week 4

This week has been so exhausting, mentally, physically and emotionally. I’m tempted to say that I adjusted to the move/new job/community etc. very well for the first few weeks (while some of my roommates found it to be a more challenging change of pace), but now all of the changes are catching up with me at once. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it. But in the event that I’m wrong, I did decide to take advantage of one of GSS’s  benefits, which allows me to see a counselor for free.
That being said, I had a fantastic time exploring different parts of the city over the last two weekends. I went to Alphabet City, the Meatpacking District, High Line Park, Chelsea Market, Central Park, a festival in Little Italy, and Atlantic Antic in BK. We also hosted a September birthday party for all the GSV’s here in Astoria. It was a theme party (the theme being “S”).

Also, my boyfriend and an old roommate came to visit! =]

All of this exploring allowed me to feel the first pangs of simplicity. As I venture out and see new things I’m tempted to taste and experience all of the wonderful things around me, but alas, I make $200 a month. Le sigh. I will say though that I am able to pick up a coffee or some street food now and then, and that the things I can’t purchase are things I don’t need anyway. I have yet to go without anything I need, and I think that if I continue to budget well, I’ll never have to (knock on wood).

week 3

This week I have been focusing all of my mental energy on my placement at Marian Hall. A few of the girls had trying weeks, mostly due to parents who don’t understand and/or respect healthy boundaries with their children. There is also a growing problem on the floor with substance abuse. Two girls are in rehab, and a few more perhaps should be.
On Thursday I took one girl to BARC, an animal shelter where volunteers can play with cats or walk dogs. That was fun, except that we were trapped outside in Brooklyn in the peak of the freak storm. We got pelted with 1″ hail balls and ran for cover. Friday was the first day of my cooking program, where I hope to cook or bake one item with whatever girls are not able to go on weekend home visits each Friday.  I’m hoping that this will help me to continue engaging with the girls while addressing two of their favorite complaints: boredom and bad food from the kitchen. We made chocolate chip cookies yesterday and it went very well. Only two girls participated, but they worked together really well, and even shared the cookies and dishes. I was really happy with myself for having the idea and proud of the girls for doing such a good job.

I haven’t had a problem with simplicity yet, and I’ve even been buying myself some nice groceries and gotten a few coffees. Not going out for drinks is helpful, and so is being used to living on a poor college-student budget. I actually made it through this pay period with an extra $32!
Spirituality has fallen out of focus for me since orientation, but we are still doing our weekly spirituality nights and sharing different experiences together. This week we went to a meditation introduction lecture at a church. Community continues to be a learning experience for some of us as our personality differences become more apparent after having lived together for about a month now.
Ta-ta for now!

lessons in community

This week there has been a focus on community here in Astoria. We began to see the beginnings of our first conflict as each of us began to realize what living in intentional community means in practice. We’re striving for a balance between alone time and group time, NYC time and home time, and present time and other friends/boyfriend times. We’re not perfect at it yet, but I’m happy to report that thanks to open communication from each of us we’re moving towards a common understanding of how this community will function.We also had a lot of fun together Friday night checking out some of Manhattan’s gay bars!
In a larger sense, we remembered September 11th with the larger NYC community at a multicultural/multi-religious ceremony on the Hudson last night. Prayers and music were offered in many different languages, and everyone was offered an opportunity to decorate paper lanterns that were placed on the Hudson River with the skyline of lower Manhattan in the background. The lights shining up where the towers stood served as a powerful presence of what was lost.

At the moment I’m a little sad that I can’t watch the MTV VMA’s. Coming from me this would normally be a ridiculous statement, but I know that the girls at Marian Hall have been looking forward to watching the ceremony for a while, and I wished I could have seen it to be able to participate in their conversations tomorrow. Alas, I’m sure they will be more than happy to watch it as a re-run for the next 3 months with me.

week two

Today is the first day of school! Most of my girls will be going to new high schools today, and I’m very excited for them. They have each been working with a staff member to pick the public school they’d most like to attend, and have been applying and interviewing over the past few weeks. Luckily, I think almost all of them got their first or second choice schools. They are allowed to go to public school (as compared to having a tutor come to the building, like the girls downstairs) because they have proven that they have a bit of stability. They need to go to new schools because we want to take the girls out of their old environments in hopes that they won’t return to old friends and bad habits as easily. I think a lot of the girls are nervous about today. It is a new school, most of them struggle academically, and they have experienced so much trauma already that go above and beyond the regular scope of normal high school problems. I’m excited to hear about how today went!
Aside from school, I am beginning to enjoy going to work. Some of the girls approach me to say hi now, and I’m beginning to be included more in information that circulates around the floor. I was able to read notes from a meeting about all of the girls, which helped me to learn more about each of their current situations. There is more going on than I thought, unfortunately. For one thing, it seems as though drug/substance abuse is growing amongst the girls. It will be interesting to see how all of the ongoing issues play out.
In other news, the other three tenants of GSV are going well too. This weekend I went to the Jersey Shore with my roommate Krystina, and it was everything I ever thought it would be. HA! We went to the boardwalk and saw the famous Jersey Shore house and spent the next morning at the beach. We also had dinner with the GSV girls from Wikatunk and played games, which was a lot of fun. We also played charades for community night last night and had a really good time. One issue in community that’s beginning to arise is that two of the seven girls have different work schedules than the rest of us, and they often feel lonely or left out. We talked about it yesterday at a community meeting, and are going to try to be more cognizant of the fact that they aren’t always in the same loop as the rest of us.

I’m doing better with simplicity that I thought I would, but I also gave myself a head start from the beginning. Our first paycheck was $127.38, and from that we needed to buy our metro cards and food for two weeks. I bought my metro card on my own credit card because the machine couldn’t accept the $20 bills I had, so I essentially started off with an extra $89. Aside from that, I have been logging all of my spending down to the penny, and have been conscious of not buying things I don’t need, for example coffee every day.
In addition to the tenets going well, I also LOVE living in NYC. It’s such an exciting place to live, and there’s always something to do. The weather finally cooled down a little so walking around this weekend was nice, and me and some of the girls were able to check out the Labor Day parade in Brooklyn. We had poor timing and missed most of the excitement, but we were also able to go to Greenwich Village and see an art exhibit afterwards. I finally saw Alice, my friend from home who also moved to NYC, and had a really fun time with her as well.

Fall is coming, I have a trip to Montreal planned in October, Dave and Kim are coming to visit soon… what more could I ask for?

first days of work

I have now completed five days of work, and I really don’t know what to think. The first two days were very slow, and I watched TV with the girls for most of the day. Up until yesterday I spent most of my time trying to be in the same rooms as the girls just to be a presence, and to talk to them as much as possible. The girls are mostly around 17-18 years old, so it will definitely take time  to gain their trust and to move toward more meaningful conversations. Yesterday the higher level girls (based on a point system which evaluates their behavior) went to an amusement park, leaving behind about half of the residents. I went with one of them to a photo class, which is based on but is not officially art therapy, and we walked around the neighborhood taking pictures and the teacher bought us ice cream. I supervised a few smoke breaks with some other girls on the roof, which is nice because its outside and one-on-one time.
By the end of the day there was a tension building on the floor because three of the residents are going to be checked into substance abuse rehab this week. Everything came to a head when they wanted to leave around 9:30, and house curfue is 10pm. In addition to it being near curfue, there was a fight going on between the residents on the floor right below us and we didn’t want our girls getting involved. When we told the girls they need to stay in, three of them tried to leave anyway. Two got out and one was stopped in the lobby. When she wasn’t able to leave she began trashing the lobby, screaming, and hitting the walls windows and doors. Extra staff were called down, and eventually the police were called as well. Several of her friends tried to come down to either help her calm down or add to the ruckus, and one of our staff took a full-force punch to her chest. The girl was taken to a psych ward after her behavior deescalated.
This was only one of the incidents that happened yesterday. There were several fights on the floors below me, and my roommate/fellow volunteer even had jello and a chair thrown at her. I don’t dread going into work like my roommates do because these situations are much less common on my floor, but I’m still not sure how I feel about my job. Lets hope today goes well!

GSV Beginnings

The first 8 days of GSV has been really overwhelming, in ways both good and less desirable.
Orientation was one looong week in rural Jersey (who knew?) where I met all the other volunteers. There are about 30 of us, mostly in NYC but some in Jersey and abroad. We spent most of the time going over the history of the organization and the four tenets of the program (simplicity, social justice, spirituality, and community, in no particular order). We had a lot of large and small group conversations about what those topics mean to GSV, to us, and to each other. It was very interesting to learn so much about the other volunteers, and to be able to speak about the concepts both theoretically and practically. I especially found the spirituality discussions to be interesting, since I had been so resistant to them in the beginning. At the end of the week that I had gained an appreciation and understanding of all of the different things spirituality can mean, and ways in which I’m interested in incorporating it into my life. It’s definitely going to be a long and slow road to get anywhere solid in that area, but I really enjoyed the initial conversations.
On Saturday we moved into our new place, which is top floor of a functional Catholic high school. The space is so large that my roommates and I ride scooters around the hallways! We found a few dead cockroaches (and then some alive ones today), and the space is very institutional looking and impersonal. With that being said we’re all really excited to make it as homey and our own as possible, and to make the most of the ridiculous amount of space we have. Oh, and did I mention the two porches and rooftop access with a view of the Manhattan skyline, or that I can see the Triborough (?) Bridge from my bedroom window?
Today was our first day of on-site orientation, and we were out from 8am-8pm. Long day. We were first briefed by Good Shepherd Services’ HR department, and given our first paychecks. If you calculate our earnings, we make $1.25/hour. Yikes! Talk about living simply. I won a game of Shepherdy and got a $5 Starbucks gift card, which was pretty cool. We filled out forms for health insurance and other boring things, and spoke to the Directors of one of the placements, a transitional housing organization for young-adult females who need life skills before leaving the foster care system for “the real world”. They were very informative and personable, and it sounds like a really great program. We left from there to my placement, Marian Hall, which is a very similar program and serves a younger population (12-19-ish). It is connected to a crisis center where the same girls can come to live if they can’t stay at home, and many girls travel from that program to mine. The staff at these programs were a little less personable and the space wasn’t big enough for a tour of our size, so I left there feeling disappointed and anxious.
We tour the other volunteer sites tomorrow and Wednesday, and our first day of work in Thursday. I’m anxious to see what I will be doing, and to have a conversation with my supervisor. My role is to be a good role model and support person for the girls, but I’m still foggy on specific duties. Tonight is our first spirituality night, and tomorrow will be our first community night. I’m really excited for this year, and for all of the opportunities and experiences I’ll be exposed to!
In other news, Dave is coming home tomorrow and I’m super excited, even though I won’t have much free time during the day =/.

grad school

I am a neurotic planner, so naturally I’ve been considering what grad school I should attend for several years now. I had finally decided I’d like to get my MSW (master of social work, with a focus on macro/public policy), but that I would like to study internationally, if possible. The problem now is that I’m not finding too many schools in Europe that offer an MSW in English. On the other hand, lots of them offer a masters of Public Policy in English. These programs, however, are two years long, while the MSW programs are only one year long (because I have  a BSW), thus saving me boatloads of money and work. What to do, what to do? Here is the list of possible schools I have compiled so far:
Columbia University, NYC: great program, $37,000 tuition (not including living expenses!)
Mcgill University, Montreal, CA: good program, great university, $16,000 tuition
Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, DU: MPP, program not exactly what I want but in Berlin, $31,612 tuition (total for two years)
University of Erfurt, Erfurt, DU: MPP, German lessons included, $7,587 tuition (total for two years)
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK: perfect program, one year, $18,379
Stockholm University, Stockholm, SW: website is hard to navigate
As you can see the schools abroad are significantly cheaper, and all of the schools are of a high caliber and are very competitive. I havn’t considered any back-up schools yet. Most application deadlines are in January, so I’d better get moving!