A Weekend Getaway!

The time here is still flying by! The past few weeks have been a little stressful, what with my class papers and finishing my TWC portfolio, as well as attending class, civic engagement, and work. Work has been work, and while I do not want to pursue law as a career (yet!), I have made valuable contacts for my future endeavors.

A few weeks ago, the Law and Criminal Justice program toured The Pentagon. The tour was interesting, but I felt it moved too quickly. There were numerous displays along the way, and we were not afforded enough time to read them over, in my opinion. In the POW/MIA hallway, we learned that more than 74,000 military men and women are still missing and have been since the Vietnam War. This is distressing to me because I never imagined that many people were missing.

We then entered the wing where Flight 77 crashed into The Pentagon. In this hallway, it dawned upon me that I was standing where 184 people were killed by a terrorist attack. This sat heavy on my shoulders, until we entered the memorial. The memorial is housed in a small room off of a chapel inside The Pentagon. It has the names of every person killed aboard the flight and who were inside the building at the time, as well as a Purple Heart medal and a Defense of Freedom Medal, the medal given to the civilians.

It was very touching and awe-inspiring to see the books of the victims, in which family members placed a picture and wrote about each individual. There was not enough time to peruse the victim book, but it was saddening and encouraging at the same time. I did not have time to see the benches outside, but I would love to return. This tour was interesting and worthy of anyone’s time.

After all this, my friends and I decided it was time for a break. We needed a mini-vacation before they started their portfolio work, and I needed a break after all my hard work. We settled on Virginia Beach, VA because it is only three hours away, and it was going to be 90 degrees!!!!! Whoever knew???

We packed up and left Saturday morning (after a few bumps in the road that included our friends not waking up on time, even though they set the departure time AND Yes and I had been up since 5 A.M.!), arriving in VA Beach around 12:30 P.M. We checked into our hotel rooms and headed to the beach. Sand always makes or breaks a beach to me. The sand here was a little rough towards the hotel, but finer and smoother near the water. We pretty much hung out on the beach all weekend, and ate dinner at a seafood restaurant on a marina. It was a great trip, and we ended up leaving around 4 P.M. on Sunday.

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking….

The view from our hotel balcony!

Jumping for joy at the beach.

Yes and myself in the water…The Atlantic is COLD!

Random artwork on the beach. After this picture, we noticed a sign that says, “Do not climb on artwork.” That doesn’t count as climbing, right??

The beach at sunset.

One of the Best Days of My Life

As I have stated numerous times before in this blog, I am at a fork in the road in my life. One path leads to social work, and the other leads to law. This internship has afforded me various opportunities to see social justice enacted in different ways. I have seen the legal side of abuse and neglect cases, and I longed to see the social work side. Fortunately for me, I was able to ride along with a group of three, young social workers to their home visits. The social workers are in the Office of Youth Division, which deals with teenagers between the ages of sixteen and twenty, whose goals are Alternative Planned Permanent Living Arrangements (APPLA) and who are aging out of the system. They ensure services have been set in place that will help these young adults live life after the system.

The visits would go like this (generally) – we would walk in, greet the client, joke around, and then ask what they have been up to, whether they have done what the social workers last asked of them, and whether they are following court orders. I met seven teens who were polite and ranged from ecstatic to see the social workers (one girl asked if she could come along!) to indifferent (one boy texted on his phone as the social worker spoke to him). One teen even asked if I would become his social worker (because his current social worker is moving to England soon).

It does not sound like much, but as I watched these women interact with their clients, I became enthralled by their work. They had developed a sort of friendship with the clients, not just a “you’re-the-client-I’m-your-social-worker” relationship. Each woman worked well with the clients and listened to what they had to say before telling them what needed to be done; they respected each person as a person. They celebrated in their clients’ successes and scolded clients for failures. They joked with each client, and a few were invited back to the office for the next day. Each social worker connected on a level with their client because, in my opinion, they were young at heart and could find a nexus to relate to their clients. These broad explanations do not do these women justice; they are the epitome of the best social workers.

They have influenced my decisions on the near future, and for the time being, I have decided to pursue a career within the social work field.

Civically Engaged

Last week and this week have been crammed with civic engagement! I recently had my volunteer training at Offender Aid and Restoration, and then volunteered the night after. Let me just say this: I LOVED it. I was offered an internship position at OAR a while back, but I had already taken the OAG internship so I had to decline. I wish I had taken the OAR internship in some respects because this organization is a hands-on, direct service type of organization. I’m not entirely sure what the interns do there, but I love the volunteering.

My first night after training, another volunteer and I helped a man in employability readiness. I know as a criminal justice major that I shouldn’t have preconceived images of people, but I was a little anxious about this man after the volunteer coordinator told me he had done ten years hard time in federal prison for conspiracy to traffick and distribute drugs. That is HUGE! So, this big man with very white teeth, a nice smile, a soft face, and who was dressed appropriately with his jeans pulled up to his hips, a t-shirt tucked into them, and a leather jacket on top rounded the corner of the OAR office. He looked to be around thirty-five years old. I assumed he was another volunteer until the volunteer coordinator told me this was the client. My mouth tried not to drop as he shook my hand and introduced himself politely.

All three of us worked on his résumé, reference list, and mulled over job search engines. The client was soft spoken and polite the entire night. After he left, I sat in with yet another volunteer on a literacy tutoring session. They were going over different sounds that letters make, such as “-ou,” “-ie,” and “-ir,” and reading them out loud in paragraphs to recognize certain words that contained these sets of letters.

Last night, there were no clients, so the volunteer coordinator, another volunteer and I had some training on how to instruct a client to disclose their offense. There’s a three step process to it: disclose the offense, take responsibility for the crime, and show that you have paid your debt; describe what you are doing to improve your life; and make your employer feel at ease in hiring you. This sounds easy to do, but harder in practice. One client had been convicted on attempted malicious wounding, and had anger management problems. This presents an obstacle in trying to disclose the crime. Eventually, the coordinator and client worked it out so that the disclosure was appropriate for the client and employer.

On to my weekend in pictures….

Ultrabar Friday night…let me tell you guys, Yes and I got in free cover, open bar, and VIP! All thanks to Sabrina!

Yes, Sabrina, and myself

Cherry Blossom Festival Saturday afternoon...

The Tulip Library was seriously even prettier than the cherry blossoms.

Advice for the day:

If you live in D.C. in the spring and want to see the cherry blossoms, wait a week or so after the cherry blossom festivities. They will probably be prettier than they are that weekend, and there aren’t as many people there gawking at them. Seriously, we had to sit on the Metro for at least two minutes before the doors opened to let us out because the platform had to clear of all the people. Then, there was a LONG line to get back into the Metro station.