Experience of a Life Time

Ryan, Britney and I all started our adventure on Thursday, March 24, 2011. We went to the old rebels house to discuss what we were going to be doing over the next few weeks. Florence and Philip La Riviere absolutely loved Ryan and Britney. Our main purpose of going to this two hour session was to discuss what Florence saw as our project. Florence is mainly blind in both eyes so she could not do this task alone. She wants a video to document the old veterans who started preserving land many years ago. As of right now we have no documentation about how these other people got involved in protecting land and fighting against development. Both the Refuge and the public have no idea how this came to be in the Bay Area. And our job will be finding out and eventually creating a video that will go up on The Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge's website, and if it's good enough...giving copies to the refuge to have in their history section. As soon as we arrived, we immediately began to discuss this future video. And also both of them fell in love with the cat. And we all got a special experience with nature. A squirrel came knocking on the window for food. We were all shocked and Florence just said "oh is that our squirrel dear?" I know Florence is really excited about this opportunity for her and her friends because finally everyone will understand what they have contributed this year. For about a month she has been sending emails with different peoples names. So Ryan, Britney and I will have our hands full. We still haven't decided but we will most likely make a long video molded together with all the different interviews rather than several little ones. But when the time comes, where we have all of our videos we will see which will be best. We will each be interviewing people that have become known as great protectors of open land. We will have similar questions and other questions that relate more to the person. Basically we will have to travel to them because many of these people are now in their 80's and 90's. Florence wants this documentation before this history is lost forever, because once it's gone, it's gone. Each of us will interview a couple of people and then together we will create the video. When we were at the La Riviere's house they pulled out numerous documents and things that they had created to spread the word to the public about saving wildlife. They had grocery bags that were donated to them, it had an egret and it said "Save the Bay". They had pancake breakfasts to raise money. Their biggest project was to fund raise. Ryan and Britney also got to witness their wall of awards. All twenty-two of them. We also got to see a huge panorama of what Don Edwards Refuge looked like twenty years ago. Overall we got information overload. I can't wait to work on this project with Ryan and Britney. I think we will learn a lot from this project as well as others who will eventually watch this video that we make. Florence says we will make a difference, and I hope we can meet her expectations.