Eight Days in the Burg

Last year I spent the Fourth of July in northern Alberta. This year I spent it on the balcony of a rented parish house in Hamburg, Iowa located a few blocks from one of the worst floods in U.S. history. The Missouri River is currently 4 miles outside of its banks in southwestern Iowa, and has broken levees and wiped out farms and towns up and down the river since early May. Since AmeriCorps is first in line for disaster response, a call went out for volunteers a few weeks ago to go to Hamburg and help maintain the levee that had been built there. I signed up for the July 4th-12th stint and as I reflect back on my time there, I can only consider myself an incredibly lucky girl.

Real World Hamburg: Ten strangers who live together, work together, and watch
Harry Potter marathons together

By the time August is over, about 80 AmeriCorps members will have cycled through the town helping where we can – usually patrolling the levee looking for signs of erosion or seepage, mending tears, and monitoring the river levels. The way the system is set up, there will be two teams of five people always in the town, and their respective deployment dates overlap, so every few days a new team comes in to be trained by the outgoing team. Five times a day, a team of four people goes out to walk the levee – meaning everyone takes two shifts a day. This amounts to about 2-3 hours of actual work a day, though technically we’re on call 24/7 in case of emergency (read: in case the levee bursts). That means we all found ourselves with much more down time than we’ve been used to. Luckily, we were granted free access to the Hamburg City Pool, temporary library cards, cable, and free movie tickets. PLUS, all of our meals were provided: breakfasts came in the form of homemade goodies from community members, lunches were donated by the Grape Community Hospital, and the DNR paid for all of our dinners at the Blue Moon Bar and Grill. Can you say amazing???  My faith in humanity has never really been shaken, yet this experience certainly reinforced that faith.

Part of the 15 mile lake that doesn't belong here...

So I’ve long since realized how lucky I am with my situation right now: I have a place to live (and love living there), I have job that will never be beat in its awesomeness, great family, great friends, and love and support coming from all corners of the country. To that list I now add the following:

1) My town is not flooded. Nor is there a current threat of a flood. My heart goes out to all those who have been affected; it’s one thing to see it on the news or hear about it in an email, but a whole new experience to see a lake where there should be highways, homes, and farms. To talk with a farmer whose crops are now under nine feet of water and hear the emotion in his voice is something I’ll never forget.

2) I get to be part of an organization that makes it a priority to give help to those who need it. No ignoring, no waiting for someone else to do something, no making excuses. We all signed up with AmeriCorps for different reasons (because it’s a job, because we want to work in the natural sciences), but when the call came out everyone was willing to go.

3) I got to live and work with some pretty chill people while I was there. Only a few minor blips of drama, which is saying something when there’s a house of ten people, one bathroom, and a fair amount of sleep deprivation. Everyone I met there is cool by me, despite the constant attempts (and sometimes successes) to touch their barefeet to my barefeet – a slight phobia of mine and which makes me shudder and squirm with discomfort…and sometimes shriek and curl into the fetal position.

Local levee wildlife

After only a few whirlwind days in the Driftless (which included my first venture into Schera’s and some ridiculously amazing beers whose names I can’t even pronounce followed by a Big Blue Sky concert in the beautifully restored Elkader Opera House sponsored by these guys as part of Project Aware), I’ll be back on the road tomorrow to head back to Columbia for the wedding of two good friends. I’ll hang in CoMO until Monday morning, when I’ll take myself out for a birthday breakfast and then head back to the Kansas motherland for a visit home.