McNowhere, Nevada

My father fondly re-named McDermitt, Nevada, to McNowhere, Nevada. This is where I'm spending the next month of my life with Sierra Service Project. It is a Methodist based non-profit that sets up service projects for youth to do home repair on mainly Indian reservations, but is currently branching out to Mexico and Honduras.

So here I am as a chef with 7 other people on staff. We have two chefs, myself and Kelley. Then there is our construction team of Martin (our only permanent boy for the summer), Jennifer, and Lisa. Amy is our spiritual life coordinator and in charge of doing the Jesus part of the camp. And of course, there is our fearless leader Mallory who keeps us sane.

We also are going to have a girl coming in next week to shadow all the jobs and lead worship for us. She leaves on Saturday morning, and we are getting our friend Phil Saturday afternoon to come play guitar for us for the next two weeks. He'll probably be our free-floating do-it-all guy too, since he won't want to sit around and do nothing. We are staying in a town with a population of roughly 350 people, two casinos, a gas station, a market, and a motel. And a small library. We are hanging out at the K-12 school, Home of the Bulldogs.

So as a chef, it is our job to make menus for the week, have a snack a day, and feed the kids fresh and healthy (and of course delicious) food. All 50 of them. Our last week we will be feeding over 70 campers. YIKES! I will be ready for almost any size dinner party whenever I get back.

Kelley and I made the perilous trip to Winnemucca (the closest city of any size) an hour away to buy groceries. Six hours and $1,700 later, we finally were on the road again, armed with enough food to stock a convenience store. We certainly got a number of looks when we pulled up to the cash register with 50 loaves of bread and 11 carts full of food! It took an hour to check out, and about half an hour to get all of it out of the store and into our cargo van. We were all quite impressed.

So far things haven't been too busy other than that, we are just setting up until Sunday afternoon when the first wave of campers come in to play. Today Kelley and I will be making enough granola for the rest of this week and hopefully the next, as well as cutting about half of our lettuce up to have ready-made salads on hand.

Here are some pictures for your fun and enjoyment!

Lisa, myself, and James on the way to Wendy's during training (James is in AZ for the summer).

This is our stack of First Aid Kits before they got loaded into all the vans.

This is the playground of our school with the awesome view of the mountains.

=Standing on the corner in McDermitt. This is the main drag. Quite exciting.

That's right, we walked to the Oregon border. Too bad its only 400 yards north! From left: Jennifer, Amy, Kelley, Martin, Mallory, and me. Lisa is taking the picture.

A large boulder of no importance that I thought my family would enjoy. Truckee, anyone?

We get to see sunsets like this every night. Beautiful!

We found a forklift outside the market with keys in it. So Kelley thought she would try it out!

We also walked to the Nevada sign. We think the border is somewhere between the two, but its about 100 feet of no-man's-land. We decided that we would claim it for our own and succeed from the Union sometime in the near (or distant) future.

The McDermitt Bread Basket. Lots and lots of bread.

Kelley hiding behind all of our baskets. I think we scared a few people with the amount of food we were buying.

The end product! Those kids better be hungry.