Iowans Know How to Work

Today we showed some good old Iowa work ethic. I don't know if things are different down here or what or if there they just have lower expectations of us college kids. Not that I'm an Iowan farmboy or anything close to that, but our workday started at about 10:00. I was expecting a little bit more of an earlier start than that.

Getting to the tree farm at 10, we started planting about 400 trees that will eventually be transplanted once they have grown a little bit. Only an hour into the job, we took a water break. It wasn't that we were tired, but rather that the guy in charge more or less told us to take a water break. None of us were really tired just yet, and I personally felt like we had just started.

We took a rather lengthy break and then worked for another half an hour and were asked if we had gotten our second wind yet. I believe Curt had the best response of "still on my first". The whole job took a little bit less than two ours of work time. We were done so early that we had so much free time that we had time to go looking for Mycala's alligator and then eat lunch back at our house.

Common Ground didn't even have anything planned for us to do. Eventually we had some landscaping around the house to do. Here's where the real Iowan hard work came in to play. Before Katrina, there was an art sculpture out by our house. what was left was the footing in the ground- which needed to pulled out. The men of the group (Curt, Craig, Chad, Bill, and myself.) put together our strong backs and strong minds and devised a lever out of a chain and piece of wood to pry out the footing from the former sculpture. Not only did we find a way to pull out the footing faster than they expected, but we pulled out MORE of the footing than was expected.

I don't want to say that we have a better work ethic or work harder than some of the people here in New Orleans, nor do I want to brag, but I'm proud of the work that we did here. We did it well, we did it fast, and we did it the Iowa way.