Hello from Akron Pennsylvania!
I am here for one week with 50 SALTers for orientation, and we are joined by almost 30 students in the IVEP program who are coming from around the world to spend a year in Canada or the US. The buildings are lovely, and all of the students are grouped into houses with other people coming from/going to the same part of the world. My only complaint is the heat and humidity- but I guess I might as well get used to it! It has been a great time of learning, preparing for our placements here and overseas, and getting to know one another. My roommate is Cambodian; it has been great to have a chance to ask her about her country. It was an unexpected surprise for which I am very thankful! She is also an excellent and patient teacher- I can now greet people, say "I want to go to the market," and count to 10 in Khmer!
We have learned many things this week as part of our orientation. Practical things such as the program objectives, challenges associated with living with host families, and what to do if you break a tooth overseas. We have also had more interesting conversations, such as why the MCC main office and meeting place is in Akron PA of all the places on earth (who knew it was a story of death, romance, faith, and hope?).
We also had a chance to visit the MCC materials resource centre. It is a large warehouse where they do everything from school kits, to meat canning, quilting, to recycling. We all split up to help with some of these projects one evening. I decided to do the environmental thing and recycle. It turns out this involves cutting the bindings off of old textbooks and paperbacks, ripping the covers off, and collecting the paper to be sold for recycling. It was painful, even heartwrenching at times to chop up biology textbooks and old unloved novels- I wanted to give them all a new home. But then came the algebra and government policy textbooks and suddenly I didn't feel quite so bad.
More to come later (including pictures) of my orientation week in Akron. Until then!
Rebecca
Don't knock math - its worth crying over too. Your Opa has a real cool book - a sort of biographical history of key people in the history of math.
ReplyDeleteOK, for the benifit of those who don't know, I actually do like math. So much so that I took extracurricular math tests in high school, intensive calculus in first year uni, and a biology stats course was one of my favourite classes last term. I just don't like it quite as much as biology :P It was sad to think of all of the people in the world that could use those old textbooks, but the money raised from recycling was also going to help people in other ways... before you can use textbooks, you need to have a school, money to get there, and enough clean food and water so that you can be healthy and engaged.
DeleteHeat and humidity? I feel for you. Too bad about the books, but at least they are of some use. I hope you learn a lot over the next couple of days. I can't wait to hear all about it!
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