Service Sites, Classes, etc.

I just want to start by attempting to explain my service sites. I begin my days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday by walking over to Venice on Vine (about 2 blocks) to pick up a vehicle. I drive to the West End Emergency Center (which is primarily a food pantry, but also gives out clothes and other various items) to pick up Sharon, who works with AmeriCorps at the Emergency Center. Together we go to the Freestore Foodbank, the distributor of USDA and Ohio food products along with donations from other sources to local pantries, and pick up the daily limit of items. We go back to the Emergency Center to drop off the stuff. On Wednesdays starting tomorrow, I go back to Venice to drop off the vehicle and walk to Emanuel (which is at the other end of my block) where I will be doing primarily administrative work. Mondays and Fridays I can either stay with Sharon to help out around the food pantry or head back to Venice where Rina, the executive director of Power Inspires Progress, will assign me something to do. I've done some data entry for past employees and for donations. Venice on Vine is a restaurant run by Power Inspires Progress that offers paid job training and GED classes. Employees are limited to a year of work at Venice on Vine. Also run by Power Inspires Progress and closely associated with Venice on Vine is Venice Catering. Sometimes I will help doing stuff for them, including a day where I spent some time dicing tomatoes. That's a very brief overview of the work I do.

One thing I was excited about for this semester is the overlap between my classes. It seems that some overlap inevitably happens, or at least it did last year, but this year's courses are designed to be similar. We've come across many readings that say the same things in different classes. We've even had some articles that have contradicted each other. It's much more frustrating than I anticipated. With all of this, we're supposed to be connecting our readings and classes to each other and to our service sites. I was under the impression that was a large part of the Service Learning class, but it's not. We have a huge book of readings that our teacher put together, and so far we've hardly talked about them, let alone readings we've had to do for other classes. A little bit of that is what our journals are for, but that can't be the primary way to work through everything that's going on in our minds. I think discussion and different viewpoints are definitely helpful in working through putting together our new knowledge from different sources. So we're still working on that.

On a very exciting note, our Community Building and Urban Change class last night had a guest lecturer named John McKnight. He's from Northwestern, which is exciting since Rebecca goes there. But even more exciting is the story he told us about his first class of people that he and a friend trained through Northwestern to be community organizers. One of the members of the class was Barack Obama! The man who trained Barack Obama to be a community organizer (aka community empowerer) spoke to my class last night! He actually wrote the recommendation for Obama for Harvard Law. I thought that was pretty cool.

As to Cincinnati's experience with Hurricane Ike, it did hit pretty hard. Cincinnati is in a state of emergency. But we're safe. We never lost power or anything. Many people around the city did lose power, and some are still without power. (Aunt Cathy and Uncle Paul were without power for about a day.) Some of the water treatment plants also lost power and put the city in a water emergency. Basically, we're supposed to reduce our water usage and, if our water pressure is low, boil the water before use. There are many trees down. Washington Park, which is right across the street from our apartment, has many trees that had branches blown off. One church down the street from our apartment had a piece blown off the top. The local schools have been out for the past two days. Many service agencies (although not mine) were closed because they had no power. So, basically, it was a pretty bad storm here, but we're all doing just fine. I don't know how bad it was in Indianapolis, but I know parts of Indiana got hit pretty hard too. I can't imagine what it was like in Texas. So definitely consider sending money or water with aid agencies to those areas. Water, especially, is really important. Thanks.