ferret or mink?

A few slightly significant things have happened in the past few days. I am mostly just continuing to settle into life here. For the most part it is good, but some parts aren’t so easy.

Last Thursday I went to my volunteer site at Southwest Community Development Corporation. I haven’t been super busy there so I thought I would probably spend the day doing some menial task that I really didn’t enjoy. Instead I got thrown into the world of emergency grants for energy/heating needs. Miss Anna is the lady at SWCDC that handles LIHEAP and Crisis, programs that give aid to families who can’t pay their heating bills. Miss Anna gave me a crash course in how to apply for these programs and then sent people to me so I could go through their paper work and help them get the help they needed. I met some really cool people. I met one guy who was a young dad and father of two. He worked really hard, and his wife had even started to work part time to try and make ends meet. At the end of that they still didn’t have enough money to pay their bills and their gas was turned off. I got to work with him and do something really small to help him and his family. It was a really good day.

Saturday I smelled like fish most of the day. That morning most of us in the house went with Lu (our housemate) to one of her service sites to help with a fundraiser. This fundraiser was of course selling fried fish platters. (I hate to eat and smell like fried fish). They also had a flea market there and I bought an awesome necklace. My housemate Tera also bought something. We think that it once was a ferret or perhaps a mink. It is really gross and has already given us hours of entertainment. After that some of us headed to our local library to join in a protest. Over the past few weeks in Philly there has been some unrest because of Mayor Nutter’s budget cuts. Some of the things that are being cut are public libraries and public swimming pools. Most of the libraries that are being cut are in low income areas where people need access to the internet. So our library (www.savekingsessinglibrary.com) is being cut and it really sucks. There was an awesome rally about it with speeches from our elected officials on what we can do to make sure the Library isn’t closed. There is another rally next week that I will try and take pictures at.

Last but not least I might have washed my phone at the Laundromat. Ok I did wash my phone. I couldn’t find it on Sunday after I had a long conversation with Brooke and Catlin, and I just supposed that it was somewhere I couldn’t find. I even checked the pockets of my pants. So actually I have no idea how it got into the washing machine, but it did. Amazingly enough it still functions almost normally. The screen goes out every once in a while, but that is nothing that I can’t handle. My mom said I completed the circle that my sister started (Sarah dropping hers in a cup of water, Deborah flushing hers down a toilet). Glad I could bring something into completion.

Rebekah