A Great Start to July

I apologize for not posting sooner. Our past week and a half has been so busy that I didn’t even find time to write about it until now!

Last weekend, as Josh and Braveen mentioned, all the Robertson Scholars from Mississippi went down to New Orleans to visit with all of the Robertson Scholars there. We had a wonderful visit with our friends! We drove down on Friday and then began to explore the city by eating great food. I especially enjoyed visiting Central Grocery and eating a delicious muffuletta sandwich, since I had been told by one of my favorite high school teachers and by one of the Sisters at St. Gabriel’s that I must eat a muffuletta from Central Grocery. It was indeed delicious! On Friday night we went to Bourbon Street for a bit to witness the crazy New Orleans nightlife. It is really wild! It is certainly unlike anything we have experienced in Mississippi this summer. On Saturday morning, the whole group got together to play a fun game of soccer, organized by our friend Harrison. Our friend Brent then took us on a driving tour of the Ninth Ward, the area hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina. We ended Saturday with a big Fourth of July Barbeque, which all of the Mississippi and all of the New Orleans Scholars attended, and then watched fireworks by the riverside. It was a wonderful visit.

I enjoyed exploring New Orleans, as I had never been there before. I also really loved to get a sense of what our friends in New Orleans are experiencing this summer. Hearing about their work, living with them for a few days, and touring the city with them gave me an idea about what their summer is like. I really enjoyed that and I wish I could visit the places where the other Robertson Scholars are working this summer as well. It was an interesting feeling coming back to Cleveland after being in New Orleans. As we drove into Cleveland, I suddenly got the feeling that I was coming back home. I have come to love Cleveland, especially its small-town, community feel, and I appreciated coming back here after experiencing the busy, flashy New Orleans.

Work this week went very well. I have continued to tutor a GED student in math three times a week in the morning. I enjoy this work very much. I’m happy that I’ve been able to continue to tutor, even though the official summer GED program is on break until August. The youth program has also been very rewarding. This past week went especially smoothly since we had a large volunteer group present. Eighteen high-school students from southern Mississippi were working at St. Gabriel’s last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and we were lucky enough to have nine helpers work with us every afternoon. We worked on reading comprehension and math with the kids in very small groups, one or two kids with a volunteer. With this set-up, we were able to do reading comprehension worksheets, telling time, counting money, and addition/subtraction with the five through seven year olds, and reading comprehension and multiplication/division with the eight and nine year olds. They loved the individual attention and also put in a lot of hard work. Another bonus to having so many volunteers was that the kids were much better behaved. With so much supervision, the kids did not act up at all, and we did not have to “flip” anybody’s card on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. This meant every child received a prize at the end of the week!

I have continued to work on reading and writing with the oldest age group (10-13 year olds), and now almost every student has finished his/her essay and has typed it on the computers! I am very proud of their hard work and their willingness to revise multiple times to make their essays as great as they can be. For the remainder of the program, I will probably work on more reading comprehension and paragraph writing with them, which I will structure through short stories. We started delving into short stories on Thursday by reading “Thank You, Ma’am” by Langston Hughes, which they enjoyed, and writing a paragraph about the lesson learned through the story.

There’s so much more to write about the past week and about this past weekend, but it is getting late and I think I will go get ready for tomorrow now! Braveen is eager to write another post and I think he will write about everything I left out in this post. I would just like to quickly thank Hilary, who is working at the Delta Center for Culture and Learning this summer, for coming to work with the kids at St. Gabriel’s this past week. She taught three lessons about the history of Mound Bayou, since this past week was Founder’s Week, the week leading up to the celebration of the founding of Mound Bayou. She also had very creative activities for each age group. The kids loved her activities and she was a huge help! Braveen will provide more details on what she did, I’m sure. We also had a fun trip to Memphis yesterday, which Braveen, Josh or I will have to comment on later as well.

Everything has been going well, and I continue to love my time here in the Delta. I can’t believe we only have two weeks left! It’s gone by so fast! I will treasure the time that I have left here. How wonderfully blessed I am to be able to experience everything that I have experienced this summer.

- Nina