Odds and Ends

06.28.09

Kate (my roomie) and I are finally realizing that we can stop trying to halt the inevitable flow our our belongings from attempted organization to our natural states of disorganized clutter. It's very nice, looking more and more like home everyday! We're putting maps up on our walls, along with pictures that we've picked up while traveling, by the end of the trip I'm going to be very attached to our room!

Tonight the Explorer Seminar I attended was for BeadforLife: a nonprofit organization that provides poor Ugandan women with an opportunity to lift their families out of poverty by making beaded jewelry out of recycled paper. The beaders are all women who are HIV+ or refugees and who can provide for their families and the orphans that they take care of with the money they get from their beading. The bracelets, necklaces, and earrings are all really gorgeous and the beaders receive fair trade prices for their jewelry. Also, any proceeds from sales go into programs that fight extreme poverty in health, housing, and education. It was really cool and I got a few of the bracelets...you guys should all go look at www.BeadforLife.org to see the video (? I think), pictures of the jewelry, and if you want to do even more good, you can host a bead party in your town or school...BeadforLife will send you a bunch jewelry for free and then you send back whatever money you get and leftover jewelry after it's done. :)

It's time for essays and tests, before Italy, and I'm also starting my intramural co-ed volleyball and soccer leagues! I don't know the guys on my teams...so that'll be interesting.

And I don't know if I've said anything about this before...but the ship's kitchen crew does these really cool sculptures out of the fruit leftovers (pineapples, watermelons, cantelopes...) after they've been cut up for us to eat. Usually they're flowers and the like, but today there was a sculpture of a puppy out of a melon!