Goodbye Apex, Hello Jonesville, VA

Hello everyone,

I have decided to keep a blog this summer since I will probably have limited access to facebook and wanted to keep some kind of a record of my summer, whether people decide to read it or not. For those of you that don't know, I am spending my summer as a staffer with the Appalachia Service Project. ASP is an organization in which high schoolers from youth groups around the country come to the Appalachian region for a week of their summer. They are assigned a county, and stay at a center there- the center is usually a school, so the volunteers sleep on air mattresses or cots and eat cafeteria food while they are there. During the week they work in groups of 7 (5 volunteers and 2 group leaders) on their assigned site. The site is a family's house which they will work on in order to make it 'warmer, safer, and drier.' There are I think around 26 centers throughout Appalachia, and a group of 4-5 staffers (college students, like myself who have been hired by ASP) live at each center, running it over the course of the summer.

I leave tomorrow for my training in Jonesville, VA and will be there until June 6th, when I will leave for set-up week at my county. I won't find out which county I will be working in or who I will be on staff with until May 30th, and will post it here as soon as I can! I don't know if I'll have cell phone service in Jonesville, but you can send mail to this address:

ASP Jonesville HSC

P.O. Box 250

Jonesville, VA 24263

or you can call (276) 346-3377 and according to what I've been told, during training evenings are the best time to reach me, and a message will be taken if a session is going on. If you are opposed to snail mail, I should have access to email, please send it to my school address kdbeach@email.unc.ed

Well I'm off to the porch! Please keep in touch over the summer :)