A Week in Photos

After not really having many of my own photos to show for YAV program orientation in Stony Point, New York, I wanted to make a point of sharing with you all a little bit of what site orientation for our first week in Tucson looked like. On Tuesday, September 27, I woke up ridiculously early in our new time zone in our brand-new house with brand-new housemates to begin our year together!

A few hours later, here's Arial up and alive! She got in from her flight saga after the rest of us went to bed, and as we milled about figuring out how to use our first few hours, we sunk into our living room furniture to watch some TV and work up the energy to start cleaning our house to make it our own.

In the process of cleaning, we also discovered an uninvited housemate left by the previous tenants under a dresser. At certain times, it has felt like a lot of things were out to get us: moths, cockroaches, a mouse, other strange insects we had never seen before, a mug that decided to become two pieces in my hands as I literally was just washing it gently in the sink, the sink itself, mosquitoes (which we absolutely did not sign up for, coming to Tucson's reputed dry heat), dust bunnies (two of my housemates are allergic), and other allergies. But we are living simply and simply living!

Here's a fun addition to our house: Arial's and my new bikes! Tucson is emphasized as a bike-friendly city, and so our dedication to simple living includes commuting and transporting ourselves on bikes. Our program gave us a bike allowance, and before we even got to Tucson, Brandon had found a couple of bike deals, so Arial and I chose to take him up on the offer of finding us these sweet and sturdy hybrids.

Those bikes were camped in our long hallway from which branches off all the other rooms (the house used to be a boarding house so the setup is pretty unique), and here begins the tour of our new abode. Once I discovered the ping-pong table on the screened-in porch, that was when I knew that this house was a keeper.

Here is the porch door out to the backyard.

 

Our beautiful, zero-scaped backyard, complete with laundry drying in the sun and plenty of new vegetation to explore. While I may miss the lush green grass of Minnesota lawns, lawn grass tends to not be sustainable anywhere, much less in the desert. And it is a different feeling completely to wriggle your toes into warm sand. 

Palm trees, no big deal.

Birdfeeders.

This vegetation is really fascinating to me. I love the angles and shapes in how this cactus takes form.

Beautiful Heather doing laundry in the beautiful sunshine.

The back of our new house!

Oh, and we have chickens! The YAVs from last year invested in two chicken coops and ten hens that we will take care of in exchange for free fresh eggs every day!

To have and to hold...

Heather, after a year of working in a vet clinic, had the most primed instincts about animals (I really almost wrote animal instincts but realized that sounds funny...) of all of us, so her expertise was quite helpful in orienting ourselves to taking care of our flock.

The crazy chicken we needed to quarantine for her own safety, except chasing her around the yard and then out from under the smaller coop to put her in was a process in itself. And she earned the name Loquita.... (which means Little Crazy One)

Poor girl is either picked on by the other chickens or simply excluded from the communal food at feeding time, so we felt it was best to give her some individual attention in her own coop.

Hey!

"Do you mind? I'm trying to lay here!"

Amy Beth and her excitement about our new yard!

Another important way of settling into our new home was of course finding our way around the kitchen, so we tried our hand at maneuvering a few bodies around the tight space and turned out a pretty decent lunch, featuring guac made by Amy Beth.

Arial and Amy Beth preparing ingredients.

And Heather just looking adorable! And also preparing ingredients. Heather is adorable all of the time, but what really made me choose this picture over others is of course our coordinator Brandon's face in the background.

At the tail-end of monsoon season, the skies change at the drop of a hat.

We did a lot of cleaning this week, but we had to make sure we broke in the ping-pong table too.

Our first home-cooked dinner! The first night we were treated to pizza by Steve, one of the Tucson YAV board members after he helped us clean our house for half the day! We have some amazing support here, and I look forward to many more dinners with these folks.

Here's our first spin out on our bikes: Brandon rode with us to our bike safety class put on by the City of Tucson that is so invested in creating a bike-safe city that they made it free for everyone and set up a deal with a local bike shop so you can choose two out of three items for free as well: helmet, bike lock, and lights. All we had to do was devote a few hours of our time to our instructor Jorge, and we would be provided with knowledge and free equipment to hopefully keep us alive and well for the year.

Heather backpacking-up for the ride. 

Here's us on another necessary errand: our first trip grocery shopping. Our intention was to go visit all of our work placements so we would get to see where everyone worked and we would feel comfortable with our commutes, but we ended up only having time for my placement at BorderLinks and Amy Beth's at Southside. We did have time to swing through Food City though (one of the plethora of grocery shopping options in this city!), and literally half of our cart (and then over half of our fridge) was fresh produce.  

    

So excited about healthy food!

 

While we started fending for ourselves in terms of preparing food, we would never turn away a free meal. Friday night, Brandon invited us over to his home in an intentional community about ten minutes away by bike. I am not exactly sure how many people live there, but they make a point of sharing meals as well as chores as a community. Brandon and his wife, as well as their two daughters, have lived here for the past few years, and it was so sweet of them to invite us into their home as well as into their community over the common feast. Before the meal was ready though, he brought us up to his roof to orient us in the city of Tucson, because apparently you can do so by knowing which mountain range you are looking at: Catalinas to the north, Tucsons to the west, Santa Ritas to the south, and Tortolitas (also known as tortellinis to us who cannot remember their rightful name) to the northwest.

I hope I never lose the sense of amazement at these skies.

The whole crew on the roof (photo credit: Ali Wood, Tucson YAVA and now board chair): Brandon,  me, Heather, Arial, Amy Beth, and Tyler.

Saturday morning was a bit of a long day because we had part two of our bike class. After almost six hours in the sun, we had passed our group bike ride, parking lot drills, test, and graduated with a sunburn. Heather was also the guinea pig to learn how to change a flat tire, shown here with our awesome instructor, Jorge.

Another thing that brightened my weekend other than an awesome house with incredible company with whom to share it for the next year was an unexpected visitor: this guy came to visit me! My novio Mauricio took on a 15-hour round-trip drive from visiting his family in Southern California to hang out with me and my new housemates for less than 24 hours - what a sweetheart!

Our final housemate, Steph, actually also arrived on Saturday, so our crew was finaly in full force. She is a fiesty personality from Puerto Rico with a huge heart and incredible passion for justice issues who felt she had unfinished business following her YAV year, so she decided to stick around for another year in Tucson to live with us and work with the Florence Project: "a nonprofit organization providing free legal services to men, women, and unaccompanied children detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Arizona." I so look forward to learning more about her work and her experience so far in Tucson!

There you have it, a few days in photos of new life in Tucson. More photos, stories, and reflections to come!