A little bit of Everything

Hi Everyone! Hope it has been a great week for everyone. T-minus 1 week and counting till spring break 2012 for Rockhurst University students. I leave Thursday afternoon to fly back to Chicago it will be great to spend the week with my family. I have not seen them since January 1^st. Please keep all of those who have answered the call to go on service trips both nationally and internationally. I am not going on one of the trips this year but hope to travel on a future one. However I know countless people who are doing a service trip this break.

            This past week the group of us that traveled to Haiti over the break had our Haiti Presentation to the greater Rockhurst Community. In my opinion the presentation went great. Our group did a great job trying to describe an experience that is hard to describe to people who have never been to Haiti before. We had a really good turnout, over 60 students and faculty members attended our presentation.  So now that we finished with our presentation we can start to think about how we want to move forward with the ideas we came back from Haiti with.

            Other than our Haiti presentation it seemed to be a fairly normal week. I had one exam on Thursday and I have been starting to think about multiple term papers that I have to do. I am hoping I can get a large portion of them done while I am home for spring break. I also had my rehire interview for my Desk Manager position for next year so I will find out soon if I am rehired. Concurrently all those students who are interested in being Resident Assistants next school year have been going through their interview process. I have had a great experience as part of the Residence Life staff this year and I hope I can continue that experience next year.

            I apologize for being all over the place with this blog entry next week will flow better.

I came across a really good quote the other day that I would like to share: ‎"I asked for strength, and God gave me difficulties to make me strong. I asked for courage, and God gave me dangers to overcome. I asked for love, and God gave me people to help. I received nothing I wanted...I received everything I needed.”- Author Unknown

New York

Hi all, I apologize for being late in my weekly blog post. You may be wondering why my blog entry is called New York when I go to school in Kansas City. Well this past weekend I spent all of about 42 hours in New York for the Annual Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Honors Conference. It was a quick but fun trip. Last year Rockhurst has the privilege of hosting the national conference so I got to help with it and experience it as a freshman so it was really fun to go back and reconnect with some of the same students I had met last year. This year the Honors Director Dr. Mindy Walker went along with three other students who are all members of the Honors Executive Board with me

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            We got to stay at this nice hotel close to time square in downtown New York. So of course we did not only get to go to a great conference which was held at Fordham University but we got to see New York City. The night we got there we walked around time square and went to what we gathered was a famous New York City pizza place called John’s Pizza. Then the second day after the conference ended the students from all the schools went exploring. We went to the Metropolitan art museum as well as Central park and did a lot of walking. I really love these conferences you get to meet students from all over the country coming from all different walks of life. There is no reason that you would every cross paths with them if it was not for this conference but everyone is doing really exciting events both at their university both in the honors program and just at their university in general. For example two are spending the summer in Africa filming a documentary and another one is studying abroad in France next year just to name a few.

            We came back with a lot of good ideas for our honors program. Each schools honors program has their own unique DNA but there are always tips you can take from these conferences as well as just forming relationships and getting to meet a lot of awesome people. 

Finally... Haiti

One of the girls in the orphanage in Duchity, Haiti 

Hi everyone I hope you had a great week. Okay now I finally have a chance to describe the trip I took to Haiti over Winter break with 5 other Rockhurst Students and two faculty members. It was a dream come true for me to go back to Haiti. Ever since I had traveled to Haiti back in the summer of 2009 as part of a service trip I had always wanted to go back.

We traveled to a town called Duchity, Haiti which is the home of the twinning parish of my home parish. It is a 140 mile drive from Port-au-Prince although the drive took us 8 hours. While we were driving out of Port-au-Prince we saw blocks of just tents, this two years after the earthquake. It is crazy to see how different Haiti is and yet how close it is to the United States.

            While we were in Duchity we met with various community groups and school groups listening to their dreams and hopes for the future of Duchity. One group we had met with had dreams of building an internet café/ library and was looking for funding. Shortly into our trip we began to realize that these groups have good ideas however they have very little business knowledge which would have allowed them to realize that an internet café would not be able to be self-sustaining even with a grant to build the building. That is just one example of the various groups we met with. Perhaps one of the most memorable things we did was going to spend an afternoon at the orphanage. The kids there are just so full of life and so much fun to play with.

            For me I felt just this great sense of peace when I was down there, with limited electricity you just are able to be really present to the moment and to the people you are with. Our group is working on different ideas on how to help the community and we hope to return this summer. What really made the trip so great was the group I went with. I could not have asked to for a better group to go with. They are all amazing people with a true commitment to helping those who are less fortunate. Have a great week. 

Watching the super bowl… An end to an interesting weekend…

Hi all, Hope everyone had a great week. I am currently in the lobby of Corcoran watching the end of the Super Bowl with a group of residents. Hope everyone has had a good Super Bowl Sunday. I went to the 6pm student mass tonight and there were very few students there I guess everyone was thinking smart and went this morning. Maybe next year they should consider doing the mass earlier so everyone could still catch the Super Bowl and still attend the student mass. Other than watching the Super Bowl I had a meeting to plan our presentation to the campus on our Haiti trip that I was part of.

            This past Friday and Saturday I was at Mizzou as part of the Rockhurst Delegation for the Certified Peer Educator training. I was supposed to go last year but it got snowed out with the big snow storm that hit the area a year ago. The training covered some good information some of which I had heard before however we did go over some information which I had not heard before. It was probably the most sitting I have done in a two day stretch in the same chair in a long time. We had 5 hours of training on Friday night and almost 10 hours of training on Saturday. It ended with us taking a test over what we had covered. If we got an 80% on the test we will become CPE certified for life. It was a great group of us from Rockhurst that went I got to know them more. . At the training there were over a 100 students from various colleges and universities across the state.

This week looks to be a busy week with an accounting test Wednesday and a two quizzes this week also. So it should be fun. Hope you have a great week. I wont forget to talk about our Haiti trip next week.