Friday we had team role trainings. Christina, my TL (Team Leader - we use a lot of acronyms here) wanted two people to go to every training, and for everyone to go to two trainings. I went to training for Media Rep and Yearbook Rep, which are two positions that I really wanted. Media Reps write press releases to distribute in the communities we go to. We're supposed to do this really soon after we get to our spike site. (Have I explained spike? A spike project is any project that is more than an hour drive from campus, meaning we can't commute there. For spike projects, we set up temporary housing which could be anything closer to the project site. For my first spike, we're all sleeping in one big room in a lodge at our site.) The hope is that a reporter will come to our project site and maybe interview people and take pictures, then run a story about it. Heather, the media staff person, said that sometimes smaller newspapers without many reporters will just put our press release in the paper as a story. So that would be cool. Yearbook Reps have to submit a little description of our project and 1-3 pictures for every round of projects. Also, there are a few other things that need to be written which needed volunteers. One of those is that each unit gets a little introduction at the beginning of their sections, so I volunteered to write the intro for Sun Unit. I think this will be a fun job, because I like to write and I like to take pictures. Unfortunately, I might not have this job for every round. Christina said we could switch jobs around because some jobs have like 4 or 5 people interested in them, and Yearbook Rep is one of them.
Friday night, we had an event called World Cafe. There were three different stations with an activity and discussion questions that we went to that got us talking about world hunger. We read some personal stories of people struggling here in Denver, watched a slide show with some shocking statistics, and made a collage about how it makes us feel. It ended up being a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. Service learning is a big component of NCCC, so I think this was supposed to get us started learning.
Today, every team had some kind of team day. My team was going to go to Boulder and do something. I'll give you one guess. That's right, hiking! Yep, we sure do love to hike. We were going to go hiking, then go to the farmer's market which we've heard is really good, have lunch, write out a team charter (kind of an agreement on rules so we don't all drive each other crazy), and write out our spike prep packet. Well, it took about twice as long to get to Boulder as it should have, and the farmer's market was closing soon, so we did that first instead. When we were done there, it was lunch time. Christina took us out to lunch at a pretty good pizza place. (Some of you may be aware that I can't stand tomatoes, therefore don't like tomato sauce, therefore don't like pizza. This place had pizza with a tomato-less white sauce, which wasn't too bad.) We did our team charter there, then went to a park to do the spike prep stuff. That packet consisted of stuff like a media plan, a Capping plan, a service learning plan, a PT (Physical Training) plan, an ISP (Independent Service Project) plan, etc.
I guess I could tell you who's on my team. I wish I had a group picture for you, but I'm sure that'll happen soon. I have Christina, my TL, from Indiana, Michala from New York, Tomm with two m's from Ohio, Lindsey from Washington state, Jessica from California, TK from South Carolina, Heather from Maine, Rob from Virginia, Becky from Pennsylvania, Marquis from California, and Jordan from Michigan. I think we'll all get along pretty well.
As I like to do, I'll end with the few pictures I took today.
There was a band at the farmer's market, which was actually pretty good.
Contortionist street performer guy on Pearl Street, who is from an island in the Caribbean and has an awesome accent.
On his way into the 20 x 20 inch box.
In the box!
And two little boys in the box.And now I'm off to downtown because it's the last weekend that we'll all be here before leaving for spikes. Good night!
Awesome, Courtney! I hope you get to do the Media thing!
ReplyDeleteLove the pics! So glad you love hiking so much!
Mom