No home to return to in Denver? Awesome.

Don’t you feel like just when life starts to go well, it throws another curve ball for you? Today’s curve ball is in the form of a flood to my campus dorm. Fortunately my specific floor wasn’t affected, but the rest of the building is in such a condition that all 300 of our belongings may be transported out of the building and we could conceivably be without a place to stay. Now I’m sure I’m being a bit dramatic, we will most likely find somewhere to go, but of what terrible luck that this happened merely a week before we were all scheduled to return to Denver. Fingers crossed everything is not as bad as it seems! Switching gears, the poverty I experienced today does not even compare to 50 dormitory floods. Last week I focused on construction for affected homes and this week I’m traveling to asses the homes FCDR will eventually be doing work for. I guess I learned things a little backward. It was a frigid day here in Texas terms, about 40 degrees ( I have no idea how I’m going to handle Chicagoland weather in ten days time), that I and four others on my team spent traveling through the colonias of the area gathering random bits of information for almost completed files. For those who do not know what “colonias” are, the best way to describe them would be as makeshift immigrant communities. While that may be a more official definition, it hardly characterizes the destitution of these neighborhoods. The homes vary from moderate (by colonia standards) to ramshackle structures put together of tin roofing and various other products. Each day I feel as if I have returned to Ghana, life down here is pretty darn close to third world. That is something I never expected to come across in the United States. Seeing and despairing at this made our task today pretty fuckin’ awesome, to put it in simple prose. Not only were we gathering information, but my four companions and I distributed over $2,700 worth of Wal-Mart gift cards to families. For homes in the area that have no steady income these were truly priceless gifts. I can not begin to describe the feeling I had when I finally saw the recognition and then gratitude in their faces (that tended to take a while due to my abysmal Spanish) as the home owners received the money. To bring someone to tears of happiness as we did today is not a light experience. Today was assuredly one of the most meaningful days of my experience in Americorps thus far.