Today is one of those days when I’m glad I didn’t wear shoes.

I got up around 8:30, slipped on my “vegan” sandals and was out the door by 9, arriving at the food warehouse close to 9:30 (see photo I secretly snapped). I arrived prepared, after last week’s hour-and-a-half debacle, and after poring over the “picking list” and choosing the healthiest-seeming drinks and snacks, I pulled out my book and settled in for a long wait. To my great surprise, 10 minutes later my order was called, and I loaded it in my car and continued on to work.

Once there I had a couple hours before my next planned obligation, and I proceeded to busy myself with office tasks: changing the calendar to September and transferring the important dates, preparing items to bring to this weekend’s long-anticipated WorldFest which I’ll be attending both days in order to supervise the program's booth, and checking work e-mail. I got word of an upcoming grant opportunity, signed up for a community fair for refugees and immigrants aimed at orienting them to the area and its commodities, and then my spuervisor got a call. It was from Mildred, the seasoned, fiery head of the Louisville VISTA office. She wanted to let my boss know that someone had applied for the other Lac Viet VISTA position.

My heart immediately jumped. Having a co-worker would lessen the intensity of it just being two of us in that office all day (not to mention lessen my workload). Boss checked the application online and read out to me this woman’s qualifying attributes. They sounded GREAT…and slightly familiar. I didn’t know there were so many people coming to Louisville from Florida, having studied Marine Biology, working on a Master’s in Education, having formerly served in Americorps…

I about popped a vein in my forehead when I shouted “I KNOW HER!” Last Friday the VISTAs went on a bus tour of some of the other sites (we did this as our required monthly meeting, see photo of Churchill Downs). Afterwards my roommate and I returned to the house en route of a coffee shop on Bardstown Road, where she saw a coffee shop patron wearing a bright red Americorps shirt. The three of us began a conversation about Americorps, this woman told us she had just moved to the area from Florida where she did a year with Americorps, and we told her about our individual positions. She seemed really intrigued, and I told her to check out the Web site because several positions in Louisville were still available. Not only did she do just that – but she applied for the position at MY SCHOOL! Al hamdulileh!!!

After that tremendous realization and after Boss’s brief phone conversation with the potential co-worker, a VISTA stopped by to pick up some extra books we had that he could use at his site. Things then settled down and I busied myself with putting together packets for volunteers. At 1:00, a woman from the University of Louisville came by to check out the school for a potential work study partnership. She’s enthusiastic, energetic and has experience with kids…I’m pumped. In the midst of that a man came in to register two of his nieces in the after-school program, and after that it was nearly 3:00 and Boss left for the day.

I finally got a chance to finish checking my (work) e-mail, then moved on to my non-work e-mail, and soon it was nearly 4:00. I left and picked up 3 Cuban girls who are participating in the mural project, then brought them back to the program where we met with 6 other girls from around the world, two volunteers, a fellow VISTA of mine who works at Kentucky Refugee Ministries and a local artist named Nico who’s guiding this project. It was a fun two hours of ART. The kids (they’re all girls, interestingly enough) drew and painted in preparation for painting this mural, and several of them are slowly but surely warming up to us. Two sisters who are from Russia but are of Turkish heritage are particularly frosty (see photo of me with them) – they’re rather bitter that we didn’t invite their 8 other Russian Turkish girlfriends to participate in the project. The younger one was really enthusiastic this time around – she brought Russian music to play while we all worked, asked me questions about Arabic and commented on my glasses (she’s supposed to be wearing glasses too). Her sister spent most of the two hours sitting back sullenly in her chair with arms crossed, but toward the very end picked up some of the watercolors I’d been desperately trying to get her to use and began painting an extremely lovely tree scene. Nico alternated between working on his own drawing which will be the base for the mural and circling the table, admiring everyone’s work and giving encouragement. By the end the tables (and some of the girls) were splattered in paint, the nearby desks were covered in sopping masterpieces waiting to dry and I had exchanged a written Greek alphabet with the younger sister who gave me the Russian equivalent. I gave the Cuban girls a ride home (see photo of then with Nico) and proceeded back to my own neck of town.

After returning home I had enough time to exchange work-related items in my bag with extra-curricular ones and headed down the block to the coffee shop. At 8:00 I met my new Mauritanian friend, and we proceeded to practice Arabic. I had borrowed “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” written in Arabic and English from the library, and we went through the entire thing while he helped me with my reading and pronunciation. Then we just sat back and talked about travels, languages, politics in the Middle East and starting a real language table with other Arabic hopefuls. By 10:00 our teas were depleted and we parted ways.

I walked back to the house, said hello to some of the guys who were watching an excruciatingly boring-looking movie, clumped upstairs and kicked off my sandals for the first time in 13 hours. Had they been shoes, I would have passed out from the stench of my own feet.

It’s been a very good day.

Here are some surreptitious photos taken of the FANTASTIC resource center at a local high school intended to whet a mousy elementary teacher’s dreams: It consists of ROLLS of construction paper you pay for by the foot, a LAMINATING machine, a cabinet full of colored paper and a WALL of stamps. Those stamps – they were like nothing I could have imagined. Ever wonder how teachers make such nice-looking bulletin boards in the hallways at schools? They CHEAT. They take these blocks which have a wooden base and spongy foam with a metal stencil on the other side, slide them into these nifty presses, heave the lever down two or three times and end up with – you NAME it: a snowman, a fire truck, any letter of the alphabet, mathematical notations, all neatly stamped from colored construction paper. There are some crazy stamps, too. You can tack up the fleur de lis (the symbol of Louisville), Africa, a hand making the peace sign, the outline of a boy or a girl, the Coliseum …