At Last, A First

Many have been waiting quite a while for this and it has finally arrived!  An update!  Due to the lack of previous updates, this one will stick to more big picture ideas, otherwise you would likely need to pour yourself some coffee to keep yourself awake.

The trip out to San Diego, CA was rather uneventful.  My mom drove out here with me and then flew back to Indiana.  On the way, we stopped at the Hoover Dam for a tour.  The ingenuity, cooperation and determination that went into planning and building the dam made me proud of the men who went before us.  They were a part of something great but were actually working for something completely different but greater...their families.  The Depression brought people from all over the country to work on this structure so they could feed their families.

The Hoover Dam

View from Hoover Dam of the new bridge they built to bypass driving over the dam.

From inside the dam from about halfway up.

We also saw some incredible landscapes (was expecting flat deserts) but got different rock formations and mountains and beautiful sunsets.

In San Diego, I met Wendy, who I lived with for the first month of my time here.  She works at Amor and has an adorable dog, Ginger.  I knew I was going to meet a lot of awesome people and the first one I met set the bar pretty high.  

Since starting with Amor (it is official, I can be found on the website http://www.amor.org/join/interns), meeting most of the people who work there and having some training I now find myself often on the move.  My first trip into the field was with Field Specialist Clint and we were working with a volunteer group of Koreans, from Australia, who spoke English with an Australian accent.  Over the week we built a home for a lady and her two children.  It was an incredible week interacting with the family, neighborhood children and the Aussies.  

After that, I moved to an apartment, likely "home" for the rest of the year, right before I headed to San Carlos, Arizona to work on the Apache Reservation.  The San Carlos homes are significantly more involved and therefore volunteer groups only have the opportunity to work on a few phases of the house in their short time here.  I have now been out there twice, the first group had over 150 students from a high school who worked to put up the outside walls of six houses, the second group consisted of 14 hearty souls who endured camping in high winds, cold weather and rain to help with some finishing work on some of the houses that had already been started.

Now you have had a very general look into the start of this year with Amor.  It appears there will be plenty to fill in, in the future.

Before I sign off for the night, I want to thank everybody who has been (and continues to be) a source of encouragement on this journey.  From the prayer to the sounding boards to the financial support it is all connected through a bigger purpose and for me personally, I seem to be learning the basics of how to move by faith.

Peace,

Mary