My First Snow Fall

As I sat at my desk brainstorming for winter camp lesson plan ideas, the blanket of cloudy skies once again caught my eye. I sighed at the realization that the sun probably would not return until tomorrow… but then, small pieces of white stuff caught my attention. They were lightly blowing in the wind. As if I was part of the Matrix trilogy, I slowly rose from my chair, grabbed my American phone and walked to the window. Two nights before, I was hit by this ‘stuff’ in the face for a brief minute or so… but this time I could see it:

*~*~ Snow ~*~*

Little pieces of lint blowing through the air. My weather geek-ness understood exactly how it formed, why, and its origin… but my mind was boggled. I watched in amazement. How could this stuff come from the skies? Is someone sitting on top of the school’s building dumping “Made in Korea” cotton balls into a warehouse fan? (Talk about ultimate ‘fan death’…)

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More Than Food~ My Thanksgiving Abroad

Well, who would’ve guessed that Thanksgiving is more than sweet potato pies and steaming hot juicy turkey surrounded by baked apples and other goodies?

As every year passes, ‘Thanksgiving’ is replaced with ‘turkey’ in the nearly-official holiday greeting: “Happy Turkey Day!” I do love my pumpkin pie, home-made stuffing, pound cakes, and who could forget my favorite, peach cobbler? But the heavy emphasis on food made Thanksgiving a holiday that I both loved and disliked.

The holiday highlight… click to read on

I adore the moments with family and friends. I love the cheers, the laughs, the awkward dances, and jointly screaming at the football games as if the players could hear… but I’m not a fan of the continuous talk about food preparation, recipe comparisons or trying to stuff yourself all at once. (Anyone who really knows me knows that I’m a huge supporter of the ‘doggy bag’.)

Planning My First Community Program

I’m starting to see what I love to do- planning health promotion programs.

I love the thrill of getting to know what people want (needs assessment), combine it with what is needed (data reports) and use creativity to pull it all together. I’ve just learned about logic models in Evaluation class. It’s really organizing my thoughts. Planning and organizing the programs are like a natural energy rush. You get surprised and excited about ideas. You get disappointed by various things that don’t go as planned. Still, you can only hope for the best.

Right now, I have to keep reminding myself that I have tons of homework due as I plan for a program for my church. I really, really want this event to make some sort of impact on our target audience. It’s a program for World AIDS Day 2011. It will be held in less than two weeks at my church in Jacksonville. The main portion is a talent show. I’m trying to recruit sponsors for the event, mainly Domino’s. I wanted people to test everyone for HIV. Yet, it’s too late to get the equipment in. Unless…. maybe there is a way. If not, the program will simply be an awareness program. I just hope that it’s a blast. This will be my FIRST community program.

I created a poster that would be used on Facebook, Twitter and these blogs. I just need to create flyers to pass out to the neighborhoods. I created a blog for the church’s events. So, that’s up and running now. I also incorporated text messages into the advertising. I plan to create a video for the event as well as a Facebook event page.

HIV/AIDS is a global epidemic but this event is going to be epic =)