On Tuesday, May 5th we had out first class meeting. It was petty quiet at first, but slowly folks started to warm up and I think we’re really establishing a nice rapport among the group members. A few of the things we did on Tuesday were to introduce ourselves (we played a progressive “name everyone” game), discussed the specific of the two courses and previewed some of the key elements of preparing ourselves for the trip such as safety and logistics.
We set two small homework assignments for Thursday’s class. Each student will prepare a picturebook that they will use to introduce themselves to people we meet on our trip. The idea behind this is that many of the folks we’ll be meeting won’t speak English, so having pictures of home and family will help break the ice even when a full-blown conversion may not be possible. The other assignment was to do some research on the people and places we’ll be visiting on our trip. By “pre-viewing” the people and places, we hope to establish greater familiarity and raise expectations for the trip.
One idea to which we didn’t get but would like to do on Thursday is to take a group portrait. We then plan to make several copies of this group portrait, sort of like commemorative greeting cards, that we can give to the folks with whom we meet as something of a memento of our visit. This was Stacy’s idea and it is terrific!