Day 26: All of the People I am Happy to Have Met...

I am thankful for the Americorps volunteers I met while living in Alamosa, Colorado.  I saw a show recently that cleverly pointed out how no one wants to hear someone go on and on about how meaningful their brief stint of volunteering was, especially when that person started and ended in a life of total privilege.  So I will try to keep that in mind as I write this post :).

The year in Alamosa WAS very meaningful to me and it did teach me a ton of things about working with people living in poverty.  But one of the best things about the year was the friendships made with the other volunteers.  We came from all over the world, ranged in age from fresh out of high school to retired, had different religious and political leanings, and there were some wildly divergent personalities.  But we all somehow ended up in this small town in the beautiful San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, all with the common goal that we wanted to spend the year serving in this nonprofit to fight rural poverty.  We lived together, worked together, and socialized together.  We camped, hiked, snowshoed, and hit every hot spring we could find.  We ate thousands of meals together.  We also spent lots of bored hours together, since our house didn't have cable / Netflix / Internet reception / any of the other devices that allow people to retreat to their own rooms and zone out, and since our town of 10,000 people didn't have a lot of nightlife options.  It was way more intense even than the college dorm experience.  So even though we were only together for 365 days and then we spread back out to our different corners of the world and our different lives, the experience led to deep friendships while we were there, and memories that will last our entire lifetimes.  I'm grateful for so many things about this year, but right at the top of the list is all the people pictured above (and a few more who didn't make the picture).