Photo Update: Week of July 4

"Noah's House" - Wednesday, July 8


At Re-Member - Tuesday, July 7


Badlands, National Park - Sunday, July 5

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Noah's House

It's amazing how you go from a high, to a low. Yesterday, I was hiking the Badlands. Some of the most stunning natural beauty in my opinion that exists anywhere in the world. With a ten minute walk from the gravel road, you can be surrounded in a natural bowl of earth, carved out into amazing geological formations that tower skyward. The Badlands can be incredibly quiet, and stunningly serene as there are enormous tracts of land that remain untouched by man and machine. And so we sit, when we visit the Badlands, in silence. Asking our volunteers to decompress, disconnect and "plug-in" to the world around them. It's a special place. Today, the reality of the Rez . I worked on a house in the town of Pine Ridge, the service-center of the entire reservation. In Pine Ridge, you find the comparative amenities of the civilized world: a grocery store, community services, and so on. The house that we worked on today, threw any expectation that things in Pine Ridge are better ...
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A Day In The Life: On The Rez

The past 24 hours pretty much sum up the best and the worst on the Rez. On Monday night, we attended a powwow in Porcupine. The event concluded the first day of a housing summit on the Rez, being co-sponsored by Re-Member. During the day, various speakers presented updates and new ideas on promoting affordable, adequate and sustainable housing options on the Rez. After a crazy thunderstorm the sun poked through the clouds, leaving us with the perfect night (in other words, it wasn't 90 degrees any more) to watch a traditional powwow with dozens of dancers. As the night concluded, and we made the drive from Porcupine back to Pine Ridge, I had a chance to reflect on my time here so far: the good and the bad, the improvements and the things that have become worse. Wednesday morning I awoke and was assigned to a work crew that was traveling to a house about 45 minutes away from Pine Ridge. I drove a van of volunteers out, and was able to talk to them as we made the drive. Many had been...
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