Tuesday, October 23, 2007 Nuestra Casa and Up ‘Till Dawn

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 Nuestra Casa and Up ‘Till Dawn

I woke up around 10:30, went for a nice run, showered, and then got back to work on my presentation. I needed to get it done at least by 3, so I was working as fast as I could. I had lunch with Olga around noon and around 2 Miguel and Evan came by. I felt bad but I couldn’t really hang out since I needed to finish and at 3:30 I decided it was good enough. I said goodbye to the family and walked to Nuestra Casa.

Another volunteer Tamara (who grow up in the States because her parents were socialists and escaped after the coup d'eta by Pinochet) helped me edit it and make it simpler. She said it was really interesting and even she learned a lot! Since the workshop wasn’t supposed to be until 5:30 I had an hour or so to hang out with everyone. But 5:30 came and went and Patricio, the employee in charge of the house, kept telling we would start soon. By 6:30 we both agreed that no one seemed too excited to do the workshop today since they were working on their leather workshop. So after all that work we didn’t do it, but I was actually kind of relieved. I realized that in theory it’s great to do a Health Workshop for homeless people but they really don’t have much desire to learn it. They would rather make the leather money holders, purses etc. that they can sell to make money. Patricio said he would talk to them later about whether or not they want to do the workshop and we would see. I ended up spending most of the time talking to one woman Maria about her life on the street and the homeless culture in general. She was really open and didn’t mind answering all my questions. She told me that health is obviously an important topic but to them the most important thing would be first aid. She said they would all love having a First Aid kit as well.

After volunteering I walked home, ate dinner with Olga, then set to work on the essay I needed to write for my Education class tomorrow. We’d known about the essay for a while but the professor didn’t give us the prompt until yesterday. And instead of it being an easy review of a couple readings like I’d thought, it was an intense “no more than 10 pages” essay. Apparently no one else in the class started till late Tuesday either because I talk with 3 other classmates (2 gringos, one Chilean) about what exactly the professor wanted. To make a long story short, I ended up staying up till 4:30 in the morning working. I was thinking about just turning it in late and taking the grade cute, but I decided to skip my Doctrina Social class and finish it in the morning.