July 10

July 10, 2009

Days Events: Supervisor Meeting, Proposal date pushed up, beers, dinner, bed early

I woke up around 9 and did yoga for an hour before getting to work. While writing my thoughts from the post few days, Dr. Bagenda called and informed us that he had gotten us an appointment for Tuesday for us to have our proposal heard. Granted it is only ten days earlier than we had planned, but that gives us ten more days to get things done. This also greatly increased the amount of work to be done this weekend. As I sit her writing I am still inclined to procrastinate until the last minute as usual. We still have two meetings tonight and are hosting a dinner on Sunday night.
We left the house in time to walk to the foundation. We have very little means of working out and clearing our heads so our walks to work fill this niche. It takes us about an hour and twenty minutes to make it to the foundation. We got there before everyone else as usual. Everyone but on of the mentors was there on time and the meeting was actually very productive. Rev. Obed is starting to pick up on our recommendations through the questions we ask. This has led him to even change the style of his meetings to get more substantial information out of the supervisors. He started this meeting claiming that he wasn’t going to talk much which in comparison to other meetings he didn’t. Instead he prompted for feedback from all of us as topics for discussion for the group. This was also one of the few times that we was responsive and contemplated suggestions rather than being argumentative as usual. All in all the meeting was productive in that he got an understanding of the lack of involvement and enthusiasm by male students of every age group, the inherent gender bias in the curriculum implementation in classes, and the lack of group dynamics that needs to be established for this program to run successfully. As the major recommendations that we have so far pertain to the curriculum proper and implementation, the recommendations we gave today were just small things. This seems to appease him though and we have a meeting with him on Monday to go over things further. Rev. has also begun to see a lot of the problems in the program now that he has taken to actually reading the mentor reports and visiting schools. While he didn’t see this as a necessity before I am not sure but it is drastically helping them already. This is leading us to have special meetings with the staff and mentors (under Rev’s direction) multiple times next week. We have moved from one meeting a week to three with just members of the foundation.
After the meeting we went to the bar closest to the foundation and grabbed a couple beers to discuss the meeting and plan out the next weeks events. Our schedule looks like this: 2 meetings Saturday, a dinner Sunday, 2 meetings on Monday, presentation and school observation Tuesday, meeting Wednesday, school follow Thursday, meeting Friday, work/catch-up day Saturday, trip to neighboring town for interviewing Sunday and an interview on Monday. This might actually ware me completely out. After our reflections and schedule planning we grabbed a bota to the grocery store. We had a few things to grab and needed to invite Willie to dinner on Sunday. We then walked home to have dinner waiting on us. Luckily Grace made food that I liked this time around so I was excited. After dinner I enjoyed another beer and headed to my room. I needed some alone time and spent the next four hours writing while watching movies/TV on my I-pod. It was enjoyable and much needed.