Shoulders & Arms

Hello.

So I've been working at AIY for a little over a week and a half now. My first day I found out that I actually couldn't work because I needed to wait until my TBD shots cleared. I actually just got a second round of them checked this morning.

The office is cool. There are about 8-9 of us, so it's pretty personable. I get to keep my bike in the office too which is nice. I've mostly been doing a lot of "intern'ish" work. Data entry on youths brought in past curfew, etc. Yesterday I had to put together a binder of youths brought in for curfew over a certain time period. At first I kinda frowned upon doing this since I wanted to jump right in on being on-call so I could develop a client base and start managing cases. But there's a lot of paperwork involved in that and I'm learning it by doing all this other stuff first.

Before I had decided upon a site, I had interviewed here twice. I had met with the director of the program and he was definitely an awesome guy. Now I would be reporting to him directly but he is out on an extended sick leave. So the assistant-supervisor is who I'm currently reporting to. The dude is definitely doing the work of two people and having a new AmeriCorps member to coddle is just filling up this guy's schedule. So I sort of feel that is why he's having me do simple intern work and also because it's just good to do to see if I'm going to stick around. The "wax-on, wax-off" philosophy.

There have been two recent and personable murders in the city. One was a mother who was simply protecting her daughter in a non-violent way. The other was a member of the community who was actually working to fix it. People have kind of gone nuts over these murders which is completely understandable. Then they start pointing fingers. The police aren't doing their job, the mayor needs to keep his word, we need to fix poverty before we arrest people, etc etc. One finger gets pointed at where I work. When the police find a child who is breaking curfew, they bring them to us. This is usually between 11pm - 6am. We get their information and offer them our services. Our services are mostly directed at the child but I'm pretty sure we can direct the adults to any help that they need. Then we call the parents to pick up the child or drop them off ourself. Reading "The City" yesterday, it was mentioned that it seems our program is off to a slow start. I suppose it can be looked at it that way but it's also something that will take time. Granted I've only been working there a bit over a week and I'm sure there is a lot more to it.

In more awesome news, on my daily commute to work yesterday, I ran into Jason Crane of rocbike!. I had just turned on Dartmouth off of Monroe when I heard a slight rubbing. So I pulled over and checked my front brakes. They had slipped a bit because I hadn't turned the lock all the way on. So I'm standing there making sure everything is cop-acetic when someone pulls up next to me on a long bike and says, "Everything all right here?" I look up and go "umm....HEY! You're Jason Crane!" So I met him and his son Bernie, who was riding on the back of his Xtracycle (which I'm insanely jealous of). It's pretty awesome that that is how he gets to work and takes his son to school. So we were talking and it turns out his wife did AmeriCorps as well!

I also got to see A Wonderful and Peter & The Wolf last night at the bug jar. I met some new faces and saw two of my boys play in their other band which is always interesting.

I'm definitely busy! I've been hanging out with AmeriCorps friends a lot and getting to know them all better. A few of them actually came to my show last week which is really nice. I'm also in the process of moving into a house with 3 other people. I will have a decent-sized room and the house itself is pretty big. Plus rent is only $225.

I'll be updating again soon.
Take care!