I finished Americans in Waiting last night, so that's another book to check off the Foreign Service reading list. Since I'm interested in the consular cone, it's especially important that I understand immigration issues, and I know that I learned a lot from this book. The legalese weighed me down in parts, but overall it was an easy read and very useful. I'm going to be teaching middle school ESL this year, so immigration policy has a huge impact on the lives of my students and their families, and this book helped me understand those issues better.
After finishing Americans in Waiting, I immediately started reading A Peace to End All Peace: The Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. It's a page-turner so far, and I'm not being sarcastic! It's much longer than the last couple of books I've read, though, so it will probably take a while to finish this one.
Aside from my reading, I've spent most of this week attending the Learn2Inspire academy, which is a week of summer professional development for teachers in my district. I used my commute to listen to the BBC Global podcast and PRI's America Abroad podcast, and I think it was a great use of my time.
The academy itself was interesting, and I'm excited to start teaching later this month, even if it's going to cut into my study time. I also picked up a couple of teaching books that I want to read before classes start, but I think they'll be quick reads and shouldn't interfere too much with my foreign service reading.
After one of the sessions on Wednesday, I drove to the medical district for the Red Cross new volunteer orientation. The presenter and most of the other volunteers were all retirees, which is what I usually find when I do volunteer work. It would be nice to meet some people my age, but I don't think that's ever going to happen for me; my friends tend toward the geriatric. The orientation included information about some of the different work they have available, and I marked that I was most interested in doing international case work, which involves trying to reunite families that have been separated by natural disasters, war, or other catastrophic events. I'm not sure exactly how to go about that, but they offer training. It sounds like it would involve making a lot of phone calls to refugee camps and hospitals abroad. I also marked an interest in being part of a disaster action team, which would mean being on-call at certain times of the day and night and going out to disaster areas (mostly fires, they said) to check up on victims and offer them whatever services they might need that the Red Cross can offer. Ideally, I'd like to do both of those jobs. There might also be an opportunity to give presentations about international humanitarian law, which sounds really fun, but it wasn't listed on our job sheet, so I added it at the bottom of the form just in case it becomes available. The Red Cross is a fantastic organization, and I'm really looking forward to volunteering with them and taking some more of their classes. I'm still waiting on their volunteer coordinator to call me and discuss the possibilities in greater depth, so hopefully that will happen soon.
In addition to all of that, I just signed up for an advanced Spanish conversation class that meets Saturday mornings. Tomorrow will be my first day. I'm not entirely sure that I'm an "advanced" Spanish speaker, but I figure I can bring myself to that level with some practice, and I'm up for the challenge. I've taken advanced grammar and composition and advanced speaking classes at university before, and I've read a couple of Spanish-language novels in the past few months, so I don't expect to be completely out of my league, but we'll see. The school is less than half a mile from where I live, which was one of the deciding factors when I chose it: it doesn't get much better than that, especially if I have to be there at 9 AM on a Saturday.
Meanwhile, I'm plugging away with my vocabulary work on Memrise.com, and I just started developing a grammar course for myself on that site. I'm not sure how well grammar will work with the way the site is designed, but just entering the information is a form of studying, so it can't be a total loss. I'm working my way through an "essential Spanish grammar review" document that I found online, and it's going well so far. I can recognize everything without much trouble, it's just a matter of using it in speech. That's where I struggle, and that's what I'm hoping to improve with this Saturday class.
I know I'm going to become incredibly busy once the school year starts, and some of these projects might have to fall to the wayside, but right now I feel full of energy and ready to tackle all of this head-on. Hasta la victoria, siempre!
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