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 Many people I have only met in the past five years or so refuse to believe I can be shy and withdrawn, but those who truly know me well know I need time every day to decompress and be alone.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