Bleeding Jesus and a Lack of Butter

      The house I live in is bordered by a pretty busy 4-lane highway, a successful and very noisy carwash, and two multi-story, multi-family residences. The fire station is right down the street. It's pretty loud most of the time. Sometimes the carwash actually plays good music and not rap, and the firetrucks sometimes won't turn on their sirens until they hit the highway, rather than right outside our house. Small mercies.  The vehicle for the house is a van.  I'll be in charge of most transportation-related issues (and most other things) during my tenure.  That means I'll have to drive the van.  On the Interstate.  In a city.  At rush hour.  I'll also have to park the van.  Parallel park.  In a city.  On a very main drag.  Put your praying pants on, I'm gonna need it!

      Upstairs in the house is a recently remodeled kitchen with loads of counter space and a stovetop with 6 burners, four of which actually work. We also have 3 refrigerators. But no butter. Or hand towels. My pants usually do the trick. Each day of the week, a resident in our house is responsible for cooking the noon meal that is served to homeless individuals, mopping most of the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, and cooking supper. It's quite a bit of work, starting at about 10, ending at 7 or 8, but the house is very clean, to say the least. The upstairs floor also contains an office, one resident room, the office for another Latin American resource place, and a dining/meeting room. A deck extends out the back way, with stairs down to a small garden and a yard. Underneath the deck is a bike-repair place that is open on Saturdays I think.

      The downstairs of the house is reserved for residents. It has a couple of halls that are painted in very garish, Latin American-esque colors. The main color is orange. There are something like 6 rooms for residents, each named after a saint, a laundry room, bathroom with 3 showers, and a little living room with couches and a TV. My room is super tiny but I'll be moving into a different one as soon as the other volunteer leaves. It is much larger and is located farther away from the fire station and the carwash. The artwork in the house is very Catholic inspired. There is a giant portrait of Pope Benedict and another of some other Catholic guy with a red cap that hang over the stairs going to the front door. An incredibly effeminate Jesus keeps watch over the living room, and a Bleeding Jesus crucifix hangs in the staircase from the upstairs dining room to the living room downstairs. It's a little creepy.   

    I'd post pictures, but as you loyal readers all know, my camera hit the deck awhile ago and I don't know my way around well enough to find a way to fix it.  Hopefully I'll be able to take it into the city this Saturday. So I guess your vivid imaginations, coupled with my descriptive writing will have to do the trick for now. 

These are the plans

      Ok, I guess I thought everyone knew what I was doing. I feel like I've explained it to like a million people over the course of the last 6 months. Sometimes, I felt like printing my plans on a t-shirt and wearing it everywhere would be easier than telling every single person that asked in any given day. But I guess I must have missed some people. So here's the plan for the next year. Or the next few months, at least.
      I've just moved to Oakland, California to do voluntary service work with Catholic Worker. Catholic Worker was started by Dorothy Day and there are houses in many cities in the U.S. Our house functions as a hospitality house where Latin American immigrants can come and live with us for a few months while they get their affairs sorted out. There are currently 3 Hispanics in the house. We also serve a noon meal to any homeless people that happen to show up at our door (between 10 and 50 individuals, depending on the month and the time of month). There is one other volunteer in the house right now, but she is leaving in a few days, along with another guy who was here for a year. So it'll just be me and a live-in staff person who used to be a resident. The house is on the main drag of Oakland and is right next to a car wash. The car wash is extraordinarily popular and has the irritating habit of blasting music out of whatever car they are washing. So far it's been a lot of rap. The house also has a backyard, which is nice, with a garden. A previous volunteer, a Goshenite named Rosanna Kaufman, took care of the garden, but she left a couple weeks ago, I think, so it's sort of a mess. So that's the plan for now – live and work in the house for a year or so. In a few weeks, I'll try to get some sort of part-time job for supplemental income and to preserve my sanity. Ben will be in Oakland or something, so I'll get to see him at least every week. Anyway, that's the long version of what I'm planning to do. Hopefully that makes sense.
    Oh, and Anna Cook, my favorite color is green.

 And my new address is
Claire Unruh
c/o Oakland Catholic Worker
PO Box 19277
Oakland, California 94619

Takin' the Amtrak

Disclaimer: This is super incredibly long. I'm so sorry. It won't happen again.

     To get to Oakland, I decided to take the cost-effective yet time-consuming Amtrak train ($170 for a 41 hour ride) from Lincoln, Nebraska. Of course, that meant that someone (meaning my parents) had to drive me two-and-a-half hours from Clay Center to Lincoln. And the train was scheduled to leave at 12:14am. So we left the house at about ten til eight at night, and drove for about two hours through a thunderstorm to Lincoln. We arrived about two hours early, but turns out the Amtrak station had moved to a few blocks over, from the old brick station in the Haymarket to a newer, smaller station. The new station was located in the middle of a construction zone. We were dodging cones and potholes and one time, I'm pretty sure we were on the wrong side of a line of cones. Dad figured it out once he noticed that a precipice was directly in our path, though, so we got our barge of a car swung around and headed in the correct direction. The Amtrak station wasn't staffed until 11pm, so we sat in the car for half an hour, while Mom and Dad took a bit of a nap and I tried not to think about how much I had to pee, and how inviting the weeds in the construction zone looked as a potential potty zone.
     The train was a little late, so I suppose I hopped on at about 12:45am. As soon as I sat down in my seat, the magnitude of my new adventure hit me (to this point, I had somehow managed to avoid the realization that I would be moving a bazillion miles away from everything I knew and loved), and I might have been a bit of a wreck for a few miles. But I eventually fell asleep in my seat (they recline! And they have footrests! It was like sleeping in a giant recliner!) and woke up somewhere in eastern Colorado. It was foggy and we weren't moving. I guess the signaling system broke down or something, is what the conductor said. I decided to see the sights of eastern Colorado (sagebrush, cattle, more sagebrush), so I grabbed my applique kit and camera and headed to the lounge car, where they have panoramic views and lots of windows. I listened to some granolas talk about sustainable agriculture, monogamy, and public restrooms. Then a fairly unhappy couple came and sat with me and whined about the service on the train. There are also some Amish people here, which is kind of cool. We made a stop in Denver at about 9 or something, and I got off and walked a bit. I was super paranoid that the train would leave without me, though, so that didn't last long. Then a whole herd of BRITISH PEOPLE got on the train! A lot of them are in my car, and they are saying things like “knackered” and “loads of space!” “lovely,” and “sheduled” in their crazy British accents. It's fantastic. I hope they stay on for a long time.
      5:10pm Oh my gosh you guys I was almost THAT person. That person that gets left behind, whom you see running for the train as it pulls out of the station. As a matter of fact, I WAS that person, but a platform worker caught it in time. I have no idea what I would have done if she hadn't. I just wanted to use the bathroom in the station and not on the train! I thought it would be a longer stop, but it totally wasn't, it was like 7 minutes! Oh my gosh. I am not getting off this train until we get to San Francisco. Earlier, I listened to one of the granolas, a very liberal-minded woman from California, ask a series of increasingly less-well-thought-out questions of an Amish couple. Then she told them that she had a partner (male) but they weren't married. The Amish guy proceeded to very politely give her “what-for”. I laughed. It was very interesting to get out in a world (i.e. not Bethel) where people don't know what Amish/Mennonites think or believe. I guess that'll probably be my new world for the next little while.
      7:30pm Ooh, there are some honest-to-goodness Australians sitting behind me! They use words like “peckish,” “walkabout,” and “bums,” as well as having fantastic accents. AND they have heard of “Footrot Flats,” a comic book that Dad enjoyed during his time in New Zealand. We're driving through western Colorado or eastern Utah, I'm not quite sure which. The scenery is very pretty, lots of wind-blown and water-shaped sandstone. Very different looking from Kansas, that's for sure. Looks like we're in for some storms too! There are a lot of dark, towering clouds straight ahead.
      8:25pm We did indeed get some rain. Enough to produce the most beautiful full double rainbow I've seen in years. It didn't last too long, of course, but it was absolutely gorgeous, stretched out over the Utah desert.
      3:00pm, Saturday Well, I dropped my camera. Again. It broke. Again. There's this guy on the train from Florence, Italy, and he's going around interviewing all these people about why they're on the train, and stuff. So while we were going through the Sierra Nevadas (beautiful, by the way), just past the Donner Pass, he asked to interview me. So there I was, sitting in the observation car, stitching away on my applique, answering questions about what I was doing in California and what does “Mennonite” mean. And all of a sudden he was like “AAAGH!!” and swiped for my side of the table. About that time, I heard a crash, and my camera went in one direction and my lens went rolling down to the end of the car. Turns out I broke the little plastic mounts that hold the lens into the shotgun mount on the body. So.... now I have to find a place to fix it. And in the meantime... use Ben's point-and-shoot? I feel sort of naked. On the bright side, yours truly may show up on a radio spot in either Switzerland or Italy, talking about Mennonites and Bethel College!