Day 6

Today was the first taller (workshop) lead by Stephanie. Her topic was gender and the word hombre (man). She had each person write on a piece of paper the first word that comes to mind when you say the word hombre, and them tell the group their names, their word, why they picked it, and then crumple it up into a ball and throw it to someone else, and the next person to the same, etc. It ended up into a big ball and all different types of words. It was pretty neat and a good introductory idea.

The 3 different groups were completely different though. So our first group is at the integration center with a group of 8-10 people mixed men and women. These people are literally getting paid by the government to attend these workshops and stay all day in the center. Most of them were very opinionated and thought their ideas were the only right ones and wanted to yell about everything. Imagine people all talking over each other in a language that you don’t understand well, when you can’t hear anything due to everyone talking at the same time. That is how I felt all 5 days in this workshop. It was very frustrating and I just wanted to yell in English to tell them to be quiet!

The second group is a group of men at the day center. These men come for the day to learn stuff and look for jobs. This group was completely different from the first. They were much more calm, and wanted to learn and be involved in what we were talking about. There were a few younger guys that didn’t seem to understand a lot, but after patience and explaining a little bit more to them, they were great. We enjoyed this group, especially after the first group!

Lastly, we have where we were staying, at the drug addiction long term treatment center. All of these people have either mental illnesses, and/or drug addictions (or alcohol) that they really want to get over. This is a voluntary center, so everyone there actually wanted to be there, or at least they were supposed to. These groups were normally very fun and interesting. They had a lot to say, some people more than others, and they were interested in all of our topics. Some of the days we had to split them into 2 groups, just because they were too big of groups, and they also had their own classes to attend. They were normally split between the people who have been there longer and the new ones. The new group seemed to be a lot younger and so they were always a louder group.
We are going to explain a few of the people that we lived with for 16 days in each post. Today I am going to talk about Jesus and Angel.
Angel is very calm and quiet and likes to read. He is one of the only 2 people there that don’t smoke, so he is off on his own a lot. He seemed nice from the one time I talked to him for a while, but who knows what he did or didn’t do to need to be there. He won’t be there much longer, and you can tell as he is a lot quieter and relaxed than many of the others.
Jesus is the first that will be leaving in a few weeks. He seemed very calm but interactive with us. We all thought he was so nice! He had a “vacation” got to leave for the weekend, our second weekend we were there, and ended up coming back the next day. When asked what happened, apparently he was sick on the train and threw up then fell asleep, and couldn’t find his ticket, and was woken up by police officers after he missed his stop. He got in a fight with the officers and ended up back there. So that changed out idea of his attitude and how nice he was. He was still very nice and calm with us, but that just shows that any of them could snap at any moment… a little scary.