by The GM on July 19 at 5:14PM
For the past two weeks, I have been out in Gallup, New Mexico for my annual two weeks of training for the Air Force Reserves. During the time out here, I have learned that the definition of "luxury" to some people can simply mean having things like running water, electricity, and a roof with no holes on top of a house with four real walls. I have spent the last two weeks building homes for families that live on one of many Navajo Indian Reservations out here.
The daily routine of being at work at 6:45 to start building a house is a bit tiring and becomes very redundant, very quickly. My job in the Air Force is to run generators and fix them if needed. I also run the power plant when one is around. There was no need for my specific career field that past two weeks, so I had to aid in framing a house, pulling what seemed like a million miles of electrical cable, hanging drywall, then mudding and sanding the drywall, and putting on sheathing on the outside of the house. The only thing I've ever had experience with is the drywall stuff, everything else was all new to me.
During the times that work got to be annoying or whenever I would just get tired of doing what I was doing, it dawned on me that a family was waiting on this home. A family that would literally be moving from a shack into brand new, two or three bedroom home. That thought sort of depressed me at first, but then I realized that these people had put their faith in our unit to get the job done and the least any of us could do was to put 100% of our pride into what we were doing.
When my group of 21 arrived, we had one house that needed all of the interior work completed, another that was just a frame, and the third needed to be started from the ground up. Yesterday, our last day of work, one house was ready to be put out on the owner's land, another was ready for the interior work (tiling, cabinets, etc.), and the third was ready to have the drywalling process start. On top of that, a group of our unit was out on a home site building the foundation around a house that was moved out to the homeowner. In all, our group of 21 has helped out four families. Within a month, all four of those families should be living in their brand new homes and that makes me very happy with the work that we did.
I know that this topic has nothing to do with sports, but it was something that was on my mind and I wanted to put it out there.
The daily routine of being at work at 6:45 to start building a house is a bit tiring and becomes very redundant, very quickly. My job in the Air Force is to run generators and fix them if needed. I also run the power plant when one is around. There was no need for my specific career field that past two weeks, so I had to aid in framing a house, pulling what seemed like a million miles of electrical cable, hanging drywall, then mudding and sanding the drywall, and putting on sheathing on the outside of the house. The only thing I've ever had experience with is the drywall stuff, everything else was all new to me.
During the times that work got to be annoying or whenever I would just get tired of doing what I was doing, it dawned on me that a family was waiting on this home. A family that would literally be moving from a shack into brand new, two or three bedroom home. That thought sort of depressed me at first, but then I realized that these people had put their faith in our unit to get the job done and the least any of us could do was to put 100% of our pride into what we were doing.
When my group of 21 arrived, we had one house that needed all of the interior work completed, another that was just a frame, and the third needed to be started from the ground up. Yesterday, our last day of work, one house was ready to be put out on the owner's land, another was ready for the interior work (tiling, cabinets, etc.), and the third was ready to have the drywalling process start. On top of that, a group of our unit was out on a home site building the foundation around a house that was moved out to the homeowner. In all, our group of 21 has helped out four families. Within a month, all four of those families should be living in their brand new homes and that makes me very happy with the work that we did.
I know that this topic has nothing to do with sports, but it was something that was on my mind and I wanted to put it out there.
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