MLK Day – A day on, not a day off…

And now, the continuation of our last post…

Ashley and I successfully busted a CAP at Ocean Springs High School, just a few miles down the road from our site.  Just as a reminder, by CAP, I mean fulfilled our duties as Corps Ambassadors, i.e. recruiting.  I had called the career counselor and set up the event before break and had expected that we’d talk to a class and have an information table at lunch.  But, when we got there, the school’s office seemed chaotic, even for a high school.  As the counselor would explain to us, we scheduled our trip on the first day back after their winter break.  So, we walked right into one of the busiest and craziest days of the year.  Needless to say, there were teachers willing to have their classes disturbed on this day, so we began our event with a nice long conversation with the career counselor, who was really into our program.  She had a lot of interesting questions and was enthusiastic on passing on our program as an option to her students.  After a tour of the school, she set us up with our table in the cafeteria (which amounted to nothing, because what high school-er actually pays attention to those things).  Afterward, she must have been impressed by the two of us, because she invited us back for the next morning and set up a pair of classes to be available to us for a presentation.  Bringing Tori with us as a kind of live visual-aid, we presented to this class for a solid half-hour, even getting a few students about as interested as you can make a 17 year old at 7:30 in the morning.  All-in-all it was a success. 

After a full week of kitchen duty, the weekend arrived.  Another team down the road, in Bay St. Louis, MS, invited us over for their town’s monthly festival, called Second Saturday.  Before Katrina, this town was apparently one of the most artistic and liberal in the country, a little enclave for successful artists.  These days, like most towns around here, the focus is rebuilding and trying to bring people back.  The only locals are those people who had nowhere else to go, or simply were too old and settled to really want to relocate.   But they still have their Second Saturday’s to keep their spirits up.  Live music, extended hours for restaurants and coffee shops, browsing through art galleries and a little dancing with my podmates from back in Sacramento.  It was a fun time, but we really got their too late to enjoy all of the festivities.  That’s what you get for having Saturday workdays.  But, if you ever want to hear some good rants about the problems with our government, go to a town that is full of liberal, independent, free-thinking artists and catch them on a party night when the beer is flowing freely…

Since arriving in Biloxi, I had been trying to set up a CAPping event at a home game of the Mississippi Sea Wolves, the local ECHL hockey team.  I was often given the run-around, but a corps member on team Silver 7 (stationed in Pascagoula, MS) found success and made a deal with the Sea Wolves, that if they were able to bring at least 20 people to the game, they would let us have an informational table and discount our tickets $2.  Silver 7’s CAPpers sent out an e-mail asking if any teams would be interested in going.  You don’t have to ask me twice to go to a hockey game.  And we were not disappointed by these teams.  The visiting team was the Florida Everblades (feeling so clever…), and they reminded me why I enjoy junior league hockey so much.  No less than one minute and thirty three seconds into the game was the first fight.  I had never seen a hockey fight start like this one did.  The two players were chewing at each other for a few seconds before they dropped their gloves, but once they decided they wanted to go, their equipment hit the ice.  They then skated around each other until both were in the center-ice face off circle.  This dance took at least 30 seconds, all the while the three refs were watching and corralling the players.  Not once did they interfere or stop the players from fighting; they just let it happened as though it were inevitable.  The fight was sloppy as neither player had a good grip on the other’s jersey; they just danced with each other until one of them fell.  But this whole charade took at least two minutes from start to finish.  The rest of the hockey game was exciting.  The Sea Wolves won 4-3, much to the chagrin of my Floridian teammates, Becky and Sarah, and Ashley had a great time and really got into the game, despite never seeing a hockey game ever before in her life.  Hockey in Mississippi – still an abomination in my opinion, but a good time none-the-less.

So, what else is there to write about…hmmm…hmmm…oh yeah.  Just one week ago, our team learned what our Phase 2 project will be.  From early February until the end of March, we will be stationed in about as different a location as one can find from Gulf coast Mississippi: South Dakota!

We’ll be living and working at a Boys and Girls Club in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.  The tribe we’ll be working for/ with are the Oglala Lakota Sioux.  Our job will be to organize and facilitate after school programs for 13-21 year-olds on the reservation, so this is our education project for the year, and we are all really excited for this unique opportunity.  Briefly, the Pine Ridge Reservation is one of the poorest areas in the nation.  There are high incidents of alcoholism, unemployment, teen pregnancy, gang activities, and school drop-outs.  We’ll be working within a framework of an already developed program that includes tutoring and classes that focus on seeking jobs, alternatives to violence and gangs, and life choices beyond high school.  To be sure, this is an intense project that we all agree will likely be the most difficult of our year.  But, again, none of us would have it any other way.

Unfortunately, there’s not much more I can say about the project, because we don’t yet know the information.  When we learn more, I’ll pass on the information to all of you.  For now, we’re wrapping up here in Biloxi.  Only three more days of work for us here.  Friday morning, early, we’ll be flying out of New Orleans back to Sacramento for a week of transition.  So, you know, just one of those typical, living-in-three-states-in-the-course-of-a-fortnight kind of times in my life.  Rock!