Jonathan's blog

We have been doing the same thing from day to day which is copying the files of the cases that the FEMA employees have to work. Honestly, I might have preferred to be on my regular project, where I would have been building homes, but I have made the best of this and learned from it. On the bright side we are out of here on November 20th. When I get home the first thing I am going to do is go and visit my family. This has been a wonderful experience and I recommend it to those who can set aside the time to do so.

So we have been working at a FEMA JFO. A JFO is Joint Field Office where FEMA/we process disaster information and find apartment complexes that have vacancies for people who got displaced by Hurricane Ike. The JFO is located in Austin, TX at Highland Mall in what ust to be a JC Penny's. We are staying at an extended stay hotel. We have also inprocessed other teams that have come through so that they can work with FEMA at the DRC's. A DRC is a Disaster Recovery Center, where we hand out MRE's (meals ready to eat), ice, water, and we also register people to get help from FEMA. Fourth round – our last project - is coming to an end in about three weeks and I am excited but at the same time I am sad, because I am going to miss everybody that I have met and become friends with.

So far during this 4th round experience we went through “spike” travel, which means going to a project in another state. We took three days to get to Pass Christian, Mississippi from Denver, Colorado. So when we got to our spike site on Saturday night, we got settled in for the night. The next morning we met our spike housing manager and project manager. The project was Project Rehab, and we were supposed to be working to rehabilitate homes that are on stilts in an area that was affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A house on stilts is just a house raised off of the ground. So, on Monday September 8th, we did one days' worth of work then we got called on disaster to help after Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.