Days 1-2 of the ABC's Conference

Hey all! This is a late night post and I should be sleeping now but I'm going to do a quick entry...

I am currently at the Break Away ABC's Conference-it is a national conference that teaches you about how to run successful Alternative Breaks. I am a site-leader which means I was here 2 days early for extra training, and it has been amazing. It always blows me away when you get a group of people together who share the same passion and desire to make positive change in the world. I am also realizing how much I still have to learn and am inspired and amazed by programs from other schools around the country- some programs are sending 20+ trips a break!!! There are 10 of us site leaders with so many different backgrounds and personalities. We have all agreed that we are a very odd group but somehow it works really well :) Tonight was "family bonding"- we went to dinner at La Jolla (a Mexican restaurant in Broad Ripple), walked around downtown for about 3 hours, then came back and played in the fountain on campus. The Break Away staff was meeting in a room that is on the first floor and full of windows so after playing in teh fountain, we all walked by teh window and pretended like there were stairs we were walking down :) We thought we were pretty funny! Then all of us played games until a little after 1. This is such a unique group-usually there are 1 or 2 people who you have to beg to play games or hang out, but everybody was just out in the lobby hanging out.

We got to go visit all of the service sites today and they are amazing. The issue this week is disabilities and my group will be working with Damar. We will be doing some maintenance/beautification such as striping the track so that when the kids practice for the special olympics, they learn to run in the lines and will perform better at competitions. It sounds like we will get a little bit of time to hang out with the kids each day which will be really fun. It was fascinating to learn about the state wide services that are offered at all 4 of our sites today and it was fun to get to show off Indy to the out of towners. There are several people in the group who have never been here before!

I'm really excited for the participants to get here tomorrow! It will be super busy getting everything ready in the morning and I know it will fly by. We will start workshops and basically hit the ground running bright and early tomorrow....which means I should head to bed! Have a great week and I'll check in again when I can :)