So, I have just spent the past couple of weeks in Paris and Rome. I think that the travel bug has seriously got me. Why did no one tell me about this amazing continent of Europe earlier?
I just got back in from Rome this afternoon and am ready to head out to do more exploring already. I had a couple weeks to play with but I wanted to have the chance to get a feel for the places I was going to visit so I had to give a couple cities the axe, namely Amsterdam and Dublin although I am hoping to hit Ireland before I leave the area. It is so much easier to travel when your flight to Paris is 45 minutes and to Rome is 2.5 hours rather than coming all the way from the States. So much cheaper too.
Speaking of returning Stateside, it looks as if that is most likly going to happen in early to mid May. Really not that far away. Coming back for the summer will give me the opportunity to either earn a little cash before school begins in the fall or persue a couple of ideas that are floating around in my head right now. The latter would kill my savings rather than build it up but I think that it could really be worth it.
Things with work are at an interesting junction right now with a new director having come on board at the begining of February. He is a young guy and definitly passionate about the community so that is a good starting point. He has a tough job ahead of him though because there are a lot of tough decisions that are going to need to be made that arn't going to be particularly popular. I guess that is one role of a leader though.
One of these decisions relates to the future of our house. In the past few months, out landlord has made it clear that they do not want to be associated with us anymore because we don't fit into their model of the housing that they operate. In truth, they are just a housing association and so arn't particularly concerned about anything relating to community or homelessness, they just want to rent houses. Fair enough. They have given us the option to purchase but there is no way that we would be able to raise the capital for that and obviously don't have a definite future cash flow since we rely totally on private and institutional donations. It looks like what is going to happen is that we will end up moving residence over to where our offices currently are, since they operate out of a house, and move the offices elsewhere. This transition probably won't happen until the fall though because late October is the deadline for moving out of our current residence.
This whole subject just underlines the fact that there are guys living in that project that, if they are forced out, will become homeless again. I have learned a lot of things while being here and one of those is how hard it is to have discussions about people's personal circumstances while you are living with them. I mean, it is not like you can have a professional relationship and then disengage at the end of the day, it doesn't work that way. While the act of living together can be a really good thing when it comes to providing accountability, it can be really tough when you are talking about issues around moving on from their status quo....especially when there isn't already an underlying friendship. Whether that means talking about anger issues, drinking problems, or just general things that need to be done to sort issues out and move on from the Community, those can be difficult subjects to breach when you fall somewhere in between a friend and a professional.
Reading back through this post I feel like I have been all over the place. I have some great pictures to share of the last couple of weeks that will be sure to arouse jealousy in the best of you but will have to post them some other time as they are still on my camera.
Lord, I was born a ramblin' man.
Ciao, Chris
