Transition...

Hello everyone and Happy Fat Tuesday!

So Green Two is officially done working at camp hope!!! It’s a bitter sweet moment. I’m defiantly going to miss everyone and all of the benefits of working in a kitchen, but it’s about time we get outside and do some manual labor.

On our final day we went all out and made one of the best meals camp hope has ever had to date. The menu consisted of parmesan chicken and parmesan eggplant (for the vegetarians). Both were breaded, baked in a marinara sauce and served on a bed of pasta. For side dishes we served cheesy garlic bread, green beans, and a root beer float cake for dessert. Our root beer float cake is an original green two recipe. It’s a white cake powder, but instead of using water, we used root beer extract and root beer. The frosting was made out of whip-its with a little bit of root beer extract and vanilla extract.

It was one of the harder meals to make and we almost went through every cooking pan and tray we had in our kitchen. This is impressive because we were only cooking for 200 and we didn’t use that many dishes when we cooked for over 700. However in the end everyone loved it!

If you haven’t heard already I am currently in Jackson, MS for transition (1/31-2/7) and I will be here for a couple more days. THEN we go to Long Beach, MS for our next spike.

We are in Jackson with all of the other teams that were in the gulf for their first spike and will stay for their second. Transition is mostly for all of the TL’s and UL’s to have meetings to meet with our team. We have a debriefing to talk about our last spike (what went wrong, what they should change, what we liked) and then a briefing meeting to learn about our new spike. So far for our new spike we know that we will be staying at Camp Coastal Care (the “Cube” as we have dubbed it) in Long Beach. The group we are going to be working for is a Lutheran Episcopal Church group. We are a little nervous about working for a church organization but I think things will work out. However our work schedule is going to be crazy. Our day is going to start out at 5:30am for PT, then breakfast and meetings until 7:00am when we will start work. We work at construction sites until 4 and have an hour break somewhere in between for lunch. We have a meeting at 5, dinner at 6:30 and then lights out at 10. It’s going to be different then camp hope but I’m pretty pumped either way.

Long Beach is 45 minutes east of Pearlington, MS and 30 minutes west of Biloxi.

The web site for Camp Coastal Care is http://www.campcoastcare.com

My new address will be:

Matt Walenciak - Americorps
Camp Coast Care
5061 Espy Avenue
Long Beach, MS 39560

Feel free to send letters, food, or even come visit! Later kids!