On Thursday we met up with others at nine o'clock at the office as usual. The train was very crowded, so we got a free ride (the conductor had too much work) and Greta had to stand all the way from Buffalo Grove to Chicago. In the morning Suzanne told us about her volunteerism projects and about the homeless- shelter, she directs. It is amazing how much the Wexler family volunteers and how passionate they are about it.
We met up with the Dream Leaders again. We were divided into three groups and we started with a sort of workshop. It helped us to get to know each other and ourselves and some of the activities were ment to gain confidence and feel that "you can". After the workshop we had lunch. At the lunch break we taught Estonian to KI, a very friendly and funky African American boy. We went with such expressions as "You're a fox" etc. :D It was all fun. I also bonded with Carrie, our group leader from The Dream Leaders. We had quite a lot incommon and it was great to chat with her. We talked about education, Estonia and New Zealand and Australia. We also celebrated Latvian Anna's birtday with a huge chocolate cake.
After the break we had to come up with a five-minute scetch about our topic volunteerism in 30 minutes. We made an educating play and I was the storyteller. 'Twas pretty cool.
After that we started with the action planning for the documentary. We are making a three minute documentary to use it as a marketing tool for our action plan. I'm going to tell you all about it later.
We went out to the Millenium Park (to the fountains) to interview people and I was amazed, that almost every second person volunteers. WOW! It is really a basic thing here in the States. I took the lead and we got about 13 interviews. We also got to play in the water and fool around in the heat. I took a lot of pictures of all the little kids playing by the fountains. They were so cute and carefree.
After taping we visited the Art Institute of Chicago, it was an interesting museum, I liked the impressionism part the most. We walked around with Ruuben and after such a long day we were basically just laughing all the time, but it was fun.
When we came home, Jeff had cooked a wonderful dinner: BBQ, vegetables and sweet potato. It was just delicious. Afterwards we played a cool boardgame called Apples to Apples. Jeff and Alyssa are so fun to have around. I won!!!
