Chicago!

Well, I'm in Chicago for Staging, and the lovely part of it all is that the hotel has a computer lab. :) Yay Internet.

This morning, Mom, Dad, Kate, Aunt Rebecca, Jason, and Amy all saw me off at the airport, complete with gifts of sidewalk chalk (which apparently is for teaching, not for covering Chicago in graffitti...boo), chocolate chip cookies, CDs, letters, and homemade granola. After a very short flight from GR to Chicago, I met up with Lily, a friend of mine who lives here, and she and I hung out until I had to go to orientation (she also bought me lunch--Chicago-style pizza--while I was stuck in line to do paperwork...I have such wonderful friends!).

Staging reminds me of freshman orientation for college...lots of info, cheesy icebreakers, and exchanging names, locations, and majors with 115 other people. Interestingly enough, I've met one guy who went to high school with my freshman year roommate from MSU (and who informed me that U of M was a much better school than MSU). Small, small world.

I've gotten to know a few people so far...I went to dinner with Tifanni (went to Notre Dame) and Abby (UMass), two other girls my age, which was fun. We went to a place called the Rock Bottom Brewery, which gave you a lot of food for your money, much more than we could eat. My roommate, Melissa, grew up as an army kid in Germany and England, then came back to the States and went to college at Messiah, a small Christian college in PA, and then went back to London for grad school. She grew up in Nazarene and Methodist churches and knows someone who knows someone who's a Nazarene missionary in Kyiv. Very cool and encouraging.

I'm glad I'm here. While some of the sessions are a little long, it's interesting information, although most of it so far has been fairly general and not Ukraine-specific. We talked about sustainable development today, and how it's better to teach someone how to do something than to do it for them, even though it may take longer initially. The example given was that instead of always telling a student the definition of a word, you should teach them how to use the dictionary. Since this was standard operating procedure at my house growing up, I understood. :)