This is a reflection written by Gavin Prouty, a first-year Bonner who went on the alternative spring break trip to Mobile, Alabama.
The bus ride down was a great opportunity to start building
a great community, what else is there to do with 22 hours straight on a bus but
talk? Made friends with a lot of the kids that came through Campus Ministry and
also made friends with one of the adults on the trip who works at Augsburg.
Once we got to the church in Mobile we unloaded and split up into rooms for
sleeping, I try to choose a room with some of the guys I didn’t know so I could
try and talk to them. First day we spent roaming the beach at Dauphin Island,
did some wave riding and souvenir shopping. Second day we got down to work and
I volunteered to go to a AmeriCorps house and clean it out because they sold it
and were moving all the stuff to a new house. Made a lot more friends working
with them during this clean out, it was a lot of work trying to take apart all
their bunk beds. They third day we went to the house that we would be spending
are time at for the rest of the week. It was a small house and we were the
first group to be in it so we got to do the demolition, that was A LOT OF FUN!
For the most part I was working with one guy I had never talked to before, his
name was Erik. Erik and me had more experience with construction compared to
the other volunteers so we were given more jobs and more power tools. We ended
up taking down a wall and building a doorway along with storage areas for the
air conditioning units and the other big appliances that would go in the back
room. One other job that Erik and me did was try to screw a ceiling back up
into position which ended up with me being in the small crawl space of the
attic and moving all the fiberglass insulation. After I had done all that work
we ended up just smashing the ceiling in too because it was just too damaged to
fix and they were going to re-do it. When that week was all done all of us were
so tired that we all got great sleep on the bus ride back to Minneapolis. I honestly
couldn’t have had a better spring break!
