happy to throw myself out of my comfort zone. But this trip was extra special because it was my senior year, and I went with one of my best lady friends, Paige. We grew even closer (5.a.m. heart-to-hearts through torrential rain in North Carolina), but also let each other be alone long enough to harass new people into being our friends. I had a great time with you, boo!


- You may find this impossible to believe, but the car rides are some of my favorite parts. By the end of them, you can recite the complete dating history, favorite childhood pets, and social security numbers of all of your fellow carmates. Long car rides breed intense intimacy. However, they also breed a little bit of insanity. Somewhere between New York and Florida, I thought it would be HILARIOUS to deem everything clothing optional. Libraries? Clothing optional. Starbucks? Only if it's topless. Habitat work sites? Soooo clothing optional. This was one of the week's catchphrases, and I immediately gained a reputation as being the group's biggest creeper. Which is okay. I would typically be the last person to suggest group nudity, but you know? Sometimes it could be fun. I got some people to disrobe, and fun was had by all.

-Related highlight: Tuesday, after a lobster dinner, we all hit Palm Beach for a night on the town. At the beginning of the night, on a whim, I asked a bartender if the bar was clothing optional. He said "Absolutely, it's encouraged," and the new dress code was announced over the microphone three times. Cha-ching. People went buck wild; dancing on bars ensued, booty contests galore, strange cougars macked on our SU boys. Paige and I just stared in disbelief. These people came to party.

-New construction skills! Our work site was extra special because several houses were in different stages of completion, so we were assigned a variety of tasks. We framed the walls of an entire house, fastened tar paper on its roof, shingled another, gave one nearly completed house three coats of interior paint, and laid sod and planted trees. So many new skills to add to my resume.

- Beach. Ocean temps were in the 70s. The weather all week was heavenly, dry and sunny in the lower 80s. We went to the beach almost every day after work, and played board games, Bananagrams, and ultimate frisbee. Small buzzkill: whenever I play a sport, I assume the mindset of a 300-pound toothless rugby player, so I got some ferocious sandburn scrapes from diving (okay, and a little falling). All the beach time made this trip feel much more like a real vacation than my past trips.


-Cuse games. We watched all four games that week, including the incredible, heart-attack-inducing UConn game. We were absolutely beat after long days of building and beaching, but sipping a mojito in an outdoor bar and watching the Orange make us proud was the perfect end to the day.

(Edited to add)- Becoming a local celebrity. Monday night, on our way home form a Marlins/Tigers spring training game, I got pulled over for the first time ever. Quite the blow to my ego, but earlier in the day, we had been featured on the local news while we were working at the re-store. The officer recognized us from the broadcast and let me go with a warning!

LOWLIGHTS

No church dinners! One of the reasons my GA trip was so meaningful was because of our interaction with the community there. One night the ladies at the local church cooked a huge meal for us. We learned about them, their town, and the Habitat affiliate. We spent time with the homeowners of the house we worked on, and heard their stories. I'll never forget how sincerely grateful they were to us, and the disbelief in their eyes as they watched strangers put their house together, just because we wanted to. We had similar experiences in Louisiana when we met people displaced by Katrina, and ate dinner every night with volunteers at the church where we stayed. Unfortunately we didn't meet any homeowners this time, and I missed the focus on getting to know the community we came to serve.

Lack of participating in state park activities! We stayed in Jonathan Dickinson state park (read a creepy story from the park's history here), and they have hiking and biking trails, horseback riding, and loads of wildlife (our group saw an armadillo...ew). Alligators are frequently seen in the river, where you can canoe and kayak. Paige and I wanted to go, even if we were sortofkindof terrified, especially after we were told that a little boy was eaten a few years earlier. We ran out of time and never got to canoe, and I never got to see an alligator. The siren song of the Jupiter beaches just drew us back day after day, and I loved every minute of it.

I could go on forever, but I'm sure you're all sick of hearing me talk nonstop about Habitat. But for any of my legions of readers who have time left in college, take a trip with Habitat. These trips are my favorite things I've done at SU, and they'll be yours too. Promise.

Good morning America, how are you?

I know that writing about this won't do it justice, and no matter what I write, it can't really ring true, or be an accurate enough description. There are certain moments that lodge in your memory without a clear order of events, accompanying sounds, or smells. You remember them only by the intense feeling you experienced at that time, feelings of dizzying glee or an electrifying excitement. Sometimes it's just a dramatic snapshot, a lone image that will stick with you forever, and be your only memory of a particular day or time.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove with a group from SU's chapter of Habitat for Humanity through the seventh and lower ninth wards of New Orleans. These are two of the most damaged areas, which have been mostly untouched since Hurricane Katrina destroyed them more than two years ago. My memory of these places will be defined by a handful of images and a couple of physical/emotional reactions. I'll remember a sickening weight deep in my stomach, of having so many thoughts at once, that eventually my brain slowed down almost to a stop. All I could do was look out the window. There's not much to say when there's so much to see. I'll remember the dozens of houses that had writing on them, left presumably by the people who lived there, begging for help. The front of one house was covered with the words, "HELP US, Please help, any donations," and other pleas, hastily spraypainted in a time of panic, still left for us to read years later. Did anyone ever come to help? When have you ever seen such a desperate, open cry for help, scrawled publicly for anyone who would read it?

Our car was quiet, we drove slowly, like tourists, through a place where people had died when a flood came, like something out of a disaster movie, and somehow, no one came to help. Two years later, in these areas, it still looks like no one ever came. What will stick with me are the foreign images of abandoned houses and empty streets, and the accompanying physical feelings I felt. What stays with me is the heavy desperation and overwhelming sense of hopelessness and heartbreak that hangs over those neighborhoods.

From the outside, some of the houses looked unremarkable. In most of them, it seems no one had moved back, because certainly, the insides would have been rotted through. The owners likely couldn't afford to fix it up, or wouldn't want to. How could you move back to a neighborhood that looks like a ghost town? A few people did; there were a few cars parked in driveways that still had the large X's on the houses, markers made by people who came through after the hurricane to check the houses for bodies. Four numbers were left in each corner of the X: the date, the number of people who came through, a number of dead humans found, and a number for dead animals. Imagine living in one of these houses, or even across the street from a house, marked with a number 3 beneath a giant X. I can't imagine what it must feel like to live in an empty neighborhood, staring at a number, left during a time of crisis and panic, a single digit strangely marking the needless deaths of three people. Who's been in the house since they removed the bodies? I kept wondering why the people who moved back didn't try to remove the markers from the fronts of their homes. Did they want to remember? Or feel too for guilty trying to forget? What does a person think, walking by something like that, every day on the way to the front door?

The devastation has taken extreme tolls on everyone left behind, not the least of which is a giant skyrocket in mental health issues among survivors, and very notably nearly 47,000 children. When we drove through those neighborhoods, I wondered how anyone could be okay still living there. What would a young survivor think? His school is boarded up, his home in ruins, and his parents might not have the resources to make anything better for him.

After all this time, there aren't answers for New Orleans. How can you rebuild something, when there's no way to stop the same thing from happening again? How do you begin to help? I don't know if my visit brought me to any conclusions. In fact, it probably muddled my opinion more. But it did renew my own sense of responsibility. It feels wrong to to drive through a devastated area, in your own country, rubbernecking out the window at someone else's sadness. But I think, even more than I did before, that it's all our responsibility. You shouldn't turn away because something's hard to look at or understand. You can't ignore news about genocide, war or a natural disaster because it turns your stomach. Katrina's devastation is largely a result of this type of ignorance and evasion-- people couldn't deal with issues of pervasive and persistent poverty, rapid climate change, impending crisis, and decisions involving government responsibility. We should look. We should remember, ask questions, and do something. Anything, really.