Sunday, December 23, 2012

An Irish Christmas!

Hello to all my friends and family across the pond. So sorry for my horrible posting lately. After Thanksgiving Camphill life went into what felt like over drive, with new co-workers and getting ready for Christmas. Which here is quite big. It's been quite a whirlwind.
Starting in the beginning of December was the preparation for the Christmas play, its the basic nativity play you'd see in the states except its centered for kids and the emphasis is on the shepherds. I was given the hardest role which was in the beginning and I basically explained the play and bles everything in a good ten minute speech. A very fun part and at the beginning so then all I had to do was enjoy myself and watch my co-workers and residents rock it. We have had rehearsal daily for about the past three weeks and this weekend we finally got to see our hard work pay off in a performance this afternoon for friends and family of Camphill. We had a pretty full house and tons of children. The performance went really well, a small child did come onto the stage for a portion of the play which was pretty amazing, he was honestly looking at us with such curiosity. We've had quite a few of pretty great birthday celebrations. Birthdays are a huge deal here and all include parties. One was centered around the outdoors and we had a fire (equipped with hail) and hungarian goulash. Then another good one was for our head farmer so the cake was of our cow daisy. Also had a thrill when there were joke candles for the cake that you can't blow out. We also had the drumming teacher for our community bring all his drums over, so we did a drum circle of seven drums and various shakers. Pretty amazing sound.....small room for the amount of people but incredible to watch. My birthday is in a week or so and is going to be rainbow themed. I am very excited for this. New Years Eve is huge here and cast of thousands come to bring in the new year where a band plays in the middle of town and at midnight you all wander the streets. Very excited for this, however I'm forgetting Christmas and all it has to bring so I will get back to that. Christmas here is rather huge, there are many traditions, both within the irish culture as well as that of Camphill that are celebrated. Camphill had an a lovely Christmas party that included a three course meal, singing from around the world and irish dancing. Really special evening. Now.. the twenty fourth marks the start of several community meals, and the decorating of the tree. There is also the big mass in town and followed by that we all go up the farm and sing to the cows....not joking. Christmas day is also centered around the community where we sing around the tree, and open the presents we all have been working on in secret for one another for the past month. All presents had to be done by hand and kept a secret. Christmas day in Dingle also includes the Christmas swim where everyone who wants goes to the beach and runs into the ocean together. Followed by hot whiskey. I haven't decided if I am in fact going to do this. I am sorely tempted. The day after Christmas is a huge festival in Dingle known as Wren's Day. The history of the festival I'm not familiar with but everyone dresses up in straw and masks so no one knows who you are and goes around the pubs/shops and asks for money. Its basically yet another excuse for Irish people to plowed and this time they get to dress up in straw! I"m really curious to see this as I have been warned by locals to make sure I dress up or else I will be made fun of. After the twenty six life quiets down a bit which for many of us is what we can't wait for. We can actually relax, do fun outings and maybe feel like we are really on vacation. Which at this point in time we are as we do not have to go to work until the seventh of January.
This is my first Christmas away from snow, family, friends and Vermont. It's been a really weird feeling for me. Not having it A. be cold. B. then no snow, feels wrong. It really doesn't feel like Christmas to me. The tradition and people I am surrounded by make it special and it will be I think, some of the traditions I've never seen before so its really fun and interesting. But this is totally knew for me. But it is something knew and I am so lucky to get this experience at all so for that I am very thankful for. Yes this job is a constant surprise and living and working with the same people is at time very trying but the positives out way the negatives. No matter how much I feel like my world is collapsing in on me I am reminded of how amazing I have it by a hug and kiss from Catriona or we spend a meal just laughing. With that my friends I will leave you and hope you have an amazing and safe holiday season and will update with pictures of the festivities. xoElsie

Friday, November 23, 2012

Holiday Season Greetings!!

Happy Late Thanksgiving to everyone who is reading this! I hope everyone had an amazing day yesterday and ate themselves sick. I am so thankful for my family for getting me to do this program and so wish I could have spent the day with them yesterday! Thank you for your constant support, I couldn't have done this with out you! Life in Camphill is very busy at the moment. The holiday season brings a lot of festivals, birthdays and holidays. I was lucky enough to get to celebrate and teach everyone here about Thanksgiving. They were very enthusiastic about doing it "how the Americans do it". Had an amazing table of 19 people complete with the works and 5 pies. Amazing work done by so many willing people. Complete at the end with speaking about what we are thankful for and singing songs together. Really delightful evening! The other major events that are going on right now that is putting a bit of stress on everyone is the craft fair that Camphill Dingle does every year for fundraising. So all workshops are in full swing producing as much product as possible. Not to mention we are also setting it up like a Christmas market so there's a bake sale, and refreshments. So there's been quite a bit of baking going on, and in my house we have several really good bakers so it constantly smells like Christmas in my house. We also have a huge Christmas raffle going on which we are constantly shoving raffle tickets in peoples faces. The only other big thing coming up is the ever popular Christmas play that is quite big and involves everyone, so that will take up quite a bit of our time in the coming weeks. But it is very funny and will be a grand time. I was cast as the star singer that has to introduce everyone and bless everything with my assistant Stephen, which will be totally fun since we get to wear fun hats. But it's been years since I've done theatre so I'm really excited about it and think it will be a great time. I will leave you all with a story that happened today. I decided to conquer the huge mountain that is behind my house as it was beautiful out and I needed to clear my head. As I walked up the road the very annoying unappreciated puppy from the neighbors jumped on me and decided to come on my walk with me....I should mention that in Ireland there are dogs roaming everywhere, so this is not uncommon. This puppy is adorable but very hyper, so I thought a walk might do him some good. So we trudged on up the very muddy road to the fence to the sheep pasture. In Ireland it is also totally fine to trespass onto peoples pastures, so climbing over random fences is pretty standard for hikes in this area. We kept heading up, and I decided to take a break and enjoy the view which was breathtaking. Just as I was heading into the other pasture the sky turned dangerously dark, I should also mention that the clouds and light here are unlike anything I've ever seen and in the pictures you will see what I mean. Anyway, it starting raining on me as I was on the side of this mountain and then turned to full on hail stones. It was actually totally awesome to be caught up in it, but all I could hear was this poor sheep farm yelling at his dog, and felt bad for him to be also getting pelted by hail. I decided that was the end of my little adventure since I was now soaking wet. It was a really fun adventure. I am missing cold, it doesn't really get that cold here, so it's just a lot of rain! I'm going to try and be better at my posting!!!

Monday, October 15, 2012

A Day in the Life at Camphill Dingle.

Greetings family and friends. It's been a little while since my last post! The past few weeks have been jam packed with tons of work during the week and fun festival on the weekends. Two weekends ago was something called the Food and Wine Festival in Dingle. This means all the restaurants in town open up there store fronts and offer a special part of there menu, it could be a sample of fish and chips, or a burger, or in some cases kangaroo skewers. The town gets packed with tourists and locals wandering the small windy streets of Dingle. Thankfully it was a gorgeous weekend to be outside. Because our group of people is so all over the place we divided up and wandered around tasting food. I was lucky to get to try kangaroo which tasted like lamb but very tender. It was really good! The evening of this weekend was also the birthday of a resident whom wanted to go into town and listen to the live irish music that is every night at all the pubs in Dingle. He is also a fond dancer so him and a co-worker danced around the bar. Really amazing to be a witness to such a lovely moment.
I've been getting a lot of requests to describe my day to day life. The way of life in Camphill is really hard to explain but I'm going to try and write out a schedule of my day!! 7:30 Breakfast 8:30 Leave for the land (farm and garden) 8:45 morning gathering (sing, talk about the day, who goes where for lunch ect, general announcements.) 9:00 Start work in the garden 11:00 Tea break 11:45 back to work in the garden 12:30 head back to houses for lunch. 1:00 Lunch 2:00 clean up/tea break and a rest. 2:40 Head back to the land. 4:00 tea break 4:45 back to work. 5:40 Head back to houses for supper. 6:00 Supper 6:45 Clean up 7:00 relax until bed time routines (depends on who needs help with what) The only difference in the morning to my personal schedule is I am normally at the house cleaning or cooking lunch. Then I go to work in the afternoon on the land. Sometimes there are activities to do in the afternoon like swimming or a resident has signed up for a class in town that a co-worker must accompany them to, for example, zumba, spanish, drumming. Other evenings there might be a concert in town or a game on in the pub which is open to anyone who wants to go. Other evenings you might relax, knit or play games. The weekends are really relaxed, we get to sleep in until 9 when breakfast is and then you do whatever, it might be going into town with a resident or going on a group outing somewhere, or going on a hike. Then in the evening we have festive supper where we talk about the highlight of our week, sing, have group silent time, and enjoy a meal as a community. This is really lovely because everyone is together, there is often great conversation accompanied with tons of laughter. This past week we went on an outing to Waterville to see a performance by a local center that works with people with disabilities and did some sight seeing, which with our group of people is always enjoyable.
Yesterday was a lovely day! Spent it out west which is just stunning as it like Dingle is on the water and surrounded by cliffs. So we spent the day at the beach, hiking and ended with a tea break and an amazing cafe/pottery store filled with gorgeous huge vases and amazing tea pots and place settings (robin you would have been in heaven. I thought of you the whole time.)
I hope this helps to those of you out there who wanted to know how my work is going. Its really not work, it's just life. Living among people who work along side each other. Its a really intense way to get to know people but really amazing because you get to know each other really fast. Its important to remember to have time for yourself and not constantly be all together, all the time. But it's very much like a family feel and for me was very easy to fall into place with everyone. No day is ever the same here. I've been licked, flashed, kept awake by a man who couldn't figure out how to take is Ipod out of ears, and tried to stop a man from peeing in public....failed. I hope you all are enjoying the fall so far and I think of Vermont often here as fall doesn't really happen. Love to you all, take care. xElsie

Monday, October 1, 2012

Happy Michaelmus!

Happy Fall everyone back in the states. I am missing me some apple pressing and crisp days spend looking at the beautiful mountains change colors. But I really can't complain, as I spent the weekend harvesting every veggie/herb/fruit from the gardens on the lang in Camphill. This past week was the celebration of Saint Michaelmus, a christian saint who was known for defeating Satan and about celebrating the earth and all it has to give us. We at Camphill celebrated with a festival. We spent the day on Saturday harvesting, making grape juice (from our own grapes), filling cow horns with manure for fertilizing the garden, and planting bulbs. Thankfully the weather was amazing and it was quite a lovely day spent outside with the community relaxing, working and chatting.
The other big part of Michaelmus is we put on some form of performance for select community members who know about Camphill and what we do. This year we put on a circus. We included everyone and put together a forty five minute circus. We spent the entire week practicing, hours of figuring out what people were good at and then pulling it together to form a show. We did a lot of laughing and getting to know each other this week and it was a highlight for everyone. Friday was spent setting up and decorating the barn on the farm like a circus tent. The show went off with out a hitch and many of the people said it was best show yet of Camphill Dingle. It was great fun to hear so many children laughing at the skits and enjoying our circus. The weekend ended with a big soup made from all the veggies we harvested. Everyone enjoyed this delicious soup together. It was an amazing week. Today I get a day off, spent cleaning, buying my bro a bday present and in the evening having a movie and wine night with my co-workers and writing postcards!
I hope everyone at home is doing well. I miss you all!! xElsie

Thursday, September 20, 2012

50 Shades of Green.

Hello Friends and Family. I made it to the old country of Ireland two days ago! After almost no sleep I got to my new home, which currently holds four people with special needs, and four co-workers. It is set off the beaten road a bit with spectacular views of the peninsula. The house is set on the base of a mountain. I got the first day to explore and get unpacked. It was spent camera in hand wandering paths behind the house, where I nearly got trampled by cows being moved to a pasture, a herd of cows and the farmer all running down the road. This would only happen in Ireland.
Everyone at the house has been extremely welcoming and helpful as I settle in. I am thus far the only American co worker, many come from Germany and one is from Korea. The farm and gardens are about a five minute drive from the house and got showed the farm by a live in resident at Camphill who took me up the cliff walk which holds our donkeys who appear to not be enclosed and just wander the cliff path freely. Then in the pasture holds the cows and sheep. As you get to the top of the cliff walk you are surrounded by animals, ocean and cliffs. The town of Dingle to one side and you turn around to pasture after pasture in every shade of green imaginable. I find myself just staring at it because it's so beautiful. Today was my first official day. I will sleep well tonight. The daily tasks are split up between the co-workers. Some spend the day cleaning in the house and making lunch while the others go and spend the morning in the gardens, or vice versa. Then everyone comes back for lunch and then heads out and works again. My day started at 7:30 for breakfast, then went for morning meeting, and started my day in the garden sorting potatoes and weeding. At 11 is one of several tea breaks....where we do just that, take a break and have tea or coffee and biscuits. Then head back to work until 1 when we have lunch. Then following lunch there is another tea break and a bit of a relax before heading back out to the mainland as its called and work. I was back in the garden putting seaweed over turned soil for winter. Later, I picked raspberries, basil, and beans before tea break yet again at four. The day ended back at the house with an early dinner as half the house was heading into town for a book reading. I have found it very easy to fall into step with the people and way of life here, yes its only been a few days but as you will soon see in the pictures its hard to feel stressed or miss home when the backdrop I'm surrounded by is so calming. The people I am surrounded by are constantly surprising me and the co workers are all light hearted and always laughing or smiling.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

N.H.Boston.Dub.Kerry-Here I Go

Tomorrow I start my next big adventure! My three week vacation from the working world is coming to a close. Vermont has been a whirlwind of friends, family, animal therapy and laughter. I made a point to reconnect with old friends whom I haven't had the chance to see since I moved to Boston, and couldn't be happier with that decision. The visits were all way to short, but I know I will see them and we will always pick up where we left off. Until then I forge alone going down the road of no pay, stress, and lack of sleep they call service work and can not wait.
I recently sat down with a grandfather figure I've known most of my life who asked me where I get my drive to do service work, it's not an easy job and there is hardly any money in it. I said partially to figure out what I want to do, as I don't know, but also I want meaning in my life, a job that is fulfilling for myself as well as hopefully making a small difference in some one else's life. That is what's hard about service work, you never know if the people you work with will actually remember in ten years. You have to try to not forget that you are making a difference. It's a constant struggle for me but I try to not dwell and take every experience (good or bad) and look at it as a learning opportunity. A big moment for me was accepting that I had to buy Carhart work pants. For most Vermonters this is standard. I don't really scream Vermont at heart so this is a big moment. Saying that I will be spending my days outside gardening and working on a farm it makes complete sense but they are far from fashionable. So pictures will follow with me wearing them. A big event that set me up for buying these pants was having to cut down a tree using a handsaw that had fallen in a storm blocking me and my friend in her driveway. The fact that two girls did this was huge and we both bragged for the day about our triumph. Great feeling, I suggest all women to cut a tree using a handsaw. Now a little about where I will be moving. It's the furthest southwest you can go in the country of Ireland, known as the Dingle Peninsula, I will be just outside of the town of Dingle. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It has been my dream to get the chance to live on the water. This year I get to fullfil that dream. Yes, it is so different from anything else I've ever done, but if not now when! This is the furthest I've lived from home for this amount of time. A big thanks to my amazingly supportive family and friends for their constant encourage and support. love.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Everyone Else is Doing It!

Since my year with Americorps I took a well deserved year long break from children and low wage. I spent my year working at The South End Buttery as a barista, and living with my best friend in Brighton. Took a three week vacation to Europe to visit friends and family in England and reflecting on what to do next. As I'm sure many of you all can relate, the new thing to do in this day an age as a struggling college graduate is teach English in a foreign country. I was strongly encouraged to do this by my cousin, although tempting I had no desire to go near teaching. But did like the idea of doing something abroad. Which led me to remember a program a friend did in Ireland called the Camphill Communities. I did some research and thought it looked like an amazing program. Like City Year it is not a walk in the park. The program works and aids people with developmental disabilities. They live in a self sustainable community, centering around farming, gardening and various forms of the arts (for more info go to http://www.camphill.ie/dingle). Having been to Ireland's country side when I was thirteen it didn't take any convincing to decide to go back to live there. The hard part was to decide where however, I chose two to apply to as they have communities all over Ireland and Scotland and even in the states. I had decided between Ballytobin which is in the center of Ireland and the Dingle Peninsula which is in the southwest corner of Ireland on the coast. I spent a week in the Dingle and it is easy to say that is by far one of the most beautiful places in the world. Then upon speaking to my interviewer she helped me make that decision a definite. It will be extremely different from living in the fast pace lifestyle that I live now in Boston! Especially since people in Ireland live in a very different way then we do. To give you a visual of where I will be. This is an arial view:
This is experience as I said will not be easy. I have never lived in a live-in community or worked at length with adults with such disabilities. But I know they will teach me more then I know. Please visit the above link as it explains better my day to day life. I couldn't not be more excited for this new adventure. Otherwise I am staying in Boston until the end of August then I head home until I leave. Where I will get a good dose of family and then head across the atlantic for a year! I will also be start my time in Ireland with the photo project called 365, which means I will take a photo a day! Please stay tuned as this is where I will talk about my work over there and of course tons of pictures! Until September!!