cycles

Here we are in Galveston, safe and sound, for any concerned parents out there. Our first work day was today, and I'll talk about that in a minute.

But I would like to preface that with a bit of reflection, if you'll humor me. I feel like I have been on so many mission trips (this one is my sixth, and three of them have been down south to do hurricane relief) that I went into this trip with specific expectations of what I am going to put in and what I will get out in return. The classic recipe for a mission trip involves roughly six days of hot, sweaty work on one side of the equation, and a warm, fuzzy feeling associated with reaching beyond your comfort zone and bonding over the work you share with others on the other.

But this time around, the words "comfort zone" ring not quite as true to me. This is my last mission trip before I leave for college, which is the next big transition I'll have to face, the furthest I have been from my home and family. Mission trips are the next closest thing to that, for me, and even they have started feeling like routine. People change, and the group dynamics are certainly different this year (with only five girls and eight guys, I have heard enough "That's what she said" jokes to last me my entire college career) but I know, again from experience, that things will settle out in the next day or so. We'll get used to each other, and settle into a routine, this family away from home that I have for the next nine days. Last night's program was based around the first line of the Lord's Prayer, "our father who art in heaven", and we talked about what it was like to know that we had a parent watching over us in heaven even when we were far away from home. We concluded that it was comforting to know that there was someone looking out for us, even as we venture away from home.

And now that this tangent has brought me back to the idea of home, in some ways the ultimate comfort zone, we'll get back to our regularly scheduled account of our work day. We met for an orientational Powerpoint by the volunteer coordinator, Luke, and he told us about all the damage that Ike did to Galveston, in spite of the sea wall that had been built after a storm essentially leveled the city in 1900. Hurricane Ike wasn't predicted to have particularly strong winds (it was only a Category 2 when it touched down), but it did have a Category 4 storm surge, which translates to 15-2o foot waves. Ike took the Texas coast by surprise, and meteorologists are redoing the scale used to measure the intensity of hurricanes as a result of the unexpected damage Ike caused. Throughout the presentation, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen to the houses we helped rebuild if another storm came along, as it surely will. A cycle of cyclones. Luke mentioned something about new building laws that would make buildings have to be more protected against potential storms, but I wonder if that is enough. People are resilient, as I have seen from the relief efforts here and along the rest of the Gulf Coast after Katrina, and a place to live is a very necessary commodity, so I will help people here for the moment, but something dramatic needs to change in the way we respond to disasters like this. I don't have the makings of an engineer (as you would have seen today, from the way I measured sheetrock to hang in a closet) but I can do something. And with that thought, Liz is signing off and going to help make sloppy joe's for dinner.