January 29, 2017 - 21:16
Unfortunately, I've been sick with the flu since Tuesday so I missed class on Wednesday and Thursday and wasn't able to join my group on our first Praxis trip. While I am excited and anxious to get better so I can return to the class and join my classmates, as well as hear about the other Praxis sites, I can't help but feel like I've fallen behind just a little beecause I couldn't join everyone for the majority of our second week of the semester, and therefore missed a lot of the courssekeeping and discussions that took place in the classroom. As I continue to think about the upcoming experiences I will have with the organization, my mind keeps returning to the only other volunteer program I've participated in with youths, which was an after school tutoring and companion program at a local elementary school in Seaside, California near my high school. Similar to this organization, I worked with kids from less fortunate and privileged families or situations. Though, I'm sure the people I'll be working with will be an older group than the young elementary school students I worked with in California. As I always do when I prepare myself for volunteering, I am reminding myself of the very real realities of the lesser privileged lives of these people, and that, while this may be a one semester off-campus volunteer program for a course I am taking at my private college, the people who need the aid of these volunteer programs are very much real and wouldn't be with the program if their lives didn't fully need to be.