It was a beautiful Saturday to meet with friends this past week. The July team had their third training where we were able to delve deeper into learning about Romania and each other.
In this training we really got to dig deeper into thinking through our own life stories and how our ‘life moments’ this past year have taught us and changed us. We saw the importance in how our stories shared create the reciprocal relationships with us and others which form the greater bonds of honest friendship.
We walked the line, so to speak, in a cultural activity which taught us where we landed on the spectrum of night owls vs early risers to risk taker versus cautious. We now know who we need to keep an eye more on, Curtis and Stets, are team adrenaline junkies. In this same exercise we were able to also learn where we tend to stand based on our cultural influence. Are we more collaborative or independent decision makers. Do we like top down power structures or more shared power opportunities. It was a very good experience to see where we all stood and see that we all come from such varied perspectives and how this can be applied in our Romanian mission as a team.
Further, as our team consists of all alumni now we started to look at the bigger picture questions of where this mission will be fitting into our larger faith walk and life. We wrote a letter to ourselves detailing our hopes of what we want to change and who we would like to be after this mission. We then continued to write out our five point action plan of specific goals of staying connected now and through our entire journey.
Finally, Rhondi taught us all on resilency in teens using the 7 Cs of competence, confidence, coping, connection, contribution, character and control. We hope now to reinforce these in our summer programming with the kids empowering them and building new skills.
It was a great training full of learning new things about ourselves and others. Please continue to support our mission this summer.
Blessings,
Ashleigh
(On behalf of the July Team)
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- July 2015
