Preparations

Bonjour Amis!

Thanks for joining us again on our voyage! Technically we haven't gone anywhere yet, in fact, I'm typing this from the laundromat in St. John's, but our travels are not the point of this post!

As I said in the first post, we've been preparing for our Spring time service with Habitat for Humanity for probably six weeks now. I'd now like to tell you a bit about that. There were essentially two really important things to get done before leaving. First and foremost, we needed to pay for this extravaganza. Second we needed to start wrapping our minds around housing issues, so that our service would not be limited to physical work, but also include some critical thinking.


[Warning, math ahead!]


Raising the $

Our trip was estimated to cost $4900. ASUP (our student government) contributed $1000, The Moreau Center $1000, each of us $100 ($100 x 15) = $1500, which left us to finance $1400. One standard procedure for raising money is our letter writing campaign. I don't know the figures on how much we raised there, but I know the expected amount is $1000.

I can get back re the effect of our letter campaign later, but for now, we'll call it $1000. That left us with $400 to get creative with and that we did.

[End of Mathematics]

Fund Raising

We brainstormed some ideas for raising money. Virtually everything from a paper airplane contest to a photo booth service at junior parents weekend crossed our minds. We ended up reverse duct taping Brian S and letting him run through the crowd at a University of Portland basketball game. This picture is a fairly accurate representation of what we did to Brian, but unfortunately I cannot locate any of our photos.

The idea is that people stick paper money on the duct taped person as they run through the stands. Apparently last year someone stuck a $20 bill on this so called sticky person, but this year between Brian and two other guys, we probably collected something like $40.

We also sent representatives of 2010 C.C. to a Moreau Center coffee house event, where we served free coffee and lattes with members of the other service learning trips and accepted donations. The Moreau Center hosted a brunch to raise awareness in the community about the service learning trips that it hosts and each of us contacted friends about attending. It was the first year the Moreau Center has held this event and hopefully not the last. Rachel Prusynski spoke about her experiences in Haiti and how the Moreau Center has impacted her life.

Housing issue awareness

The group met up a few Fridays in a row before our trip and during two of these meetings we engaged our brains in some deep thought. The first Friday was a panel discussion with Habitat for Humanity: Portland, The Fair Housing Council of Oregon and Rebuilding Together Portland. The three organizations together painted a decent picture of the diversity of organizations out there dedicated to helping others with housing related issues.

Rebuilding Together is an organization that goes out only a few times a year to remodel houses in need of repair. They aggregate a whole bunch of projects and then usually in Spring send a large number of people out to work. People apply to have work done on their houses and Building Together gathers supplies from many of its corporate sponsors (like Home Depot) and does the work through volunteers. It is fairly easy to get involved and you should try it sometime! here is the link: (http://www.rebuildingtogetherportland.org/contacts/new)

The Fair Housing Council of Oregon is an organization that doesn't receive as much press as maybe they ought to, given the amount and importance of their work. They send out undercover home buying agents to make sure landlords and home sellers are not discriminating against peeps. They offered for us to come help them do some undercover work, but their website currently says they are not hiring. Here is a link to the bus tours they give on the history of discrimination in Portland (http://fhco.org/tours.htm) if you're interested.

We also met another Friday night and while we ate pizza (since it was dinner time) we also watched an episode of 30 days. (http://www.imdb .com/title/tt0502498/). This particular episode is the first episode of the show and the topic is living on minimum wage. For those who don't know (I certainly didn't) the actor is Morgan Spurlock (which probably still means nothing)... He's the guy from Supersize Me and each episode of 30 days is essentially a new Supersize Me with a different topic. Here is the link to Hulu, where you can watch (all?) eighteen episodes! (http://www.hulu.com search?query=30+Days&st=1) The first episode is a bit unbelievable and silly at points, but for the most part it is probably accurate and definitely interesting.

We shall see what Spokane has in store for us. It is a five hour drive from Portland, we leave at 8:30 am and my Ipod is only half charged!!

~Official Historian C.C.MMX