First Day (The Spanish Improves)

We woke up early this morning and started the day with breakfast at McDonald’s, causing me to break a multi-year streak of not eating at the place. Oh, the sacrifices we make, right?

My sleeping spot by the air vent worked well enough. Rachel and the other ladies, however, got woken up by Mike snoring. That’s got to be some serious noise if you can wake up a whole group. Just sayin’.

Our group got split into two for the day. My group spent the whole day clearing out one house, more or less finishing the salvage effort so it’s ready to be bulldozed. The house had been completely torn apart, the people inside surviving by hiding out in the basement.

It’s surreal to enter the rooms of a house through the exterior walls, and there are so many houses in the area that are similarly exposed. Metal has been twisted around trees like cardboard. Some of them have been stripped down to the foundation.

I’m not quite sure how to respond when I see the areas that have been wiped out. Homes and businesses have been destroyed, and I think about all the people attached to each one of those. At the same time I want to take pictures and show people what it’s like and how people are dealing with it.

For example, there are a lot of American flags flying over the rubble, and people have spray painted on their houses that they are safe. One person wrote that looters will be shot. Other places are already in the process of being rebuilt or getting new roofs.

The owners of the house we worked at today had a lot of vintage collector’s items. They had a number of classic cars that sustained damage when the garage collapsed, and a tube transistor radio cabinet. There were two old pinball machines, from back when the points were counted by physically rotating dials and the maximum score was 9999. It’s interesting how many things you can learn about somebody from sifting through their stuff, and what kinds of things you have in common. I saw a chai latte K-Cup for those Keurig coffee machines—it’s one of Rachel’s favorites. Andy found an Xbox 360 controller still trying to connect to the console.

I can feel my Spanish slowly and painfully coming back to me; I feel like I’m about up to a first semester level (that is, still terrible). It does help to be forced to use it to communicate with somebody. I’m always jealous of multilingual people, which these days is a majority of my friends. If one were to keep score of “things that make people cooler,” speaking another language would be at least a +5 bonus.

Today, I managed a step in the right direction. Andy and I were talking with Cesar and Robert over lunch, when Heidi (another member of our group) interruped to remind us that she had no idea what we were saying. With apologies to Heidi, being able to do that to somebody was magnificent. Perhaps I am making some progess.

This is not at all related to disaster relief, but a poplar brand of gas station around here is called “Kum and Go.” Maybe Missourians feel differently, but from where I stand that has got to be one of the worst names for a business ever.