Anyways, a couple weeks ago we talked about service and what that word means to us. One of the definitions that we came up with I thought was pretty good, where we defined service as "your ability to distribute your resources and sacrifice for the benefit of others. There are many ways to service other people," and it was great to have that discussion since we are going on a service learning trip abroad. I realized that it is better to serve people, that means give them a hand up rather than a hand out, and to make sure that your service to others is meaningful and useful. Through this whole process we have been warned that Kenyans have no qualms about asking for money right out and that we have to be wary of that, but Brett explained to us that sometimes there isn't a whole lot that you can do besides give them that money as long as you are sure that it will be going to the right place (i.e. giving a mother $150 to put her kid through primary school).
My life has been really crazy, so I haven't had a lot of time to process the fact that I will be leaving for Kenya in 13 days (whoa!). Last week was finals week and we had a final group meeting/dinner at Brett's house. We talked about this test that we took two weeks ago (I forget the name of it because I forgot to bring my notes with me). Anyways, we took this test to help us to figure out how comfortable we are with experiencing and interacting with different cultures. I'll have to explain this better later when I have my notes with me, but the gist of it is that our whole group is on the middle of a continuum between ethnocentrism (on the far negative end) and being acceptable/wordly (on the far right positive end). I don't think I am explaining this well, so I am going to save a deeper explanation of this for later.
And...here are some more photos from my life :)
The goofy holiday staff photo at my internship
Me and Sarah at Copper
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