TL as Soccer Mom, Friend to Youngins and Professional Roofer

What a week! M4 works at 3 separate locations here in Marquette: Vandenboom (a pre-school), Lake Superior Village (a drop in community center) and the YMCA day camp. My first task here was to start with a schedule provided by the sponsor and frame out the next 2 months. This involved plugging my teammates into time slots and locations based on preferences, such as whether they wanted to work in maintenance/painting projects or spend more time with kids, which shifts they wanted (6:30 to 2:30, 7:30 to 4, or 9:30 to 5:30), splitting up teams based on who wanted to work together, who should work together, and the luck of the draw. Then there was also my general goal of breaking up work locations for people so that they got to try a little of everything. Complicated stuff, and when I did the big reveal, there were some grumblings. I think it helped a little that I gave them the option of switching up spots with each other if need-be, but I was worried about how this week would go down. Now that it's over, I can say that it went pretty smoothly, but that my position as the TL during this round is definitely different than previous ones. Because of the varied start and end times during the day, I spend a ton of time driving back and forth. Today, I drove 54 miles in 14 hours and probably didn't leave a 3 miles radius. I start tasks, get into the swing of them, and then have to leave abruptly to "pick up my friends," which is what I told a 7-year-old girl I was playing air hockey with yesterday when I had to run to Vandenboom to get my peeps. I actually like driving, and the van is pimp, so it's not a big deal, but sort of makes me feel like a soccer mom. haha To give you an idea of what goes on here in Marquette, here are some weekly highlights.

Part of what we're doing at Vandenboom is cleaning and painting classrooms in order to spiff up the facility before the school is reviewed for national accreditation. Yesterday, a conversation went down wherein Drew asked Christina to play the Beasly's. Apparently he was referring to the Beatles, but this somehow ended in her playing Backstreet Boys. Then this happened:

I also took some time out to snap photos of the various animals around the school including this amazing guinea pig, who reminded me of the beloved Squeeker Forlenza of my childhood.

There were some other awesome moments including Phil helping a little boy look for grubs under stumps in the playground, and Gaby making clay snowmen with the YMCA Day camp, but I can't post those photos unfortunately, since images with the kids aren't cleared for personal blog use.

Another highlight would have to be... every moment I spend at Lake Superior Village. I spend half of my day here, and so I've been able to get closer to the kids, even though I have to leave occasionally. We play air hockey and foosball, Wii, read books, do arts and crafts and even Lego robots! However, Carter and Kristofer who were paired up with me for the robot portion of this week got the crap end of the stick. After an hour of trying to get the dang robot to work, we pretty much gave up, and I admitted to these 7-year-olds that I was was really only skilled at making robot voices and funny faces. They seemed okay with that. Another little girl named Alanna made a card for me, which was ridiculously sweet because she is 5 and couldn't remember what she had attempted to write inside. It also seems the kids really love the YMCA theme song and had me play it for them 3 times yesterday while we did the whole dance together.

Then there was the epic afternoon of roofing that went down today. Drew, Greg, and I replaced shingles on the roof of a shed out back, and ended up working on this thing from 9:30am to 9pm. Drew did most of the leg work to be honest, but I did get some time up on the roof, and felt pretty badass when I eventually became comfortable enough to walk around on it and nail in shingles. Greg also spent part of the day painting dull lines of a basketball court with fresh yellow paint.


At the end of the day I was feeling pretty pooped out and emotionally drained. But then, a little girl named Natalie rode up on her pink bicycle to deliver a measuring tape she found. She said I must be tired from doing all this work. I said that yes, I was exhausted, but it's worth it to be tired when you're doing nice things to help other people. She said "I like to help people too!" and that was literally the best moment of my week. A few minutes later a little boy ran to ask me if the basketball court would still look nicely painted when he came back tomorrow and when I said yes, he started jumping up and down with excitement. Then, kids began coming out of the woodwork to play with the hopscotch area Greg had just painted, and my heart melted.

I freaking love this job.