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 Many people I have only met in the past five years or so refuse to believe I can be shy and withdrawn, but those who truly know me well know I need time every day to decompress and be alone.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.