Welcome everyone to my new blog as I begin my year of service! For those of you who followed my previous blog when I studied abroad, I can pretty much promise to not write as much or as often as I did before. Partially because I will eventually settle into a routine and not as many new things will happen. And, partially because I will be staying in the same place and my job deals with sensitive information that I should not post on the internet. So, this blog, if it works the way I am envisioning, will be mostly reflections on the experience and is more likely to talk about things I do away from work that are less sensitive.
As many of you know, I am in the Amate House program in Chicago and will be living with eight other people in an intentional community while we all go out to different service related jobs in the city. I have been here for a week and so I am halfway done with orientation. It has been an intense, long week. We still don’t know each other and are trying to feel around each other and see how our community will work. In the mean time, we have been thrown into an intense together-ness with these almost perfect strangers and are expected to be a community. It is a bit much and some of us are struggling with it but we know that there is of course a reason for what we are doing and that eventually we will be grateful. On the one hand, we are looking forward to starting work but at the same time we know that work will be even more intense. We have been going around between the different houses and other locations (Greater Chicago Food Depository for a morning of re-packaging cereal and DePaul University for a talk) to talk about the various tenents of our program. So far we have talked about Community, Stewardship and Service. We also spent Friday afternoon on the beach (a much needed break).
Do we have the weekend off? Sort of. There are not necessarily scheduled activities but we do have to spend Saturday as a community exploring the city and Sunday we have to be introduced at a Mass and then have a grocery store shopping challenge- we get $15 per person per week to spend on food. Saturday morning we explored our neighborhood and then came back to our house for grilled cheese and tomato soup. We took a digestion break and then used our Amate-provided-1-day-CTA passes and went downtown. We went to Millennium Park (where we saw a few wedding parties taking pictures, much to the delight of the girls) and took pictures at the bean, of course. Things were crowded with Lollapalooza. We then walked up Michigan Ave. to the Ghirardelli shop for free samples. We then headed in the direction of Navy Pier and stopped at the beach there for a little relaxation and then headed home to regroup. After re-packing some snacks (why have dinner when you can have two rounds of snacks?) we met up with South House at a park in Pilsen to watch “Where the Wild Things Are” outdoors.
Sunday, we were introduced at St. Agnes of Bohemia, a parish whose school has been served by Amate volunteers every year and I think the vast majority of its staff is former volunteers. The rest of the day was spent grocery shopping. How long would you think it would take nine people to grocery shop for a week? Try five hours. We planned out our whole menu for the week and talked about thinks like buying canned or dried beans, and also our feelings before we were even able to shop. We get $135 per week (that’s $15 per person) for groceries, which goes surprisingly far. We shopped at Food 4 Less, which appeared to be somehow connected to Kroger since it mostly had Kroger generic brands. We got everything on our need list for $122 and then were able to get a few wants, and this even included stocking up on a few bulk items. The boys cooked breakfast for dinner and after that we finished off the gallon of ice cream we bought on Friday and watched “Saved”. The second week of Orientation is halfway over, but I will write about everything some other time.
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