ESLARP

In other words: East St. Louis Action Research Project.

This is where I worked for my sweat equity hours. It's not exactly affordable housing per se, but it is a much larger scale neighborhood-wide outreach program involving many small and large scale projects. Some projects do involve housing - for example, this weekend, they re-roofed one particular resident's house. However, the other projects are quite diverse. When I went in September, I worked on archival shelving units for a cultural museum celebrating a famous dancer from the area who had recently passed away. This time, I worked in a thrift store and in a cemetary.

The thrift store was GIGANTIC. We cleaned up the basement and organized the items thrown down there, as well as unloaded an entire truck full of new donations and redecorated for spring.

The cemetary's problem was that it was right by a hill and kept flooding and silting over whenever it rained. The tombstones got buried, and people had trouble finding their loved ones. We were assigned to dig down to the tombstones until they could be read so they could be documented before they got entirely buried and washed away. The particular plot we were working on contained dead babies - giving new meaning to dead baby jokes. In fact, I'm not sure if I can laugh at those anymore ...

For the evening, there was a talent show lead by the community youth. One particular "Jimmy" did an AWESOME rendition of "What goes around comes back around" along with a really well-executed dance routine. All the girls from UIUC were all over him ...

The weekend was pretty rewarding. However, there was a huge group of sophomores who were there only because their professor required them to be, and that got on my nerves, because many of them complained about it. At least they got the work done. And they weren't THAT bad in terms of whining, but still, one could tell they didn't actually care all that much. Hopefully, the weekend helped change that a bit.