The Way Life Should Be

This blog post is way overdue, but I feel I need to wrap up this year, rather than leaving it incomplete.

After working at Rebuilding Together New Orleans for two harried and completely crazy weeks, Badger 7 was ready for a pretty awesome project. We had poked and prodded for a Habitat for Humanity project the whole year, and we wanted to go somewhere truly amazing.

Then, imagine our reaction when Brenton spelled out our next project using Skittles: Habitat for Humanity, Portland, Maine. Most of us had never been to the northern most state in the continental U.S., so we were all pumped to visit and check out its largest city: Portland (pop: 65,000).

The Maine welcome sign on I-95 pronounced that Maine was "the way life should be", and we, as a team, found that to be fairly accurate. Maine has so much natural beauty its hard to put into words. For the first time since first round, the team was together for a full round, and we were excited to have an awesome location and an awesome project.

While in Portland, we stayed at HFHGP's volunteer house, lovingly dubbed "the farm". We had the run of the house with our super cool roommate Stef, and slowly became accustomed to the ways of the farm: a gang of wild turkeys that would circle the house each day at 5:30 pm, low water pressure, flammable clothes dryers, exploding fire extinguishers, and stumbling around a bathroom without a light. Badger 7 acquired quite an eye as well as to finding free wifi, including (not 1 but)2 public libraries, numerous drinking establishments, and the random panera and starbucks thrown in.

The project this round would not have the same (or even remotely possible) if not for the staff of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Portland, including Steve, Kate, Stef, Ben, Asa, Alexa, and ReSteve. We had the great opportunity to work with Steve Bolton, the executive director of HFHGP, for at least half the round. Steve had the innate ability to make every task at hand, even the most mundane, fun and exciting.

For the majority of our project, we worked on a single house in Naples, ME. The house was a Habitat home where the homeowner could not keep up with the payments, and ultimately had to return the house back to HFHGP. The homeowner had just moved out a week before we arrived in Maine, so we started in on the house just after the papers had been signed. Habitat wanted to sell the house to recoup some of the value, so it was our job to return the house to a sallable condition.

The house had been left in a mess. The homeowner and her two sons had packed up everything they could fit into their car and left Maine.

To be Continued.....

(This post is a work in progress...even half a year since NCCC has ended)