Nigerians, Shotguns, and Squirrels

Hello from Cooooooooon Rapids! My team departed from Vinton early Monday morning and arrived later that day in Coon Rapids, Iowa which is about 2 hours west of Des Moines. We met our sponsor named Elizabeth who is a bubbly Ecologist that swears like a sailor. She brought us to an old, worn down farm house in the middle of no where. This will be our home until December 15th. It sits on about 4 acres and is accompanied by an apple tree, an oak tree with a tire swing, and a few run down barns. I'm absolutely in love! Coon Rapids sits in the darkest part of Iowa since there is no light pollution for miles. Therefore, the nights are absolutely breath taking with the amount of stars you see. Right now there is a meteor shower going on so I love to sit outside and watch everything and listen to the coyotes. Iowa is just full of surprises. :) What we are doing here is more invasive species removal in order to help an oak savanna thrive. We have been chain sawing and bucking trees so far, however tomorrow we are going to set our tree piles on fire. The Oaks will survive the fire, but the others won’t. Since we have now opened the canopy, the seeds that are dropped will now have sunlight and room to grow. Its kinda cool and I'm digging my new mad chain sawing skills!

We have been invited over to some houses for dinner which has been quite interesting to say the least. We arrived at this house and the first thing this woman says to us is "who wants to go check the squirrel trap?" I, of course, go and is led by the daughter over to grandma's house. I found myself at a gorgeous home with high windows and expensive paintings. This very well put-together elderly woman greets me with a shotgun in her hand. She asked me what my name was, and when I told her "Jessica", she starts to load her gun while asking "Jessica what?". "Uuuuuuuuuhhhh....Jessica Beckwith ma'am". She hugs her granddaughter and starts chatting with her while I dart my eyes around the room looking for my escape rout wondering if I can take the grandmother if I needed to. She then points her gun to a very scared looking squirrel in a trap on her porch and tells us to take it. I bolt out for it and wait at the door while I’m sure I look like the craziest person to ever set foot in Coon Rapids. We take the squirrel back to the first house as an already cooked squirrel is being set on the table. They decide that the best place to leave the alive squirrel would be right next to the dining room table! We ate in awkward silence while it gave us silent death glares. It was enough to make me go back to being a vegetarian! One thing that was cool though is there was an exchange student living there from Nigeria. It was a lot of fun to talk with him about Africa and it made me want to go there even more! One day....!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyhoo, being and incredibly goofy bunch, we have made up a ton of funny rules and games to help us pass the time. Here are some:
1. How to swear. I don’t know how we got on to this, but you take the first letter of the swear word and combine it with cinnamon. So one could say, "Son of a Binnamon!".
2. The blow dart game: You have to make eye contact with someone and do the motion that you are blowing a dart at them. If they see you do it, they have to drop to the ground no matter where you are until someone else walks over to you and "pulls out the dart". We have gotten so good at it that we can do it across long distances and in mirror reflections. It’s just really funny when you are talking to someone and all of a sudden they drop to the ground because someone across the room blow darted them. The funniest time we have had with this game is when we are in public places like Wal-Mart. I blow darted a couple people in the food isle and they dropped to the ground, confusing the finnamon out of a bunch of people. Hahaha... we are a strange, strange group.

Ok, that is enough for now cause I need to go, but I shall leave you with my new address for anyone wants to send me cookies. I know you all are!!! :D

Please send mail to:

Jessica Beckwith in care of Whiterock Conservancy
1390 Highway 141
Coon Rapids, Ia 50058

Peace Out!