Nostalgia

I'm in Peer Leader training these days, which means I'm spending the majority of every day (no, we don't get weekends off) around other similarly self-motivated, overly helpful, crazy enthusiastic students. We're going through training to be the best possible resources for incoming freshmen. I'm having a blast! The group of Peer Leaders this year is phenomenal. They accepted fewer applicants, so some freshmen seminars will have only one Peer Leader, rather than the usual two. The result is that the more experienced Peer Leaders (who are generally the ones leading seminars alone [like me]) won't be held back by a less-qualified Peer Leader, and the less experienced Peer Leaders have partners to help them out. The less experienced Peer Leaders are better fits for the program than a lot of people who Peer Led my sophomore year, so I think things will go very well this year.

In our social time, I often find myself talking to others about my time in Senegal. ALL THE TIME. It makes me miss Senegal pretty terribly. In particular, I find myself describing how welcoming Senegalese people were to us, and how we were immediately invited to birthday parties, weddings, and baptisms--even by people we'd just met. I miss the way people were so eager to get to know others. Networking is so important there that everyone wants to be friends with everyone else. The networks people form open up all kinds of opportunities for them, and everyone helps out everyone else in their network. Looking at it that way, it's easier to understand why there's so much corruption in Senegalese government--politicians have to bestow favors upon people in their networks.

On a different note, there are lots of exciting and stressful things coming up for me. I move houses in four days, I need to turn in a new draft of my SIP ASAP, Orientation starts in three days, and I need to come up with a silks routine in the next week and a half. I'm halfway through ordering my own aerial silk (I'm waiting on some information from the woman I'm ordering through), and I started a Cafe Press store selling items with the Cirque Du K logo on them. Things are moving right along.

Tonight some people at my house are hanging out and dressing up and drinking cocktails. I'm looking forward to doing that and then getting to sleep in tomorrow morning, finally. I hope everyone has a great Labor Day!

...and sorry this post was sort of all over the place.