Orientation

Yesterday I got up at 6:30 am so I would be able to leave by 7:30 to take the metro 45 minutes all the way down to GWU only spend another 30 minutes on the shuttle to George Town and arrive exactly on time at 9 am for the opening remarks. Not that driving down there in traffic would have been any faster.
The welcome, going over schedules that I already received via email, and discussions on the history of American volunteerism were interesting, but I felt like it was a waste of time when I have so many other more pressing things to work on. We met up with the Russian volunteers for lunch and then things got a lot more interesting. I forgot how exhausting the translating and speaking a foreign language are at first!
We were all excited to meet each other. After lunch we met up in the lobby to go to Rock Creek Park for "team building exercises"-- which I think is not the best name for it... Since we as teams won't be working together after this. But it was a beautiful humid 85 degree day and I love playing outside. We divided into smaller groups and then went around to the various challenges. I love games like this where you brainstorm, work together and then trouble shoot. It's nice when it's something more tangible than a public health program. One game was getting everyone through a differnt hole in a giant spider web without them touching- you could only use each hole once & some were high up. We had to plan for the last people to have ways of getting through without anyone to lift them etc. I love a good challenge.
After we spent four hours playing outside some of us decided to meet up and go down to this great Ethiopian restaurant that I had heard about. :) It's called Zed's. It was so much fun! We were all stuffing ourselves using our hands (I passed around my package of antibacterial handwipes first of course) and the spongy flat bread, passing around the big platter that all of the foods we ordered were piled on. By the end of dinner it was past 8pm and I headed back down to the metro for the ride home.