U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. -- HOUSTON -- A whirlwind of activity marked spring break for 15 Air Force Academy cadets in Houston, March 21-25.
The Northwest Harris County chapter of Habitat for Humanity kept the cadets busy, starting March 21 with a two-day deconstruction project in the River Oaks neighborhood.
“Deconstruction is where we go and take down a home being demolished and bring everything out of that home to be reused,” said the cadet in charge of the Academy’s Houston contingent, Cadet 2nd Class Dylan Dempster.
Removing the materials took an exacting and gentile touch, versus wholesale demolition, and yielded wood, molding, lighting, ceramics and other material to eventually be made available for purchase at the Habitat chapter’s sales facility, ReStore.
The next task for the cadets was a roofing project, originally scheduled to take two days.
“The job was to tear down a section of roof, put it back up and re-shingle it,” Dempster said. “At first we were slow, trying to learn the ropes about everything but eventually we were able to get into a rhythm and cranked it out.”
The same storm front giving the Academy a dose of blizzard-like weather didn’t leave Houston untouched. That system stretched down to Houston later in the day, guaranteeing rainfall early Thursday morning and accelerating the cadets’ construction plans.
“The great thing was it rained the next day and if we hadn’t finished the work, the roof would have been open when it rained,” Dempster said. “We were able to get the roof up first and that saved the
home from possible water damage.”
With deconstruction and roofing marked off the cadets’ “to-do list,” the next task was tearing down a newly-acquired facility.The Habitat for Humanity chapter obtained an old store front adjacent to its ReStore, which will eventually become a receiving and storage facility. The cadets gutted the facility during the rest of the workweek, rotating between easy and hard tasks. The easy tasks were building cubicles and shelving. The hard tasks needed brute strength and persistence, as the cadets removed splintered and stubborn floor tiles with flat-bladed hoes and other tools over a 15,000 square-foot-area, one 30-year-old tile at a time.
The cadets in Houston were among a group of 75 cadets who swapped their Spring Break for construction work with Habitat for Humanity in Houston; Sacramento, Calif.; Oklahoma City; Corpus Christi, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Tupelo, Miss.
Academy cadets performed between 36,000 and 38,000 hours of community service during each of the past five academic years, as part of the Academy's Cadet Service Leadership program, which connects community organizations with cadet volunteers.
The alternative spring break program is funded by the Center for Character and Leadership Development and the Association of Graduates at the Academy.