Service Learning Day 1

I met with Clemencia for the first time this week. We met in the library and sat and chatted, learning more about each other. I told her about my hometown, family, major, activities, and so on. She told me that she was married and 8 months pregnant, but had not yet picked out a name for her son. She's lived here 9 years, living in Mexico beforehand. We talked about travel and the places we had gone in the U.S. She has been to California and Arkansas to see family and I touched on a few vacations and road trips with my family growing up. I was nervous because I didn't know what to ask; I felt like I was playing speed-get-to-know-you, thinking of topics and questions in a hurry. She asked a few questions about me, mostly when I simply talked and left out pieces. I wish she would have spoken more because I was at a loss for conversation starters and felt awkward. However, once we started talking, it went more smoothly. I asked what she wanted to work on in our sessions, explaining the service learning concept that we will learn from each other when she asked what I'd get out of this, and she said she wanted to learn more English words, suggesting I bring a book next week. OK. We exchanged pleasantries again, and parted, ending 15 minutes early. I felt overwhelmed as I walked back to my dorm, having this assignment seem to hang over me like a dark cloud. Where do I go from here? I thought. I'd told Clemencia I'd taken 3 years of Spanish in high school, but now was taking college level French, so most of the Spanish was gone. So now I have to teach her English words when my once-poor Spanish accent is  nowhere in my brain storage, having been thrown out last fall to be replaced with French 101. Basically, I felt unprepared and had little hope for the weeks to come. I thought about walking around campus and saying the names of things, but my ideas stopped there. Other than having her read a book out loud to me and help her with pronunciation in the following weeks, which seemed like it would get boring for her and me, I didn't really know how to plan for next week. I still am at a loss for creative ideas on my "lesson plans," but I know I'll figure something out. Anyway, it was a good initial meeting. Clemencia is nice and appears very eager to learn. I think we'll work great together, teaching each other along the way.

The Street I Grew Up On

So you turn right, heading straight. You pass a childcare place on the left, where I used to rollerblade on Saturdays and after school because they had a smooth concrete parking lot with slanted driveways. After you pass the second street on the right, continuing straight, mine is the third house on the right. It's one story, red-pinkish brick, with a medium-sized pear tree on the right side which bore little edible fruit, opposite the driveway and garage, which was always messy and a weekend "project," but never got completely cleaned out. The houses around are equally quaint and cheerful, with flowerbeds and small trees and bushes lining the fronts. The street continues and curves to the right, circling with a choice of two streets to turn down, and then you can head out back onto the simple main street from which you turned. Nothing of too great importance, but this is the street I grew up on, knowing the handful of kids that lived on my street and the two surrounding it. The man across the street has too many weenie dogs to count, as he loves them so, and the neighbors next to us have younger children that are too polite for their age. I used to ride my bike around this small, barely-able-to-call-it-a-neighborhood place and it would take minutes. It was a small and quiet street, with the small friendships of a small, but growing town, that will last until we all hit middle school age, and our families start to grow and move, and we lose contact, but remembering the street that we somehow grew up on along the way.