Hi all! Now that we’ve been home for a week and I’m caught up on homework, I figured it’s about time to put up my blogs from our trip. So, without further ado, I give you Laredo: Day one.
After months of planning, organizing, and fundraising, spring break was finally here, and we were more than excited. Late on Friday, March 30, many Habitat volunteers gathered at the Complex fire pit for a pre-departure BONDfire. It was fun to spend time getting to know the people we would, quite literally, be drooling on in the van in less than a day.
We left for our Habitat trips around 11 am on Saturday, March 31. My group had a nearly 30-hour drive to Laredo. We entertained ourselves by talking, sleeping, eating nutritious road trip food (…), doing homework (just kidding), making up random games (such as counting Chick-fil-a’s), and the classic Habitat trip activity of making friendship bracelets.
Photo credit: Grace Balfanz
I’ll spare you the details of our van ride. It was long and made for uncomfortable sleeping. Personally, I love long car rides, but not many share the sentiment.
Sunday afternoon, we stopped for lunch on the San Antonio River Walk! It was super awesome. A group of us had lunch at Waxy O’Connor’s Irish Pub, where I had possibly the most delicious chicken sandwich of my life. (Disclaimer: I will probably refer to every piece of food from this trip as the best thing I’ve ever eaten). While we were waiting for our food, a group went to check out the Alamo! I was among the group that stayed to wait for our food (priorities.), but here’s a picture of them!
Photo credit: Kelly Maloney('s camera)
After lunch we had a few minutes left to wander the gorgeous River Walk, and then it was time to head to Laredo for orientation!
We met the Laredo Habitat staff at a park a short distance from our work site. They fed us a delicious (again…) meal of pizza and salad, and then we listened to Carol, the Executive Director, tell us about Laredo and what we’d be working on. I was impressed by a) how enormous their Habitat chapter is, and b) the organization and communication of their staff. After learning a little about the culture, talking about safety (“If you think you hear a cicada, you don’t. It’s a rattlesnake. Get away from it, quickly and calmly.”), being warned to stay out of Mexico (about twenty minutes away from our site), and meeting most of the staff (which included 4 Americorps house leaders!), Carol told us we’d be playing a game called ‘Welcome to Texas.’
Basically, this game consisted of Carol pointing at people and saying, “bang!” When she pointed, the pointee needed to duck and the two people on either side of the pointee had to ‘shoot’ each other. Whoever shot last was out, until we got down to the final shootout.
Victory.
During orientation, we also had the pleasure of meeting Javi, Kimberly, and Javi Jr., one of the families we would be building for. Javi Jr. is a cute little 18-month old who we all loved and wanted to steal. Don’t worry, we held back.
After orientation, we moved into our houses! Because our trip happened during Holy Week, we couldn’t find a church to stay in. Instead, we got the opportunity to actually live in Habitat houses! Our group of 40 couldn’t fit into one house, so we split into two groups and lived a block away from each other. Both houses were within walking distance of the houses we would be working on, so aside from 20 people sharing one bathroom, we basically had the ideal living situation.
We had a quick team leader meeting after moving in to plan out some team-building, and then got our entire group to relocate to a cul-de-sac between our houses. We came up with team names and cheers, then played a few get-to-know-you games before heading to bed!
Keep checking back for more updates, they should all be up in the next couple days!