I'll show you improvement

Most universities have fall break days. You know the type. A day or two off the beginning or end of a week to prolong a weekend and give students a chance to go home or just enjoy fall in general. Not ours. No, folks, we have a mysterious "University Improvement Day" on a Tuesday. Why a Tuesday, you ask? No one knows. Students don't know, Professors don't know, other faculty have no answers. We have no idea why it's a Tuesday, but you won't find me complaining. Tuesdays are my "long days" each week - three whole classes in one day.

I didn't have plans for this glorious day of freedom until I was heading home from work at 9am this morning. Pajamas, movies, and baking. All day.

Here's what's on the menu:
Whole wheat banana bread
Apple cranberry muffins, possibly coffee cake
Little Miss Sunshine
Patch Adams
The Breakup
Maybe a batch or two of chocolate chip cookies.

Thankyou, University, for improving my day.

Driving Music

Once upon a time it was my plan to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company. I may not have known the first thing about being a CEO or what a Fortune 500 Company actually was, but that was my goal. It may or may not have had anything to do with stilletos and cute business suits. Regardless, I went off to my first year of school as a business major and signed up for accounting and marketing in my first semester. Reality hit me somewhere between the long columns of accounts receivable and payable after hours of staring at meaningless numbers, erased multiple times to be shuffled to yet another column that made even less sense to my tired brain. I wasn't cut out for this.

I was currently a double major, and my other field of interest was psychology. I knew I wouldn't make it through 8 more years of school to be able to actually use psychology, so I was at a bit of a loss. Then my Grandma came to visit me in Iowa. My grandma is a social worker at Maryville Academy near Chicago. My Grandma and I are a lot alike, and she gets me. We had a couple talks over tiramisu that weekend and I decided social work sounded more like me. I took a bunch of gen eds (that didn't transfer) to finish out the year and then wound up in Winona as a social work major with fuzzy ideas about what social workers actually did.

Turns out we do some of everything, at half the cost.

And we're very liberal.

This all brings us up to Fall 2009, where I'm seven months away from holding a diploma and joining the real world. You may remember my quarter-life crisis a few weeks ago when I had no idea what next semester held. I knew I needed an (almost) fulltime practicum and it needed to off this list of a hundred approved agencies in a 150 mile radius of Winona. You may also remember I had "no clue" what I wanted to do. I'm interested in mental health, and homeless people. I'm also interested in nutrition, counseling, immigration, and human trafficking. And I feel strongly about women's issues. You pick one.

So I visited half a dozen agencies off the list. And I really really liked one. Two, actually. But one was working with immigrants and refugees in Rochester. The Intercultural Mutual Assistance Association builds bridges between cultures and provides services and resources to immigrants in the community. They connect people with translators and offer job training and life skill classes, and they connect people in the community to other services they need.

Last week I went to interview. I was told there was competition, but I had the placement as soon as I walked in. I'm going to be a minority there, which I think is sweet because I love learning about other cultures. I'm told the staff likes to cook together over lunch break and I'm pretty excited. I will be working with the program manager, learning how to work in a cultural social agency at the macro level. I'll be teaching job training classes, going to international fairs and workshops, representing IMAA in the community, and planning fundraisers and events. I won't have my own caseload since I don't speak another language, but will instead be learning how to manage all the programs. Which kind of sounds like exactly what I wanted to do before I could put it into words.
Did I mention it's in a business office, so stilletos are still applicable?

I'll be driving 110 miles to Rochester and back four days a week, so I'm on the hunt for good driving music. But I'm suddenly really looking forward to the rest of this year.

The Global Forum

A month or two ago my friend Nikki suggested we go to the Global Forum to end Human Trafficking in October. It sounded great and it's something we're both passionate about, but it was in San Diego, and we're in Winona. And we had school. And hotel and airfare would be expensive. And it would be mostly proffesionals/abolitionists.

Needless to say we decided to go.

It wasn't hard to convince my roommate Helen she also wanted to go, and then the school gave us $300 from some diversity fund we didn't know existed to help cover costs. The way our fantastic seniorslidesemester schedule worked out, I only missed one day of class. I happened to have an important presentation scheduled that day, but something about my sweet talking skills or the fact that I control my proffessors caffiene addiction paid off. (Oh the joys of working at a coffee shop in college!)

The conference was October 8-9, so we packed up the car and headed to the cities to stay with my parents Tuesday night. My mom's a great sport and brought us to the airport early Wednesday morning. Our flight got in early enough that we had almost a full day in San Diego. Being college students, we took about 3 modes of public transit to get to our hotel and that ate up most of the afternoon. But it was warm. It was sunny. It was fantastic. I texted my mom Thursday morning to tell her I swam laps outside in the warm sunshine. She texted me two days later saying it was snowing.

The conference was fantastic. There were about 700 professionals, volunteers, law enforcement officers, social workers, researchers, politicians, musicians, business owners, ambassadors, and lots more. I learned so much from everyone I talked to. It wasn't a conference to tell us statistics or what Human Trafficking is - these were all people who knew the facts and were actively doing something about it.

Thursday night we had a concert, too. Brant Christopher, the lead singer from Dispatch, Jon Foreman of Switchfoot, and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club came and played a sweet acoustic set for us. They also showed some fantastic photographs that broke my heart.

I became really interested in supply chains. The fact that so much of what we buy has been touched by a slave at some point along the line is sobering. We've all seen fair trade coffee and chocolate and that's fantastic, but what about cotton? What about pieces of our cell phones? What about the clothes I'm wearing right now? (http://www.stopuzbekchildlabor.org/)

It was encouraging to be around so many people with the same passions who could point us in the right direction. I have a stack of business cards and phone numbers of people all over North America (and the globe, actually) I'm saving for next year when I'm looking for a job. I have internship possibilities running around in my brain. I know that people are actively doing something to stop slavery. I am so inspired by the people we met and talked to. We brought back some new ideas for raising awareness, money, and new leaders in Winona. I got to hear messages from people like Francis Chan and David Arkless telling me "Don't let people calm you down!" and "We have to be on the absolute edge of our comfort zones." I don't think it's too niiave to say we can make a difference, and the movement has already started.

"Just because it's not my family doesn't mean that what's going on isn't an emergency." - Francis Chan

San Diego for awhile longer

Last week when I joked about being stranded in San Diego, I meant the actual city, outside in the sunshine, not the stuffy, air-conditioned airport. Just thought I should clarify that, since, you know, this is where I've been sitting for the last 2+ hours. The flight to Denver is delayed because of ice (what?) and thus the connecting flight to Minneapolis is delayed about twenty minutes so hopefully we'll make it to our flight in that twenty minute window.

Our trip was fantastic. We met lots of sweet abolitionists, researchers, ambassadors, volunteers, students, rockstars, roadies, speakers and activists from around the world. We talked about legislation, supply chains, slavery, trafficking, and new ideas. We're leaving with new friends, information, and inspiration. More on that later - we're off to grab some starbucks and probably play another 7 games of banana grams.