Hello St. Johns!

This place is amazing! We got here yesterday midday after a six hour drive, it was by far the shortest travel we've had which was nice. On the first day we met Tom who is our sponsor, he surprisingly looks like my uncle Tommy :p He's a really nice and eager to learn EVERYTHING about NCCC; we gave him a thorough debrief on who we are and what we do. It's nice to serve someone who is genuinely interested in your background and what you're hoping to gain from this experience.
Today was our first day - we had a tour of the grounds which are lovely (I suggest googleing the campus, it's beautiful) and met a lot of people we'll be interacting with the next couple of weeks. This place is literally a self sustaining little town, it has more people than most towns in Minnesota. It has a power plant, fire station, police, post office, pottery studio, art gallery, library, church, restaurants, and more...there are like at least 100 monks living here at any time, they live here all their lives and many of the students (at this all men's school) come and live here for four years without leaving so they offer a lot of things! I don't know much about sports but they're a title 3 school and their coach won so many games (more than ANYONE else) they basically let him do whatever he wants..it was really cool. It was nice learning so much about where we are. Best of all there is a lake! I've been swimming each day :) it's going to be a daily activity I can feel it. I love it. The rooms we live in are dorms, they're earth homes though so it's semi-underground. It's a little warm but not too bad. I love the living arrangements and the grounds! This is going to be a fantastic project...
okay onto the work......
We're installing a 9 ft deer fence around 19 acres of oak forest which was rated as excellent condition. It's important because the deer population is out numbering the oak trees which isn't allowed the forest to replenish. The forest isn't only beautiful, it's functional! Everything on campus made of wood came from that forest! It's amazing to see. The work included in putting in the fence is pretty intense. Today we put in poles for the fence, they have to be 3 ft in the ground so the hole are already drilled for us but we have to do the final edits to it and make sure the pole will go in smoothly and evenly..then once the pole is in we have to level it and add tons of sand. Lots and lots of shoveling, honestly the worst part is the bugs! We have tons of bug spray and tick block and what not. They're intense though, never have I ever been so attacked by flies.
I love the site, I love the sponsors, and I love the work :)

so far so good.