Today marked the first day of winter break, at least as far as after-school programs are concerned. I can't help but feel a pang of guilt every time I rejoice at their absence: I mean, what about the kids, or even the volunteers?

Today in our Monday meeting our executive director came down from her office to listen to our words about expectations, realities, accomplishments and frustrations. I mentioned these programs as my greatest frustration as well as one of my greatest sources of pride. When I arrived at the school I didn't expect my role as director of the after-school programs would be so all-encompassing. I didn't expect the programs themselves to need so much supervision, and I generally underestimated the commitment. We have had our share of challenges, both from kids and volunteers. School staff has not always been supportive or understanding.

At the same time, I personally have led the way through a lot of meetings, emails, suspensions and solid progress. The big picture looks a lot better than it did a couple months ago, as does the scene when you walk into the classroom. I have been part of the team that decided to change the course of the program, even if it's just because I happened to be there.

So yes, the after-school programs have been a black hole for my time and a huge pain, among other things. They have also introduced me to a lot of awesome volunteers and kids, as well as given me a chance to be persistent, flexible and creative in my position. After-school programs are my primary opportunity to interact with the kids one on one, and I'll miss that next semester when I (hopefully) am not around as much.

All that said, shaking free of this burden (we'll call it what it is, even if I've gained a lot from it) will give me so much opportunity to do the work I've been placed here to do.

It really has been more than a month since I posted an update. I need to be better about that.

Even though I'm exhausted from my day at work and the annual meeting tonight, I'm going to take the time to sit down and summarize some of the things that have happened lately.

Coordinating Council meeting: success! I was pretty nervous about this one. Despite the fact that I have been told explicitly that I am not a Community School Director, I can't help but feel like the ultimate success for me would be to work at that level. I have probably mentioned before my tendency to set ridiculously high standards for myself. Not very helpful is that my first impression of my job was meeting the Community School Director at the Barclay School, and I didn't bother to distinguish between her job and that of the VISTA. Hmmm...so how are our jobs different? I still haven't answered that question, and maybe that is why I still feel like I can set a perfect stage for when my school does become a community school. My goal, in a way, is to show everyone that this is a job I can do, and even though we didn't get the community schools grant I can do all the work that staff paerson would have done had they been there. Pretty unrealistic, considering I spend much of my time bogged down with the after-school program.

Tangent. The Coordinating Council went well, or so I was told. I have trouble gaging the success of these things. It felt like I had never chaired a meeting before, even though it was just a more adult version of what I did for two years with the Venture Crew. We got through it, though, and will be meeting again in January. By then I will have done needs assessment surveys (kind of like climate surveys) and we will have lots to talk about. I'm excited to bring everyone back together. I really want to see more things moving forward.

Tonight we had our annual meeting, where everyone dresses up and attends a nice awards ceremony/banquet honoring those who have given a substantial amount of time and resources to our organization. There are a lot of amazing people connected to Greater Homewood, and seeing them collected in one place can be an inspiring and reaffirming experience.

Sometimes it can be easy to forget how I got here, what I prayed for, and the reason I come to work every day. I walked out of the dinner tonight filled with a renewed sense of purpose and a sense of excitement at all the possibilities I have in front of me. The one thing I cannot do for the kids I serve -- any of them -- is give up on them. It may be hard sometimes, but this is where I am called to be. I wrote in my jaclyncole.com blog about the MICA masters degree program in community arts, and maybe I will copy it here at some point. However I do it, when I finish my contract in June I need to keep doing this work.

Tonight our executive director embarrassed and flattered us VISTAs by asking us to stand up and be recognized for our work. As some of Greater Homewood's biggest supporters and donors stood around us and applauded, it was a good time to remember why I'm here. No matter what, I have a great support system here. I have been told that in the real world, when you get a real job, no one ever thanks you for doing the right thing, it's just expected. Maybe that is how the rest of the world is, but not here. Here, each and every person gets a "thank you" in turn. Our jobs aren't always easy, but at least we have a lot of great people on our side.

Right now I feel like I should be wrapping up my work week. Instead I am on my laptop, in bed, with some intentions of checking my GHCC email and slogging through some paperwork before the day is over.

Yesterday I was in bed all day, slightly feverish and hurting all over, recovering from a stomach virus I no doubt picked up at the school. I know this because I have not gotten a stomach virus since first grade. There are perils to returning to elementary school, for sure.

When I was young and stayed home sick, my mom would often insist that I take an extra "day of rest" on the first day I woke up feeling better. I remembered this as I got into my car this morning exhausted from the task of getting dressed and ready to leave. As my mother may have predicted, I hardly got anything done and ended up leaving after a few hours anyway because I had a killer headache and absolutely no energy. Mind you, in the past 36 hours I had eaten nothing but a soft pretzel and a piece of toast, which may have had something to do with it.

So here I am with my cat, Katie, sleeping on the bed next to me, hoping I'll be well enough to do at least half of the fun things I had planned for tomorrow. At least I have eaten a substantial amount since getting home: half a package of ramen noodles and two small pieces of chocolate.

This is getting a little ridiculous. I'm ready to see my energy and good health come back now.

In almost everything I do, I want it to be perfect. Recently I was talking to a teacher I had in grade school about my sister, who is now one of her students. "She is so serious, and very hard on herself. Remind you of anyone???"

Born 14 years apart, we are surprisingly similar in some of our mannerisms and attitudes. One of the most striking examples is that pursuit of perfection and the difficulties we face just to keep going in the face of frustration.

If I am working on a task that matters to me, I want it to be perfect. From the outside I am sure it looks like I am doing a good job, but I still feel like I am underachieving, like there is something more I should be doing, like I am not working hard enough. When faced with adversity or challenge I never give up, but it is so overwhelming to keep wanting more and more from myself and knowing I don't have a ready source to draw it from. Somehow I need to find a way to turn around and see it all from the other side, see the bigger picture, and know I still have the power to exceed others' expectations even if I cannot exceed my own.

Spectacles

Moving along.

It has been a long time since I posted anything, and I feel like I should be saying something. Honestly, there has been a lot to say and little time to say it. I have been so busy recently and it is just now beginning to catch up with me. Because the vision program has sucked so much of my time in the past couple weeks, I am behind on everything else. I have a meeting to match kids for Big Brothers/Big Sisters tomorrow, and I am still getting referral forms. I'm getting three new Experience Corps members tomorrow and I have not warned the teachers -- I will be arriving before the school day starts to duck my head in and ask a few teachers I have in mind. Luckily, I have learned that if you give teachers too much advance warning they can forget what I told them. They are all as busy as I am, and the more weathered ones who know the plight of the VISTA have already expressed their sympathies.

I have to lead a training session for my after-school volunteers on Wednesday and I have not put together an agenda or ordered food. My work-study is coming tomorrow and I am not 100% excited to be thinking about what two of us should be doing as opposed to just me.

All in all, though, I am probably doing fine. I was talking to one of my coworkers at the office -- easily the sweetest person I have ever met -- and he seemed to think I would do a good job. "I just have a feeling," he said, and reminded me I have an excellent support system there. Whenever I thank him for being so kind he just says "that's what we do here." And it is. I do have a great support system, and I also know myself well enough to realize I will never be complacent about my job. I was 100% confident when I worked in the Staples Copy Center. Every day I went in with a feeling of mastery of my responsibilities there, but my role was very concrete. At this point in my life I am actively seeking a challenge, not a job that will provide an easy feeling of competence. No matter how well I do here, I will never be totally satisfied. I will always know there is more I could have done and I will always try to reach for it the next time. It is in my nature to be hard on myself, I just have to practice channeling that energy toward the positive.

In my mind I keep seeing news photos of blood running down the sidewalk. I got an unexpected voicemail from a friend and old neighbor/housemate the day after saying he had moved and I found it strange, having not yet found out a man had been murdered across the street from our house. Now I can't get in touch with him to ask if this is what drove him out.

Someone died with their skull cut open on a piece of sidewalk I must have walked on a thousand times. The lack of a reason, a motive, any explanation at all at this point, gnaws a hollow in my heart. How does a community begin to accept death when it is this senseless, perpetrated against a random, innocent person merely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?

I work in a city with a murder rate second only to Detroit. What really rattles me is I'm not writing about Baltimore, I'm writing about a small college town in Amish country where I spent the past three years of my life.

If I went to Park Heights and talked about this one murder, the first in the town since 1982, people would say everyone should be so lucky. That just underscores the tragedy of a city so ravaged by homicides. How do people exist in a world where death is so commonplace and it's so rarely possible to make sense out of life? When I look at children in the schools and streets, I forget that in many neighborhoods by age 10 they have all seen a dead body under a sheet.

I am not sure how I would cope if I still lived in that apartment, if I remembered every time I walked outside that an innocent life had died right beneath my feet. But what about the people who can't escape? What about the people who live their whole life witnessing senseless loss of life in their street, their block, their neighborhood? How do they keep going? How do we blame them for losing sight of hope and optimism, a sense of things working out for the best?

Today was a Good Day. I secured a number of donations for the JHU Freshman Day of Service on Wednesday. Today I picked up a five-gallon bucket of Sherwin-Williams gloss finish exterior latex paint. Tomorrow some folks from Hopkins should be dropping off paint rollers and trays, trash bags, gloves, and possibly some gardening supplies. In-kind donation forms and thank-you letters abound.

I woke up this morning with a headache that began last night. Despite a grumpy start to the day I managed to keep my energy and spirits high enough to do what I needed to do. When I got to the office to print and copy the paperwork for the Sherwin-Williams donation (and use the cool postage machine!), however, I was manic and shaky with hunger, probably a result of last night's visit to the gym. Luckily, Karen was there and suffering for lack of food and fresh air as well, and we walked over to Carma's. I ate gazpacho outside and hoped I wasn't too poor a conversationalist due to being undernourished and sleepy.

This afternoon I was pleased with the day's work and couldn't wait to come home and ask Doug to go out to dinner with me. There was a coin toss along my way, and I threw all the change I had into the boot of a smiling fireman with kind eyes. It wasn't very much, but he said "thank you, God bless you," and there was just enough time for this exchange before the light turned green and my time on Gwynns Falls Parkway was over.

So, I am currently trying to figure out how to post a long piece of writing without showing it all on the page at once. For anyone familiar with LiveJournal, I am dearly missing the tag. Since Blogger doesn't seem to give me the option of putting a long chunk of text behind a cut, I am going to wait until version 2.0 of my website is up and running and host it from there.

I was reading my friend Matt Fowler's blog today, and there was one entry in particular that interested me. Matt is doing a year of service for Mission Year, so we will really benefit from sharing our experiences with each other.

His third entry really struck me because it reflects an attitude I encounter all too often. When I first committed myself to this idea of year-long service to my fellow people, I expected my friends and family to meet me with enthusiasm and support. I was not at all prepared to come up against deeply ingrained societal values that said I should be pursuing a 'real' career, that my intelligence and capability obligated me to achieve conventional success.

Now when I describe my job to people, I feel like it sounds broad enough and difficult enough that it demands a certain level of respect. When I say I helped to write three successful, $65,000 grants and I work in an inner-city school every day, I can prove that I am serious about this.

Still, though, there is this American idea that skill and determination should be compensated monetarily, that I should be chasing the kind of success that will be universally appealing. That isn't what I'm about. My friends and family have come around and more or less appreciate and admire what I am doing, but sometimes when I tell new people what I am doing I still encounter this word:

why?

And, well, why? It's not a question I can answer for everyone. I can't answer it for everyone not because I don't have a strong enough "why," but because there are realities out there not everyone can accept. I don't feel I can blame them. After all, it is so easy to look away, and so hard to believe we have the power to change anything. But I need to, and I do believe it, even if the only change I make this year is for the roughly 250 kids that are going to walk through the doors of my school tomorrow.

Finally

At long last, we've been released into the wild. Yesterday was my first day settling into the new office. The school seems strangely lonely compared to the constant activity at GHCC. There are only three new teachers, and the four of us have been spread out in our own corners of the building for the past two days. Today I ventured down into the kindergarten area to check out the newly renovated -- and very pretty! -- space, an adventure that yielded some conversation with one of the new teachers, which was nice. I am terrible at introductions, and often just slink around and smile at people as if that will convince them I am actually someone they should hold in high regard. Hmm.

Tomorrow all the teachers return, so hopefully the school won't be so quiet and lonely. Hopefully I'll make a good impression and not be totally overwhelmed. This job is forcing me to restructure the way I interact with people, something both positive and difficult.

As ready as we all were to leave and get into our respective schools, we still gravitate back to the main office. Both today and yesterday, we have ended up there together, discussing our days and enjoying familiar company. It's good to know that whatever storms we may encounter in the schools, we have a home at the GHCC office. I mean, really, our department's space is a basement efficiency apartment with yellow walls -- it even looks like it should be more of a home than an office. And despite the quirks as it makes the uneven transition from one to the other -- like not being able to use the (small) printer and the air conditioner at the same time -- it is a comfortable retreat, and I hope it remains so.

We VISTAs are still in training this week (going on week four, counting PSO), so there isn't much going on. All of us can agree we are burned out on training, ready to have our office keys in hand and be released into the wild. Having been here in the office since June 25th, I am seriously ready to move out into my school.

I start there on Monday, geared up for another week of orientation as I sit in on the teachers' professional development week. After that the kids arrive, and I had better be ready.

The blog has been kind of quiet because I am having some computer issues relating to some new hardware I just installed. Hopefully it all gets fixed pretty soon, but my computer usage has been significantly reduced since Sunday night.

Today is Tuesday.

Sometimes everything just feels right. Of course there are days when it is so hard not living in the city. It is hard being the one who is different from everyone else: I didn't come here for VISTA, I had already established a place to live and a basic framework for my life; I am not on my own, renting a room in the city, or free to walk to any neighborhood events that may be going on at night; when the day is done, I am far away. I won't deny that this is difficult and sometimes awkward. But of course there are days when everything feels right and easy and smooth, days when I roll down the windows on my way home even though it's 100 degrees outside, just to feel real air on my face.

Short thoughts at the end of the week.

One week down, two more to go, and only one more week of purely school VISTA training. The more information I absorb, the more I find myself feeling lost. Today I got out some looseleaf to put in my training binder, and on Monday I think I will use it to make some lists. Lists, along with day planners, are some of the most basic elements necessary for my survival.

Also, I am now officially one of those people who have two cell phones. True, this may be because I don't have a land line in my office and the cell phone is like my office phone, but all the same I know I am not the only one who is feeling like they have leveled up. And I did just use "level up" to say I am now capable of wielding twice as many cell phones, you are not mistaken.

As usual, it took me at least 10 tries to record my voicemail greeting. I was sure I could avoid that problem by writing out an outline of what I wanted to say, then locking myself in my car, but no luck.

Despite my continuing exhaustion and sore eyes, I feel energized because the whole weekend is still ahead of me. I haven't found a less exhausting occupation, but at least I have finally reclaimed my weekends after 18 years of schooling. 18 years, wow.

Speaking of reclaiming weekends, Doug and I are still committed to plans just about every weekend, so I cannot imagine what life will be like when we start having weekends that are truly relaxing.

Today we watched The Boys of Baraka. I now want to show it to most people I know. If I could be sure I would keep to my word, I would stop writing for today and promise an entire entry dedicated to the movie. The film placed the viewer squarely in the middle of poverty, of city life, of hope and hopelessness and people who know just what they want but have precious little chance of getting there without an extended hand to help them up. This is a necessary experience for everyone.

Coming on the heels of our parent involvement conversations, Boys of Baraka was a strong reminder that parents love their children even if they have failed to support and provide for them. It was heartbreaking to watch the boys' parents as they wanted so desperately for their children to have a better life, but could not actively provide it.

"Sending them to the Baltimore City schools is sending them to jail."

I hope Boys of Baraka stays on as part of the VISTA training for years to come. It was so valuable for me to watch, having seen America's cities only through the eyes of a true outsider. Driving through a poor neighborhood, I am always burning with curiosity about the lives of the people living there. Usually what I am told of poverty and the inner city seems so alien, so incomprehensible. This documentary stripped that foreignness away and let me walk side by side with these boys, if only for a couple hours.

Random thoughts on VISTA training.

On Monday VISTA training began in earnest. Before diving into the inner workings of Greater Homewood and the Baltimore City schools, a trip to Carma's was in order. Many of my companions followed my example and ordered iced honey lattes, which are heavenly (especially when made with soy milk, and any mixture of coffee and soy requires considerable skill) and I have only ever seen them at Carma's. Also, their signature Icelandic style yogurt and fruit compote never disappoint.

I feel like we have gotten a pleasing mix of slow-digesting information along with ample down time to bond, reflect and, of course, eat. We have two weeks to ease into our new school VISTA skins, and I am thankful for a schedule that gives ample time for learning, work, and play.

Despite being bitterly exhausted from entertaining houseguests in the evenings, the past few days have provided a space to acclimate to my new life. If I learned anything from college, it is that I need to identify potentially harmful tendencies and manage them gracefully from the beginning. During individual meetings today I expressed my concern that I would end up volunteering to attend community meetings, staying in the city literally all day. After burning myself out in such a brutal way during my last year of college, I know I can't return to that lifestyle. I was downright miserable filling 18 hours of the day, for several days per week, with my work. While I'm also downright miserable not working at all, I need to learn to find a balance. This job will absorb as much life energy and time as I allow it. I have never had a problem motivating myself toward high achievement, but admitting limitations of any kind has proven difficult if not impossible at every turn.

Speaking of challenges, I feel like I have some sort of addiction to them. I've received my share of compliments in life, but most of what I see in myself is potential. Of course I'm capable of great things, I just haven't done them yet. I'm always working toward something, hoping, grasping, waiting. Finally, I have an open arena to achieve and excel. I just hope I am up to the challenge.

That has to be everyone's relationship with this job, though. It seems like the only relationship that is sane. The opportunities for learning, personal growth, autonomy, collaboration, and contribution to society are fairly limitless, a fact that is both inspiring and terrifying. Presumably, many others have come before me and I was selected for the job because my superiors thought I would be successful. They have been at this for a while, which almost certainly means I can do it. But everyone has to think, at some point, what if I'm not up to it? What if I don't do enough, can't do enough?

For the first time since Monday, I am spending the evening at home. This is exhausting. Many people I have only met in the past five years or so refuse to believe I can be shy and withdrawn, but those who truly know me well know I need time every day to decompress and be alone.

PSO was fun, inspiring, and an awesome social experience for me. That doesn't make it any less exhausting, though, and I am thankful tonight that I am not surrounded by 150 new friends.

After all the delicious food, alternately hilarious and tiresome workshops, and endless networking (buzzword alert!) and socializing, I am happy to say PSO was every bit the fabulous experience my predecessors told me it would be. When it was finally time to go, after a picnic lunch under a tree by the side of Route 202, I felt very strange to be saying goodbye. Hadn't we all become colleagues? Wouldn't we be working together again come Monday?

One little piece of serendipity: as we were doing an icebreaker toward the beginning, we needed to to some mandatory mingling. In a banquet hall full of 200 people, I turned around to the person sitting right behind me, and there was someone I knew from college. I had no idea she was doing VISTA, and certainly not that she would be in Wilmington with us. Yet we were sitting right next to each other, at adjacent tables.

Rather than give a boring and too-detailed account, I will offer a few excerpts from my paper journal.

From the first day:

Talking about poverty is hard for me. It's kind of a knee-jerk reaction to try to relate, say I know what it's like not to have enough money. Not having enough money? I am (and always have been) so comfortably in the middle class. Poverty, REAL poverty, is still an abstract concept to me, and hardly so simple as not having enough money. Not having my most basic needs met is unimaginable, almost as much so as not having anyone to turn to for help. Even here, there are stereotypes about poverty -- my own include laziness, addiction, lack of education, unwillingness to work. There are also a lot of theories on the causes and solutions surrounding poverty. How justified is our outrage? Do we have a right to speak out about this, to write in scholarly terms? How much solidarity can we feel entitled to with people who are actually there? How much do they care about our theories and textbooks?

...

"I'm with you" vs. "I understand and I'm here to fix it," just like Pastor Doug said at Calvary Bible in Philadephia.

The most valuable tidbit I took from this week, though, was the power of words. When your job is to facilitate partnerships, it is absolutely essential to be ultra-sensitive to the cultural responses of everyone you speak to when you choose angles, words, and phrases. I am being vague because I am sure I will have many similar experiences later on that will bring this into focus, and I'm trying not to make this entry too long. In short, there are many words and phrases I use in a day that could offend the people I interact with. Most seem innocuous, or at the very least justifiable in their context, but there is something lurking underneath them. The collective experience of any group of people can turn simple words into a battleground. My job, among many other things, will be to skirt around the perimeter of that battleground.

Hopefully there will be much more to write as I begin real VISTA training on Monday and eventually get the key to my very own office. For now, though, I'm falling asleep at my computer.

Here's to a great year.

Now, onto the real beginning.

Today was my last real day working at the Greater Homewood office. Tomorrow I join the ranks of the other school VISTAs and head off to PSO -- aka pre-service orientation -- at the Doubletree Hotel in Wilmington, Delaware. Preparing for four days of seminars and workshops, I have caved to the hype and purchased the new Harry Potter book.

I am eager to start my "real" work. Training, in one form or another, will last almost three weeks. After that I start up in my own office, working much more autonomously and designing my own projects. I love being in the main office, but it will be such a relief not to have to ask after each assignment, "what can I do next?" I dislike being reliant on someone else to feed me a constant stream of tasks. Plus, at this point the anticipation can only lead to self doubt -- more time to wonder, "am I really up to this?"

Alonso and some short notes.

I didn't get a lot of actual work done yesterday, but it was still very long and very productive. For a week or so I had been entertaining the idea of being placed at Margaret Brent instead of Barclay, my original top choice. I finally went over to the school with Sofia, the departing VISTA, and it clicked with me -- the school had a good energy and I feel good about the principal, who also happens to have the same first name as I do (albeit using the Kennedy-style spelling). For all my compulsive need to be 100% informed on every situation lest I make one misstep, most of my big decisions are made by instinct. My entire decision to join AmeriCorps in the first place began during the alternative spring break trip to Massachusetts: I just sat in the dark sanctuary of the church we were sleeping at and prayed for an answer to my lack of direction, and this is what I got. Now, rather than be ridiculously concerned, I just said "this feels right."

There will be more later, though. I can't let such a routine event overshadow the most important part of the day.

Yesterday evening I had the privilege of attending one of the new CEO's (aka superintendent) "community conversations." This was a time for the community to be introduced to Dr. Alonso and also for him to be introduced to them and their concerns.

By the end I was sorry this hadn't taken place a couple weeks later, when the other VISTAs will be in town. Though he struck me as a bit soft-spoken at first, Alonso is in Baltimore as a guy who is going to get things done, to turn the entire school system around. He exudes the quiet confidence of someone who has done this before, yet he is not afraid to tell people "hold me accountable, but don't forget you have a part in this."

Hopefully I'll have a lot more opportunity to talk about Dr. Alonso. I'm not going to go on at length here because this was my first introduction, and I know better than to presume some kind of comprehensive understanding has come out of that.

What I can say is I heard Alonso -- the former #2 guy from the NYC school system -- described as a "breath of fresh air" in a city that desperately needed to bring someone in from the outside. I also heard him challenged by parents, community members, and school employees. They've heard a lot of talk, now they want something in writing, they want to see a change.

This man has not failed to impress me, but I identify more with that sense of tentative optimism. You sound like a great man, Dr. Alonso, but I won't quite believe it until I see it. Overall, last night was totally inspiring. The parents' and teachers' words broke my heart. They are angry about middle schools with no libraries, computers, science labs, algebra, gyms, or adequate cafeterias. They are angry about the myriad ways the Baltimore City Public Schools have failed them. But in their words I could hear a stirring of the winds of change. People are tired.

These beginnings of an uprising, of reform, are also what give me caution. The feeling in my chest last night was the same one I felt three years ago, the year of the last election. I rode in a hot car and sat in traffic for a half hour on Route 22 to get to the John Kerry rally at the Allentown Fairgrounds. In the heart of what used to be the steel industry, now sometimes called the "rust belt," here was a man who preached passionately to the working class. I was swallowed up in an amphitheater full of people clapping, cheering in affirmation, and full of hope -- hope that the good, middle-class jobs would return to the Lehigh Valley, hope that their children wouldn't be sent to war, hope that the hard-working, middle-class brand of success at the foundations of our nation would be returned to them. This was a working class that was tired of being stepped on and tired of being used and forgotten. I could feel a big change coming, a shift in our nation. There was a lot of electricity in the air. People were tired.

We all know how that story ends. Right now I'm praying for Dr. Alonso, and praying that he will be steadfast enough to "turn this ship around" (as he put it). He said to us afterward, "if I get half of it done, a quarter of it done, a tenth of it done, we are moving forward. It is going to be so hard. Baltimore City is, like a lot of industrial Mid-Atlantic cities (ahem, Philadelphia?) is marvelous but broken in a lot of ways. There are many problems, hundreds of wrong ways to fix them, and probably only one right way. I hope everyone can learn to trust this Alonso guy. He seems absolutely dedicated, and he really knows his stuff. The last piece of the puzzle is getting the people behind him, proving he respects them, and making a public point of addressing some of the worst emergencies in the schools quickly and completely.

I hate the expectations with first posts, but at least I have a story.

I'm not one for introductions, so I'll start this whole thing off with a story. This isn't my first day, just your standard issue Monday morning.

I-70 ends gracelessly at the beltway. For some reason, all on-ramps to the beltway are one lane, so the interstate highway, going strong since the middle of Colorado, suddenly finds itself crunched down into a little, curving path headed for 695. This would not be a source of confusion if anyone had the right of way. A series of three large signs instruct motorists, "single lane ahead," "alternate right of way," and finally, "form single lane NOW." There are traffic jams here daily, though thankfully they are not always long.

Monday morning, it was long. After learning from NPR that the probable cause was an accident at least five miles down the beltway, I decided there was no way I could sit in traffic like that.

Impatience clouding better judgment, I escaped via the Security Boulevard Park & Ride exit with the theory that the sun would point me east, and a path due east would take me to Charles Street. During my early days of driving, when I lived in rural Pennsylvania, this approach had taken me on some fantastic scenic routes and led me to discover plenty of new roads. When it's not at the front of my mind I forget this isn't the best approach in the city.

Utterly lost in Baltimore's west side, all I can say is it's one of the few times I've been thankful for my car's crappy paint job. In all my time riding SEPTA buses and working in Philadelphia last summer, I have never seen so many boarded up houses. I couldn't see any homes that weren't boarded up, actually, because picking them out would have required me to take my eyes off the road for too long. Grass was growing through every crack in the sidewalk and everything looked dead save for the people gathered on the corners. Often I'm not worldly enough to know when I should be scared, but I was scared then. I knew I needed to make a left from the road I was on at the time, and I drove through a lot of intersections looking for a street large enough that I wouldn't feel like I was seriously targeting myself.

I emerged unscathed, but this was a big reminder just how naive I am. At age 16 I saw the dilapidated shacks sprawling around the perimeter of Lima, Peru through a bus window and I was astounded. This, I thought, is what is it to be in a third world country. There are poor people in the United States, but nothing this bad. I had no idea people even lived like that in the world. Since then I have learned so much, and how ignorant of me. Poverty was something I had read about in books but never seen firsthand. Now, even though I spent a whole summer working with the Camp Girard kids in Philly, and even though I have spent hours at Greater Homewood on grant proposals detailing the need of our partner schools, I still feel like I have no idea. Helping Leigh write an ADA grant I was so surprised to learn a lot of kids don't own toothbrushes. I think about my petty money troubles, and my (for the most part) comfortable middle-class upbringing, and at least I have the sense to realize I'm not even existing in the same world.

Being immersed in this city and its issues, its history, and its bizarre politics is going to make for a roller coaster of a year. I'm going to have to start measuring my own success, life, and relationships with the people I serve in different units. My current bank of experiences just isn't adequate for comparison.