hope for the future

sometimes we may doubt the competence of today's youth. how is the future going to look with these truly creative geniuses?

 

as the someone in the don bosco club put it, they made an especially manly snowman.

While i still have plenty to write about from Christmas and New Years, i thought that i would fill you in on what i've been doing more recently. I decided in December that i did not want to continue in the school after winter break, which meant that i had a two and a half week period between the end of winter break and a seminar in Berlin. I decided that i wanted to spend this time doing a mini-praktikum at the Don Bosco Club in Köln-Mülheim. This is an interesting borough of Köln. In the last sixty years it was a booming industrial center with many factory positions. To fulfill these positions, many guest workers (Italians, Greeks, and Turks) were brought in. However, these factories were closed in more recent times (last twenty years?). This left a large, un-educated population living in very close quarters (there is an old army barracks that was converted into housing after the second World War. fifty thousand people lived in these barracks, which is probably on a piece of property the size of two football fields). This inevitably created a cycle of poverty to which drugs and violence are natural. What i do is volunteer in a youth center, a safe haven if you will, for the kids to have a chance to be kids. Essentially, i play games all day. it is extremely fun. We play monopoly, risk, pool, kicker, soccer, ping pong, connect four, and much, much more. Even though the kids try to BS me all the time on rules, i still show them who's boss. Actually, they'll walk all over you if you let them. It's not all fun and games, but the majority of it is. 

First off, I must apologize for being less than attentive in my  blog posts. I tend to use the internet at night, and often I neglect writing and/or speaking to my mother, and instead i go to bed. Never the less, now I have lots to write about, but one step at a time.

Advent

The two biggest traditions that I observed in advent season are advent’s calendars and advent’s wreaths. We (in Monroe at least) are familiar with the chocolate advent’s calendars. Here, there was a much greater variety of calendars available. Many people had home made advent’s calendars. These were pretty simple, consisting of little, numbered pockets on a larger surface. Another variation I saw was a paper calendar. It was about as exciting as it sounds. Instead of a piece of chocolate behind the flap, there was a picture. [Sarcasm]I know that would have motivated me a child to count down the days before Christmas.[end sarcasm] The advent’s wreath is four candles (for the four Sundays of Advent) arranged in a wreath composed of coniferous greenery. Also in this pre-Christmas period, it is obligatory to bake enough cookies to feed the family and neighbors for a month in the case that you’re snowed in and all other food mysteriously becomes inedible. Ok, so maybe not that many cookies, but the fact remains, that I spent an entire day slaving away in the kitchen baking delicious cookies. One type of cookie was a hazelnut-spritz-cookie, another was an almond-spritz-cookie, and the third was a normal sugar cookie. Delicious

First off, I must apologize for being less than attentive in my  blog posts. I tend to use the internet at night, and often I neglect writing and/or speaking to my mother, and instead i go to bed. Never the less, now I have lots to write about, but one step at a time.

Advent

The two biggest traditions that I observed in advent season are advent’s calendars and advent’s wreaths. We (in Monroe at least) are familiar with the chocolate advent’s calendars. Here, there was a much greater variety of calendars available. Many people had home made advent’s calendars. These were pretty simple, consisting of little, numbered pockets on a larger surface. Another variation I saw was a paper calendar. It was about as exciting as it sounds. Instead of a piece of chocolate behind the flap, there was a picture. [Sarcasm]I know that would have motivated me a child to count down the days before Christmas.[end sarcasm] The advent’s wreath is four candles (for the four Sundays of Advent) arranged in a wreath composed of coniferous greenery. Also in this pre-Christmas period, it is obligatory to bake enough cookies to feed the family and neighbors for a month in the case that you’re snowed in and all other food mysteriously becomes inedible. Ok, so maybe not that many cookies, but the fact remains, that I spent an entire day slaving away in the kitchen baking delicious cookies. One type of cookie was a hazelnut-spritz-cookie, another was an almond-spritz-cookie, and the third was a normal sugar cookie. Delicious