Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

I had heard the Museum of the American Indian was pretty good, and I was excited to go, so when I heard my roommate and her friends from back home were going, I asked to tag along. Thankfully I did because I was so pleasantly surprised. Other museums in the Smithsonian collection are cool, but especially the Museum of American History seemed to be the same old American point of view. But as soon as we entered the first exhibit, we could tell it had an incredible amount of input from so many different Native American groups. This museum was so well done and so powerful, we all just marveled at the layout of the exhibits as you meandered through different displays and histories, at the beautiful sayings on the wall, and at the richness of these cultures. So many beautiful, peaceful peoples almost completely destroyed by greedy, warring peoples. Why do we still let this persist in our world? It was so great to finally see Native Americans telling their own story rather than the traditional story told about them by caucasians. Too bad we only were able to spend about an hour and a half there; we felt we could spend an entire day.

Random thoughts:
- I miss my comforter.
- Where's a racket stringer when I need one?
- I'm learning business lingo! Quite funny that "as is" and "to be" are used as nouns by my coworkers without a second thought...

The sayings are so beautiful, please click on the photos to read them and go to my Picasa album for more!

Rezina and her friends, then roomie photo!








Representation from Pine Ridge, where St. Luke does work!

Peace Corps Interns on the move

What could have easily turned into a debacle was actually an incredibly fun evening. So as part of my program, we're scheduled to not work on Fridays, but I was headed to work at 5pm on Friday afternoon and I was really excited because one of the Peace Corps interns sent out an email to all the interns at the Headquarters to go out to dinner and then perhaps Jazz in the Garden. Apparently "Jazz in the Garden" happens every Friday night in the garden by the array of Smithsonian museums, and it is immensely popular in the DC scene. So being a new Peace Corps intern, I was really looking forward to meeting other interns! And not having work, I had gone out to lunch at an adorable little cafe after class and then relaxed for a couple hours in Dupont Circle (as much as I could relax - my roommates and I were waiting to hear back from our Program Advisor about the possibility of moving apartments. About a week ago we discovered a mouse, and over the course of just a couple days there were scratching noises in the walls, nibble holes things strewn about the kitchen, and mice actually seen emerging from our stove burners. Normally I can handle the idea of mice, but this just seemed like a health hazard. Don't worry, we moved apartments this weekend!). It was fun to write in my journal and sneakily take photos of the men playing speed chess in the closest thing to a park in downtown DC.

Anyways, I arrived at the Peace Corps at about 4:50 to meet the other interns, but after showing my badge to the security officer, the officer at the security desk then asked, "Are you here for that intern thing?" After my affirmative reply he proceeded to hand me a pink note that said "Hey, Kathryn! All employees got sent home at 4, so we headed out but call this number if you want to meet up with us." Apparently everybody got to go home an hour early for the 4th of July weekend, but the intern I had met just a day earlier and is coincidentally in my program as well was so sweet in leaving a note for me! So I set off in search of the Peace Corps crew, and as they wandered unsure of what restaurant to go to, a couple metro switches and quite a few phone calls back and forth to pinpoint each other's location later, I finally found the interns heading into Ruby Tuesdays and graciously thanked my newfound friend Tschuna for all her help. It was great to hang out with the other interns, though only 5 others could make it, and they're all great people I can talk about serious matters but also be silly around as well. A pretty relaxed crew. Following the dinner escapade, the now notoriously indecisive group splintered off and I headed to Jazz in the Park with Brittney and Tschuna.

The Garden was completely packed! Tons of people had brought picnic blankets, others brought treats to share with friends, still others met their parties by the large wading pool seemingly not permitting wading.
Brittney and me, Tschuna and me


Common practice, though, was to submerge your feet into the pool to attempt to cool off as you listened to some fun music and watched people dance. People were actually dancing! Watching others salsa and chatting about hobbies with the girls really re-energized my love for dancing, and Tschuna even asked me to teach her how to salsa (sometime when we weren't around throngs of people)! Not like I know much, but it's incredibly fun.

As the jazz ended for the evening, something perhaps completely normal but entirely unexpected for us was people started running through the pool in pairs! Some couples, some friends, but it seemed like the object of the game was to be received by the crowd on the opposite side from where you started from and to avoid the park security circling the pool to escort you out of the supposedly forbidden water. The observers lived and died with each hop, skip, and trip of those who dared attempt the crossing!



After this absurd ritual, Brittney headed home, and Tschuna and I made the decision to stay downtown and wander around the Smithsonian area and the capitol at dusk. The lights were beautiful, the buildings majestic, and the conversation incredibly entertaining as we divulged some of our life stories and silly little personal quirks. And somehow all this wandering led to the perhaps impulsive decision to wander even further: we decided to walk back to Georgetown from the capitol! And meandering through the routes the monuments gave us an approximately three mile route we completed in about an hour and a half (without boredom or blisters!). My luckiness of schedule flexibility, a little built-up city directional intuition, and some new friends made for a great day.



We listened to the orchestra's rehearsal for their 4th of July concert!


World War 2 Memorial











Quotes and thoughts:
- "This is Georgetown University, one of the most expensive universities and they can't even take care of their freaking mice!"
- "I just feel dirty, I don't want to find mouse poo in my cereal, I don't want to eat mice for dinner or shower with mice." I find this reasonable...
- On a bus ride through what is termed "Embassy Row," I read the huge banner on the Finnish embassy saying it is now "green" and is the first LEED certified embassy in the US! It was strangely comforting to see such a modern-looking building with tons of beautiful glass windows with ivy coming down the sides of the building.
- Having had my Comparative Economics final Friday morning, I very well could be done with econ forever!
- The new apartment just feels so much cleaner. How much we rejoiced in the simple pleasure of having no navy colored mold above our showers.
- I love learning! I love learning about people, about things, about culture. And I am quite excited for Georgetown's take on US foreign policy this coming month.

State Department Site Briefing

Part of our program is the opportunity to go on site briefings - basically where a group of us get to go sit in an important government building and hear about what is going on. We all have to dress professionally, AKA dress or pantsuits for girls. So on Tuesday morning my roommates and I spent much more time than usual fretting about whether or not our outfits were appropriate or not, tossing our normal purse objects about our room based on what we could and couldn't bring in, and prepping our feet for more walking in heels.

Outside of the Department of State, where our huge group waited for a good half hour to go through metal detectors and send our things through xrays but it was cool once we got in!


They modeled the room after the UN - it's 2 stories and numerous rows of really comfy chairs that have little plugins to hear speeches translated! Not ours though, we just got a briefing, everything in English...


Bernice and me so excited! It just felt really cool to be in that giant room where people that have an actual influence on how some things in our world work. I actually met Bernice that day and she is a complete sweetheart. She is from Haiti and we ended up talking about our families, things we do for fun, foreign languages, and singing and acting for a really long time. It's so amazing when people from really different backgrounds find their personalities and interests converge!













Three spoke to us on the various subjects related to western hemispheric issues, and it was really cool to get the spiel on what some of our government personalities are working on. And even cooler to hear kids from our program ask each one questions related or only semi-related to their main topics and try to get to the heart of a lot of issues and current events. The first guy was from the Bureau of Western Hempispheric Affairs, directed a number of programs related to South America, and even volunteered in the Peace Corps! He spoke to us mostly on the importance of free market economics to increase prosperity especially for those in what are deemed third world nations. Then a woman from the Latin American office of the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs got pretty in depth about joint efforts between Mexico and the US to stem the flow of drug trafficking across our border, and I was pleasantly surprised with how much she clued us into her actual personal opinions - that is definitely not easy to do in that environment. The last speaker was Director of the Office of Mexican Affairs in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, and I'll give him credit for even though he didn't emphasize the humanitarian aspect as much as I would have expected with the arguments he was making, it definitely seemed like he was also stepping outside his political bounds to push freer immigration laws in our national interest. It was also a fun experience to go to work that afternoon and have my supervisor say, "Tell me all about it!"

Random thoughts from today:
- Were politicians and civil servants in high places at some point passionate about what they're doing? Is there still a passion lying beneath the government politically correct speech that channels what they think the government wants us to hear?
- Who knew all these bureaus and departments even within the State Department even existed?
- Why do so many guys here wander around in preppy polo shirts and khakis?
- Every day I am re-reminded of why I switched to a Mac before starting college. I love the fact that I get a laptop at work, but it seems that not even the IT people realize there is something better out there than waiting around for your silly PC to catch up to you.
- Today I was also reminded that the Peace Corps is, albeit independent, a government agency. There was quite a stir up here on the sixth floor when somebody spotted a bunch of Homeland Security trucks and motorcycles parked in front of our doors downstairs. Thankfully they were just here to train our security guards.
- I had never heard anyone say "It's whatever" before coming out here. And I've heard it from both west-coasters and east-coasters! Perhaps the Midwest is just slow in general (not hard to believe as much as I love Minneapolis), but I'm kind of thankful it has not yet picked up on this colloquialism.
- DC has an amazing abundance of crepe restaurants. Thus I had been craving a crepe since I got here, and was finally able to fulfill that quest today as my intern buddy Rebecca and I chose the around-the-corner Crepeaway for today's lunch exploration destination. Twas amazing.