What I Learned in AmeriCorps
// August 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Ten years ago a naive girl from the concrete jungle of Hollywood took a Greyhound up the I-15 and landed in Missoula, MT for an AmeriCorps domestic service stint. I basically wanted to get paid to learn how to backpack. I had spent some time bouncing around NGOs in Costa Rica but figured I would learn to be a burly outdoor girl in the mountains of the US. The Montana Conservation Corps (MCC) backcountry crew seemed like the ticket.
I was reminded of my time with MCC recently when I was helping a friend finish the basement of a home she recently purchased. There was a new wall built and finished several inches off of the foundation wall. The space between the two had to be insulated and was over 10′ long. My friend’s construction-friendly father was given this headache and had no idea how he was going to get R-30 insulation between this new wall and the foundation wall with support beams and untouchable darkness in the way. I went to help out a week into the process of the basement and took a few minutes to look at it. I suggested using cardboard to saddle the insulation and slide it through then remove it by sliding it out. You would be left with insulation in place.
The trick worked and her father was relieved because he had been trying to figure out how to insulate this wall for a week.
So how did I know to do this? My time with AmeriCorps. Towards the end of my stint with MCC I was on a crew that had managed to weasel ourselves into a front country project doing straw-bale construction and building composting toilets. In straw-bale construction cardboard can be used when placing odd shaped pieces of straw as a unit. Same principle, same trick for the insulation with obstacles in the way.
Thinking about it I learned a lot from my AmeriCorps time: (more…)
