Day of Service – September 11, 2011

I only have two memories of a specific hallway of my middle school. The first is from seventh grade (2000) when a classmate of mine joked that Gore was going to win the presidency. The second is in eighth grade (2001) when a close friend of mine told me with the most stone-cold look, “The Twin Towers have been attacked.” I had no idea what the Twin Towers were or why anyone would want to attack them. Over the next 24 hours, I learned quite a bit.

For the tenth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001, AmeriCorps NCCC members from the North Central Region provided service to the communities surrounding Vinton, IA. Our team was selected to help the Cedar Valley chapter of Habitat for Humanity (HFH). When we were first told of this project, we were extremely excited to pay our respect to those that lost their lives by helping build up the community and that we would be working with other NCCC teams from our campus. Specifically for September 10th, our selected service day, HFH was working beautify the exterior of Esther’s home. Esther does not have the financial or physical means to keep the outside of her home in the most pristine condition, so along with HFH, we were glad to help.

Team Leader Darcy painting back of house on scaffolding.

Our first goal was to paint the garage and her siding. Previous volunteers had already painted a first coat on much of both buildings, so our job was mostly to make them look nice. Our second goal was to replace her crooked, broken gutters in order to move rainwater away from her foundation (which was flooding her basement) and into the storm sewers in the road. At first, it just felt like what we had done on a mini project during our training with Block by Block back in March. I was literally doing the same thing, too: painting an old garage in Cedar Rapids.

Phil and Hillary painting Esther's House

Then I started to think about why I was actually there. It wasn’t to fix up a house damaged by the flood of 2008 in hopes that someone would move in. It wasn’t to practice working with my team so that we can correct any big problems before we drive 600 miles away and live together for six weeks.

We came to this elderly woman’s house on September 10, 2011 in order to put positive energy into the world. We came to show that after ten years, we still remember a terrible tragedy that took place but we will rise above it. We came on this sunny summer day to, as HFH puts it, give a hand-up, not a hand-out. I did not come for myself, I came for someone else.

Drew and Gaby repairing siding for house.

The most rewarding part of the entire day? When Esther came outside, about an hour before we had finished, and commented on how lovely her house looked. She had been living there since 1974 and never once knew that something like this could happen.

~Phil