Here’s a short note from Britani, a JV in Tacoma. The Tacoma JVs arrived to a house undergoing the final steps in renovations but were quickly moved in within their first few days in the city. Here’s a part of their story:
After being picked up from the train station and whisked off to our support person’s house for a delicious welcome dinner of lasagna, we tumbled out of two cars, suitcases in hand, at our new house. For a tour. Already weary of living out of our suitcases and being unsettled after a week of orientation, we were excited to have a place to call home, but our house, Thea Jamba, was not yet finished, and the kitchen was buried under a pile of artifacts from former Tacoma JVs. Zach and Mike temporarily camped out in the upstairs bedrooms of our nearly inhabitable home while Bridget, Rebecca, Liz, and I lugged our bags across the garden to the Catholic Worker house to stay in rooms generally used by guests of their hospitality program. At first, we were hesitant to accept their offers of the food in their kitchen, but we quickly realized we didn’t have any other options. We had no money, no food, and no usable kitchen of our own. So we accepted. We accepted cereal for breakfast, tomatoes and cheese and english muffins for mini pizzas, an entire frozen chicken (named Frederick) that we didn’t know how to cook, and the friendship and hospitality of people we had just met. We had our first dinner in our new house on the deck with food generously given to us by the Catholic Worker house, eating out of one bowl with many forks before cranking up the record player and excavating our kitchen. After a few days, the house passed inspection, and we moved in the night before we started work at our placement agencies, but we have continued cooking and eating together almost every night, except when we are invited to a harvest dinner or a potluck.
