NM- Still in New York, New York

What a twist in your plans Robert! It sounds like you are taking great advantage of it, which is wonderful! Marianne, you are having a lot of hard work and fun in the city! That sounds exciting too! I am sure your IP is great!

I am in New York and I wish I was in Portugal or even Andorra spending time at home, relaxing, with friends and family. I really miss them all and I miss home, even the washing machine and the rope in the garden to hang the clothes on it! That sounds crazy I know! We still have to wait till the two last weeks of August to make that true.

In Summer A I took Intro to Painting at TC which was fun and more interesting than I have ever thought! It really pushed me to look at things in a different way and to express myself in another way that is not through writing papers and journals... I am eager to have time to keep painting.

Summer B is here, and I am taking a course in Conflict Resolution in the Classroom. It is very well organized, fun and so, so, so relevant! For my personal and professional life! It is so interesting to learn and to be aware of the strategies that exist to solve conflicts in a healthy and constructive way. The classes are intense, from 9am to 5pm! but it is just 5 days and the readings and the instructors are great. I have met wonderful people in both courses.

In the meanwhile I keep trying to finish my dissertation for a Master degree that I begun in Portugal two years ago. I keep procrastinating, which is awful but I am sure I will finish it soon (before vacations hopefully) and survive. My advisor from Portugal takes his time to answer my emails (approximately one month for each little email) so that makes it more difficult. It is hard to remain motivated. :) I am always thinking that I'd rather be doing something else: reading, painting, making my puzzles or even attending more classes at TC... So, I am having a hard time with myself and that dissertation...

I also have been participating in Sojourners. To make it short, generally on Saturdays mornings I go visit detainees at Elizabeth Detention Center. One person that I had been visiting for more than one month now has just been freed, which was an awesome new! I am so happy for him! For those who may be interested in knowing more about Sojourners and getting involved as a visitor there is an informative session this Thursday. Contact me (or Marianne, she was the one who convince me to become involved and I am very grateful to her :) ) if you need more details about it!

Daniel, my husband, is having lots of fun as a soccer coach for kids. He is also exhausted, so he is dreaming on our next vacations to Portugal.

We spent a wonderful weekend in Washington DC on 3th, 4th and 5th July. We had a wonderful time together discovering the city, its museums, hanging around in the mall and participating in the folklore festival that was taking place there. That was so refreshing!

We also have been receiving friends from Andorra and Portugal that come to visit us and explore NYC. That have been fun to have them at home and spend time with them. Daniel's cousin and her husband are the next people coming. They arrive this weekend and they will stay for two weeks. :) So, we are getting prepared to welcome them!

And roughly that is it!

I would love to read more news from you all! So keep posting news!

Lots of hugs for you all,

Natali

RS-Say What?!

Thanks Marianne for that wonderful post. It was much enjoyed and appreciated!

I am currently eating breakfast at the Salt Lake City airport.

If you were paying attention at the beginning of summer, you might be wondering why I am not in Cambodia. To give myself a break from my often long-winded, meticulously-detailed and often mundane summaries, I'll keep it short and simple: the NGO's budget dried up faster than a sponge in the Atacama desert. Furthermore, as an education team, we had exhausted our on-site work. We were great-well prepared, organized, all of our ducks are certainly in a row. We were ready to start something up, but unfortunately, the Cambodia Project is not at the stage where it can become a reality. I had the option to stay in Southeast Asia and use my time to my advantage by seeking work at another NGO, or I could have hopped on a plane back to North America to attend my sister's wedding in Maui. I decided to do the latter.

The wedding was beautiful, simple, and awesomely backlit by Maui's famous beaches. The rest of my summer will be spent dividing my time between Texas, California, and New York. While my time in Cambodia is done, my work with Cambodia is not. I still have work to do during the summer. I will be finishing up the work that I started abroad stateside. But, for the most part, I see this as an unexpected opportunity to spend time with friends and family. And I intend to live it up.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or remarks, you know where to reach me.

Love,

-robert.

p.s. Keep those blog posts coming!

MK-Meanwhile, back in the city...

7.19.09

Dear friends,
I envy all of you in various glorious spots across the globe and appreciate the stories you’re sharing! (more, please)

I am doing my best to have a fairly glorious summer in the city while you are gone. Highlights:
* Lots of picnics in the park and as much free music in fun settings as I can manage.
* A fairly steady succession of send-off celebrations for each of you.
* A visit to my sister and brother-in-law who just moved to Princeton!
* Mostly hanging out with my I House crew, where I will still be living next year!
* During Summer A, took Immigration and Curriculum with Lesko in C&T and Qualitative Research Technology with Reza, both of which helped me get organized for my IP on cultural expression and friendship formation of West African immigrant children in a multicultural classroom in central Harlem.
* Bond is now in possession of the IP, which isn’t a masterpiece, but I was invested in writing it, it addresses a gap in the literature and is a culmination of many of the components I’ve been focusing on while at TC. Also, Bond is in the process of getting funding for a big research project on African immigrants in the city, so I’ve become an unofficial member of a research team. Hopefully I will get it back soon and wrap everything up by early August at the latest, but still be in touch with the research at TC.
* From June 29-Aug. 7 I am teaching 6th grade ELA class in the mornings M-Th at HEAF, Harlem Education Activities Fund, an after-school program whose slogan is, “Come to HEAF, go to college.” The building is at 125th and Adam Clayton Powell, on the 10th floor, and from my classroom I could see Harlem mourn Michael Jackson in the plaza, and line up by the hundreds to pay tribute at the Apollo. I’m impressed with the program…all of the teaching assistants are HEAF students who are currently in college. It’s a successful, community-based model, and I’ve enjoyed working with students again.
* This summer I’m also getting paid to design 5th grade curriculum for my teaching job next year at Harlem Link Charter School, which will be at 112 and Lenox. I’m just getting started with that and the proposed structure is to combine Social Studies and ELA lessons around big units on Geography, Comparative Governments, Immigration, and Expansion. After 5 years of teaching to content-based tests, this is challenging and exciting for me. Daily work starts Aug. 19.

I am looking forward to a steady succession of welcome-back celebrations! I miss each of you and am grateful for you and what you are doing.

-Marianne

P.S. Mary Mendenhall will be back next semester, teaching a revised Ed in Emergencies course and one more course on strategic planning. She also needs an intern at IRC to help her design an Ed in Emergencies program at University of Nairobi. Arjmand will also be back in the fall. The new Annie (Sarah) is very nice and cool, but I'm still working through Annie not being in the office.
*If anyone wants to send a cool postcard I can share with my students, mail to: Marianne Kinney, 500 Riverside Dr. #408, NY, NY 10027

RS-Cambodia and Thailand with Jacob and Robert

Hello IED crew and awesome non-IED-ers!

It is so good to know that everybody has been so busy this summer that they haven't had time to update on the blog yet!

Despite the sarcasm in that statement, I certainly have to admit that it holds true to me. I got on the blog website, and it is as easy to post as writing an e-mail. I look forward to writing in here more often, with the support of everybody else's blog entries as well.

This past friday I just finished spending my first month with my boyfriend Jacob. We flew in together four weeks ago and our plan was to work for two weeks and to travel for two week. While I have gotten and of course will continue to focus on work for the rest of the summer, this post constitutes a brief summary of all of the fun things we did during our time together in Southeast Asia. A visual description can be viewed here.

We took a boat at Siem Reap and visited the floating villages of Tonle Sap Lake, saw fish and alligator farms, explored Ankor Wat and all of the surrounding Ruins with wonder and amazement for a day. Jake and I stayed at an amazing resort in Kep, one of the nicest places I have stayed in in all of my life, for 35 dollars a night. We explored lime stone caves, saw how pepper and salt is made, visited Royal Palaces in Cambodia and Thailand, saw a fireworks show for the queen's birthday and saw hundreds of people dancing at night to music in the public square, a very interesting cultural sight to behold. We ate and shopped at local markets, ate stinky fruit, learned how to bargain more effectively, started our Christmas shopping, rode through the mountains in the North of Thailand, visited ancient Wats on mountain tops. Took an elepant trek through the jungle, rode on a bamboo raft, fed hundreds of fishes in the river and in caves (where there was some amazing huge blue fishes), Had a cup of great coffee in some european styled coffee shop/house overlooking a valley (feeling as though I was in france). We visited hill tribes, got countless massages, explored the beaches of Phuket and surrounding islands in south Thailand, went snorkeling for the first time in my life, heard colorful, tropical fish feeding off of rocks, made some friends from South Africa who gave us personal tours of the island, including a private beach and an enormous marble plated Buddha on top of a hill. We saw amazing highly detailed temples and buildings in Bangkok, ate street food galore, saw a jade buddha, an enormous reclining budda, took river taxis up and down the main river of Bangkok and the surrounding canals, paddled a boat in a beautiful park overlooking some of the vast skyline, had drinks and appetizers on an open air terrace way up high in a beautiful, skinny skyscraper, visited this really fun, interactive museum of Thai culture and history, and shopped for clothes at enormous malls with sales up to 70% off retail price. Our last night together we witnessed a lighting show in all of its glory.

Jake left this past Friday morning. Since then, I have been trying not to be too sad, (even though I am pretty sad), and have been tending to my e-mails, reflecting on what I just lived though, and of the work ahead of me. It is daunting because much of what we are going to do has yet to come, hasn't been fulling realized yet so I don't fully know what to expect. Also, I am afraid to take the leap and to actually start doing some "development" work in a professional context. My entire work produced at this internship has been on an administrative/organizing scale so far, and I have yet to get my hands dirty by researching things, writing proposals, plans, outlines, creating things from scratch using my brains, wits, and "skills" etc. Everyone else has been doing this for quite some time this summer and throughout the year, and I know I can do it too, but I hesitate and worry that it will take me longer since I am brand new to it compared to everyone else. We shall see how the next two months fare, and right know I feel that I want them to go by very quickly because I want to be with Jake again, but logically, I know that this will be a great experience, I am happy to begin working on a much larger and more involved scale, and am glad to be away from the toils and taxes of academic life for two more months.

Looking forward to hearing about your travels, adventures, and experiences.

Warmly,
-robert.

P.S. I have decided to begin this and future subject titles with my initials for easy referencing.