the invasion

After a week of training and two weeks of preparation, we finally have students on our site! Sunday afternoon was the kickoff for our summer of mission trips in the Humboldt Park area with 50 students from all over. I cannot even begin to explain how exciting it is to have students and to be able to see the purpose of the past three weeks.

Yesterday, Monday, was the first full day of programming. I got wake up at 5:30 to make breakfast, and later got to lead a work crew to an organization called Casa Central. It was phenomenal! I spent the majority of the day playing bingo and dominos, dancing, making arts and crafts, and chatting in Spanish with senior citizens (all who are in this facility are Hispanic, the majority Puerto Rican). It's so good to be talking in Spanish again.

As a part of my position, I lead and organize all of the evening activities. So later that night I took a group of 50 students on the EL down to Millennium Park, and the amazing part is that it couldn’t have gone any better! Our system of getting students on the train and then walking to the park worked surprisingly well, and all of the students were all on time. We even got back to the site a half an hour early—it was truly incredible.

These first few days have been a bit hectic and rest is scarce, but we’re getting things figured out. Fortunately this is a small week of programming (only 50 people as opposed to the typical75), which has been a huge help. On top of that we have another YouthWorks team at our site to help kick off the first week before we both have to run our own independent sites. What makes it even better is that one of the staff members on the other site is a Taylor person; it has been good to have someone around who I am used to seeing outside of YouthWorks.

Week 1: two days down, three to go.