And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa
It's always darkest before the dawn
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS AN OLD POST, BUT I HAVE HAD LIMITED COMPUTER ACCESS... WILL WRITE MORE DURING TRANSITION (Transition is happening right now, by the way)
The Little Team that Could…
In the past few weeks, Green 5 has been struggling. We started the year a solid team of 8 Corps Members and one fairly confident team leader. Shortly into CTI (Corps Training Institute) we lost a member, but we were okay. We prevailed because we knew this loss would do nothing but strengthen our team. And it did. We had a few speed bumps in Artesia, NM but we all put the energy into making this team mesh and work. By the time we got to New York, we thought we had it made. A few weeks later we lost another boy due to family issues he needed to attend to. It was a tough pill to swallow, but again, we carried on.
It was early May when Green 5 hit its roughest patch. Mistakes and less than professional behaviors forced our third member out of the program. This one hit my corps members like a ton of bricks. They certainly were not fully recovered from the loss when they found out that yet another corps member would have to resign from the program for health issues. Four down and four remain. Now, at half our size, it’s hard for us to keep lacing up our boot straps and carrying on, but we do. We have exactly 8 days left in New York and then 6 days of travel before we make it Sacramento and eventually learn our fate.
Will the campus keep us as Green 5? Will they merge us with Silver 1 who also has 4 corps members? Will they merge Silver 1 and Silver 5? All we know is that we have to stay strong and stay positive. We’ll shake it off; we’ll work through and work hard and work together.
FEMACorps is not traditional and certainly not Traditional. What I mean by that is that FEMACorps is a completely new program and there are definitely no norms yet. And it’s miles away from what Traditional NCCC is. In a Traditional program, teams have about 10-12 members, work in the woods or at least not in an office, get their hands dirty (including the team leader), and most of the time all live together in tents or yurts or some sort of rugged lifestyle. The members have little connection to the outside word and solely rely on their teammates for everything and anything. Yet, here I sit in clean office in the middle of New York City with my government issued Blackberry and laptop responding to emails and text messages from work friends and friends from home. I talk to my family weekly and constantly have access to the internet. I live in an extended stay hotel where I share a bedroom with three other team leaders and have the availability to cook food or go out to eat whenever I want. I have a hot shower and clean towels regularly. I have a team of only 4 corps members who rarely leave the office these days and while they do the work, I’m doing paper work or trying to manage my budget. It’s anything but Traditional.
As we near the end of our second round, we’re still fairly uncertain what to expect when we get to our next round (let alone Sacramento). Will my team be stuck in a JFO again for 8 weeks, looking at spreadsheets and relying on our Independent Service Projects to see real damage? Will I be with my team or will they become unrecognizable in the midst of the Silver Unit? Where will we go? Oklahoma? Texas? Chicago? North Dakota? Back to New York (dear God, please NO!)? Maybe Green 5 will finally catch a break and get sent somewhere awesome and get to fix these damaged roads they’ve been looking at on Google Earth. We make tons of speculations (as a team and with my fellow team leaders), but to be quite honest there are only a handful of people that currently have the answers to these questions… or maybe they don’t- and that’s what makes this program so far from conventional. I’ll keep everyone as posted as I can when the changes begin and I’ll embrace them as much as I can.
