Part Two

After a rather long intermission, I have decided what Act II of my year off will be. I am living with my cousins in Nashville TN and will be volunteering at a local clinic. I had the orientation for the clinic this morning. They showed us (myself and the other new volunteers) around. The building is very nice; it's open and has lovely murals on a lot of the walls and gorgeous art from all over. One of the really fascinating things about the clinic is how diverse it's clientele is. 79% of the patients are immigrants or refugees and come from more than 100 countries. They keep a map on the wall and put a pin in each country they have a patient from. It's an impressive number of little black pins covering the map. Anyway, back to the main track, after the tour we watched a short video telling the story of one of the patients to give us a better sense of how the clinic worked. We had morning prayer with the volunteers (they have a short prayer before each work shift) and then filled out applications. (I found it a little odd to have orientation before filling out an application, but that's because orientation is pretty general; once you know what you'll be doing, they have you shadow someone to get more specific training.)

After that (it was only a couple hours) Lena brought me home (since I have no car here) and we all had lunch. Then TJ, Louie and I ran some errands. One of them was to look for [drinking] glasses at an antique store. TJ found some she liked and I found a book. It's a book about Rudyard Kipling, it's 83 years old and it's a first edition. I got it for $14 even though the price written on the inside was $24. So that was cool. When we got back to the house, I started on dinner. I made Rueben sandwiches which turned out very well.

And that has pretty much been my day.

Happy Valentine's Day!