Where has Loni been?

BUSY! That's where!

I've finally settled back into college life, but have started my new job as a resident advisor on campus. This means lots of work!

I flew from Panama to Sacramento, where I spent 24 hours at home with my family. Then I packed up my stuff and drove down to San Diego. RA training started the next day.  From 9-5 every day for 3 weeks, I was busy learning, bonding, and laughing with my new coworkers.  Although it was a pretty fun 3 weeks, if left very little time for blogging, eating, unpacking, etc... 

Training ended last Friday, but THEN, all our students moved in on Saturday.  For move-in (Saturday and Sunday) I worked 10 hours straight each day- from 9am to 7pm- meeting new residents and checking people in.

Now it's the first official week of school.. we don't have classes yet (well, technically they start today), and all the RAs are responsible for planning, organizing, and running fun activities to get the new students involved in campus and meeting their neighbors. By night, we break up parties and attempt to sleep among the chaos which is 1800 people getting to know each other.. at the top of their lungs.

I complain, but I love it. :)

Oh, and in my "free time" I plan extra fun activities for my residents, and attempt to be creative by making bulletin boards, door decorations, signs, etc to welcome my students and let them know about campus resources.

And I havent even mentioned the work I do for my classes, AMIGOS, unpacking and moving home from Panama, and working at my lab. That's a whole 'nother post. Sigh.

So that's a little bit of what I've been up to! Any tips for schedule-managing and stress-relieving? 

San Juan Bautista

Every year one weekend at the end of June in Chitré, where I currently live, the city explodes into a huge festival celebrating San Juan Bautista (one of the Catholic saints).  Friday is a drunken sort of horse parade, Saturday hosts nightime activities and fireworks, and Sunday combines the two into a drunken cultural parade with traditional dress and beer.

And I got to experience it all this year (minus the drinking, of course, since I was working)...

It was pretty entertaining.

Happy Monday!

I'm on phone/hospital duty today (basically like being the on-call staff person for all 60 volunteers in case anything should happen), which means it's the first real free time I've had in about a month (until the phone rings..)  In my house. All by myself. With my computer and everything.

It's nice.

I also figured it might be a great opportunity to update the ol' bloggeroo and let you all in on what I've been up to the rest of the time.  So, coming this week are a ton of new posts!! Be excited!

First up, an update on community visits.  A huge part of my job this summer is preparing everything for the volunteers' arrival: from host families, to evacuation plans, to rotating meal plans, to community contacts and project ideas.  Before the supervisors got here, the other Senior Staff members and I visited a few of the communities, just making primary contact and warning them of our supervisors' and volunteers' imminent arrival.

Then, last week, as part of my duties as Senior Project Supervisor I went on a week-long survey, where I arranged more of the logistical details within communities, filled out a "profile" of each community, and stayed a night each one (since I am a member of Senior Staff, I only have 2 communities, but all of the supervisors do the same thing for 4 nights).  I also ended up having to go out to one of the other supervisor's communities, due to some trouble we were having, so really I got to go hang out in 3 different, beautiful, and welcoming communities.

If you didn't quite understand all of that, no worries, just know that it was a lot of work but also a lot of fun, and I got a few good pictures!

Because why wouldn't you play cards at a bus stop?

Color version of the photo above.

It was a wild adventure, and I loved every minute :)