Thurseday Getting to Know Poeple.

Currently ab out 1/3 of ASB Illinois and about 1/2 of ASB Rutgers is listening to a beautiful performance by two musicians. They play guitar and bass guitar and mostly play country. There is a woman from the Charleston Police Force with a very beautiful and sincere voice. They play quite nicely and are very relaxing at the moment.

As the week draws to a bit of a close, I rounded up a couple of stray quotes to remember from the trip.

"Whats a feline Pirate's favorite toy? YARN!" Sirius
"How do you take your eggs? scrambled or fertilized?" Dan
"I love caffeine" Ron with head sticking out of window

Another good quote from an Inspirational poster
-In the End we will conserve only what we love
-We will love only what we understand
-and we will understand only what we are tough

Here are a couple of Good Songs from pogo's jam
-blue October
-Love in this Club
-Like You'll never see me again
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That was fun

So we thought the paint in Lisa's house was completely done but we had accidentally painted all of the trim in flat paint.

Everyday we work we learn more and more little things about our surroundings. Today I learned that Pogo is a serious music appreciator. In the morning when we started, she fired up a surround sound system directly hooked up to a top hits channel on Cable TV. During that time was when I figured out about all of those quality jams.

In the afternoon, Ron showed me the basics of doing trim. I measured pre Fab trim pieces and cut them with a Miter Saw.

Back at SALS we hung out with some young kids. SALS serves as a daycare during the daytime. The kids were somewhat rowdy and disrespectful. We tried to challenge them somewhat by cooling them out and trying to make them think. Sometime it worked, but other times they ignored us completely.

I connected with a good number of people today.

Wednesday

We went back again today to LISA (pogo)'s house. Nothing particularly eventful happened, but we go to know everyone a lot better. Particularly Wesley, Pogo, and Ron. Our group split again and half of us went one way, half the other. I was with the half which stayed back at the house to keep painting and keep working on the siding cover ups. Today I was mostly wokring outside. We installed a window and it needed some calk. ... Im getting rushed off the computer so i don't have a lot of time for deeper reflection...

Tuesday SALS Kids (Americor)

Today we started out finishing our paint job of Lisa's house. Our SALS companions were about 18 years old and were working on the exterior siding of the house. They were clearly mostly thinking about the bottom line. They worked when Gary wasn't looking. That is, the SALS high school dropouts were getting paid.

The legitimacy of the real-life need of our work was again debatable, as was somewhat explained yesterday. Lisa had the physical ability to walk and clean her house, and she could have tried to paint it. She didn't NEED the work which we were doing. Her hobbies seemed to consist of smoking cigarettes and watching TV. Maybe we provided inspiration to her or to someone. Perhaps someone will visit her house and be inspired by our volunteer work.

A lot can be said about the SALS kids who were getting paid. While they appeared to lack motivation, they primarily lacked leadership. They were working on difficult tasks such as applying siding. Not all of the kids had work or direction at all times. At one point, 'buck' decided to arrange his boss, Garry's toolbox. By about 2 PM we were starting to see the end of the painting work. A group of 6, including myself, went off to another site to work with Gary. This was when the work started to get truly questionable. Our group of 6 broke into two groups of 3. One group of 3 went to paint a garage which already had a cote of paint. We didn't come to West Virginia to paint a garage. The other three people, the group which included myself, went to paint the kitchen. The kitchen light was dim and I was unable to see where i was painting. We were applying a non gloss coat to a glossy coat on a stuck type ceiling. It was a trivial task. It didn't make sense because the house was to be sold to one of the SALS group members.

Back as SALS, our host Arty cooked us classic West Virginia food for dinner. It was tasty and reminded me of the Soul Ingredient at FAR. We ate potatoes, ham biscuits and sweet and extremely sweet iced tea. Before this, Sirius and I went on a two mike hike up through a trail on the mountains which surround SALS

Monday

Today was our first day on the job. Our crew painted the 3 out of 4 rooms in a small neighborhood house. The exterior was complete with IN SOLE brick. The owner appeared to be about 60 years old and had little to comment on, even when we spilled paint on the main carpet of the house. The word traipse onto would more accurately depict the situation. We were using plastic drop cloths for the paint so walking into or out of a work area lead to serious difficulties.

I worked mostly in a room which appeared to be originally used for sound recording. It contained a PC which was a bit of a surprise among the particular atmosphere of the house..dust, stale cigarette smoke, and barely functional windows. We found some other... treasures.. in that particular room. That was the room which I primarily worked in. We painted the room pink with a coat of primer. We left the ceiling as it originally was, black paint with glitter and glowing stars. It looked quite nice by the time we were through.

The other group worked in a different small room and painted the walls a sea colored green. The overall effect was quite nice but we had to do a a lot of cleanup details. We spilled hundreds of drops of paint on the wood floor and managed to vigorously scrub most of it up with hot water and cloths. We did our best to restore the furniture arrangement in the two bedrooms and the kitchen areas to its orignal state, but the owners' neglected clutter was very overwhelming and tedious. The job basically took all day, and I spent most of it painting the pink sound room with Sirus and Darek. We barely spilled any paint and were marveled at due to our painting skills. Secretly, I think we just got lucky because we painted pink of Manila. Any painter knows that this is a fairly easy paint over combo.

Recently we found a surplus of air matresses so that should take some of the pressure off of my back during sleeping. Im going to go blow mine up and perhaps play some goofy game such as apples to apples.. and by goofy i mean quite fun and nice.

Sunday Getting Situated

Yesterday we arrived at at our destination, the SALS (south Appalachian labor school), at about 7 PM eastern time. The thirteen of us ASBers saddled up into two minivans and made the trip. The journey was fairly uneventful with the exception of the final leg of the trip in WV, toward the labor school. The final leg was through a winding desert mountain road. The combination of approaching darkness, bad mapquest directions, and winding, dangerous, and deserted roads made this leg frightening at times. When we arrived we prepared previously purchased spaghetti, played a game called the mafia, and got some sleep.

There is no great word to describe the facility. The closest thing which it can be likened to is a small elementary school. It has a total of about 10 rooms. The building itself is very much in the vernacular style, haphazardly pieced together in the 70's and added to and subtracted from according to various needs. Its located among wooded mountains and is not really connected to to any other town center. There is a winding road, connecting the closest town which is over 10 miles away. Our school has electricity and water but its apparent that there is no gas line, as there are gas tanks around the place. While there is DSL here, most of the computers are locked out, and the remaining ones have outdated operating systems. There are showers and a full kitchen.

The primary use of the school is to provide supplemental education for K-12. The school also provides a home base for a number of different labor based clubs, and doubles up as a sort of community center. While the building is nothing to look at, its evident that it has been cared for. The bathrooms are in good working condition, there are no apparent leeks, the windows are not broken, and the kitchen is nice. Its also apparent that computers have been made a priority at this school. There are at least 3 which work, that I can log onto. There are another four or five which may work but I can't test because they require a user name and a password.

Everyone slept in till 12 this morning, and we went to try to find a state park. We never found the park but ended up driving around for a few hours. Basically all of the town centers are focused in valleys. The mountains are incredibly steep and seem like they would be difficult to settle into. These sporadic valley towns are generally built up around what appear to be industrial facilities. they are about 5 miles apart from each other, and I saw at least four of them while traveling through the valley. The SALS, however, is not located near one of the valley towns.

Things are a bit tight around the SALS. We are sharing the place for a week with another volunteer group from Rutgers college. We met them at our 'orientation' held here at the SALS. During this, a number of individuals 6-7 from the organizations which are advocating our various work projects discussed their roles in advocating justice. One member stated that their goal is to improve standards of living to a reasonable level. Im excited to start working tomorrow and that's about all I have for now. Im going to go get ready for bed.