Saturday - What a Joke

I'm adding comments to what I wrote in my journal, they are in bold. This is a bit of a rant; you have been warned.

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Today didn’t feel very successful to me, quite honestly. Today was a absolute joke, and waisted our time. I had high hopes for some of the activities planned, and things didn’t turn out so well.

We were up early, and traveled across the city to help a health center set up for some street festival. What ended up happening, was that we stood around at the wrong place for awhile, before being directed to their (fully setup) booth. We helped them blow up balloons (29 of us), and then stood around holding the balloons while they found tape. I think we ended up having more balloons popped then setup. When it became apparent that we weren’t really needed, we were told to go wonder around the partially setup street festival for a half hour. I visited a pawn shop, and ended up buying some 2$ old CDs. Net culture of this stop, zero.

Our group leaders have been terrible about planning anything more then a day in advance, or doing any type of research. Some of the people's community service organizations were contacted the day we got here, and others were under the impression that we were all Latin Americans and could speak Spanish.

The next stop was a Latino community, one street in particular. Getting their took forever, since the buses were messed up in the area around the street closures we were coming from. It also doesn't help when we try to thirty+ people onto a single bus. This happens whenever we try to travel, its like a flash mob. Public busses aren't ment to handle that kind of load. When we did get where we were going, there was a few interesting things. I got a shaved ice from a street vendor, who operated out of a cart with a block of ice and an assortment of flavorings in bottles. It was really good (more so because of the extreme heat in Philly) , and from what we learned quite common in the area. After that though, we were suppose to visit stores in the area. I got one quick peak into a “Botanica”, which was a mystical-type store, but we were rushed off to lunch. The trouble we had getting their only left us with enough time to secure food and get to the park where we were going. There wasn't anything interesting here in the first place, I'm convinced it was just suppose to be filler.

We brought our food into the middle of a park in the heart of a Latino American park to eat. I was quite uncomfortable doing this, as every person their was staring at the spectacle of 30+ white college age students strolling into the middle of their park. I just didn’t feel welcome, and quite frankly that was all right with me – I sort of felt like we were invading their space. Everywhere we go as a large group, we are a traveling circus. Everyone stares, and nobody wants us there. We are invaders in their territory. Regardless, the food we got was delicious. It was a mix of fried chicken/beef/bread/cheese pastry like things, none of which I remember the names.

After lunch, we went to a place called “the Lighthouse”, which was a community center. There was a traveling exhibit there we were being brought to. It was two rooms, a child’s room and a jail cell, and had projectors on each wall. The show was a dialogue between an incarcerated father and his son. It was suppose to be touching and deep. I thought it was pretty bad. Really Bad. It didn’t have any sort of flow, each piece of dialogue was completely disconnected, and the actors even were in different cloths in different parts. The high point was when we got to sit around in the A/C afterwards, while waiting to leave for our next thing. Again, wasting time because they thought the exhibit was longer.

Finally, we ended up at a small gallery. The first thing we looked at was a mural outside. The people working on it thought we were coming to help out, which we weren’t. See the theme? None of this is really being planned. We all felt like jerks being like - yup, we're here. Nope, not going to paint. That was awkward, and we ended up getting bought ice cream by our leader (Ryan) while we waiting for the book reading inside to start. "Oops, things didn't go well. Lets buy them ice cream and hope they forget about all of today".

I don’t even know how to describe the author. Crude, and a ranting lunatic. He began by reading out of one of his books, which detailed the story of a Latin American teenage witch, who chooses a punk rock “bozo” to get her pregnant. She brings him through a portal in the projects to the beach of Puerto Rico, so that her tribe can provide magical “male enhancement”, since he is white (and therefore lacking, compared to her kin). I’m saying this all quite nicely, but the book itself was extremely crude. Really crude. In ways I won't even allude to.

After reading, he began to talk about the state of the world, and injustices done to Latinos. Somewhere along the line, it turned into a shameless Bush-bashing rant. This culminated when he read from a poem, that went something along the lines of “Bush you monkey-faced ****er, I hope you ****ing drown in your own **** , you *******. He also managed to work in that he doesn’t believe in God, creationism is BS, evolution has been proven, and voting is futile.

I don’t know how we ended up with this author, but our teacher has since issued an apology. After that, many of us just left, and that was it for the day. Our teacher even had the audacity to go up and whisper to him that this was a Christan college mid-read, like this was something she could correct. She did no research before planning this, reading any one page in his book would have clued her off. She was embarrassed, and I can't wait to see what she says on Monday.

To sum up the day, we blew up balloons, walked around aimlessly twice, ate food in a place we weren’t welcome, saw a poorly done exhibit, were expected to be painters and weren’t, and got offended in numerous ways. Totally worthless. This whole thing seems like it was pulled together the day before we got there. I'm waiting to hear that the 785$ we spent to come here was embezzled, and that if we just go home they'll issue us our credits.