wednesday

Weekly I now go to another part of town, and I'm chilling out with a cool community who is all about going in and living alongside people to see what they need, not just dumping a bunch of programming on their heads. And they're hard-core, this isn't a three years term, this is as permanent as this life gets (the people I've spent the most time with are 6 and 8 year residents respectively.)

I start my day at a toy library. That's right, me and many small children (and their mothers, thank goodness!) This is particularly ironic as some of you may know that one of the last straws in my decision to not go to St. Louis is that they were threatening to have me work with children. Strangely, now that I'm doing it, I'm finding it an exciting challenge and I even kind of enjoy it.

After that my day is pretty fluid. So far I mainly just meet people who have been there longer and hear about what they're doing. But today I also got to sit in on a language class for the second most common language of that borough (after English). If my job flows in that direction, I may start learning it for real. Which would be another unexpected challenge. I love life's surprising twists.

In regards to flying out Monday, I'm having trouble sleeping and my heart rate is up. So even though I'm not incessantly conciously anxious, my body knows something's up. Pretty dang exciting.