back at the office

my street has a little too much action at night. which is why i can't sleep.

but back to BTR. basically, i thought i would be able to write about every day, but i am going to write really quickly about the most salient points because it is way too difficult to cover what i am going to call the entire sensation that was BTR.

we did a lot of workshops that challenged people to open up to each other, to question each other, to work towards educating themselves, towards realizing we have a lot of work to do with ourselves before we start working with the kids, and basically, to bring together a group of 142 (now 141, someone dropped out today) individuals that know nothing about each other in a short amount of time. i dont think we could have developed the camaraderie that we did in four days back at the office, but we managed to do it isolated in the woods, and i am pretty psyched for my corps.

we ate a lot of crazy camp food, did a lot of team building, did some service at the camp where we do BTR (my team helped to build a fence).

upromise william monroe trotter elementary school team serving
in the roxbury and grove hall communities

myself, kevin/r-roy (behind the pole) and matt on the right -- setting a post

i have come to the realization that even though the nametags that we wear every day are dorky, they are still super useful. it is nice to hear my name in our interactions, even with people that i don't know very well but recognize their faces.

so now we are back at the office doing more fabulous training, except it is really hard to sit still all day. i am glad that we will be prepared when we enter the schools because that was one of my biggest fears about teach for america, not being adequately prepared. today the MBTA people came to talk about safety and our role as ambassadors on the T. we get passes to ride around for free, even though they take a deposit out of our accounts. so at the end of the year we get the money back if we haven't lost our T passes. which is pretty nice if you think about all the money we could spend on transportation a month. not to mention 10 months.

on thursday we get to go to our school and visit in the community and do our PT out there. hopefully one day i will get to take a good picture of PT being done so i can put it up here. opening day is coming up for city year in a week and a half and i can't even believe it. our first day of after school is the 25th, which is like, next week!!