2 weeks in

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I can’t believe I’ve been here for almost two weeks now! The time has flown by. We finally started working during this last week at the community center in the Malkiya village since the tent hasn’t opened yet (though they’ve finally started putting it up!) but it means we had a lot of space to spread out all our arts and games. However it also meant we had a ton of kids come through since without the tent we’re pretty much the only source of entertainment. We’re doing projects with the kids about different parts of American culture that were prepared for us in Iowa. Not surprisingly the people sitting in the office halfway across the globe didn’t do a particularly great job choosing activities for a group of kids they have no experience catering to, which means we’ve had to do a lot of editing to their very precisely laid plans that we’re on strict orders not change in anyway. My logic is that the home base will be happier having a successful contract in Bahrain that the kids we’re serving actually enjoy and our contractors like, even if it’s not what Iowa wanted, than an unsuccessful contract with a displeased Embassy and Bahraini Ministry of Culture in which we followed every poorly designed layout and project the Iowa way. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they agree. Regardless it means we’ve been spending a lot of time planning and preparing before each day and moving farther and farther away from the carefully pre-laid plans as we realize more and more they just don’t always work. We’ve also been visiting various Bahraini craft stores and dollar to make adaptions to the plans and get all the missing supplies. So maybe not as carefully prepared as one would hope. But despite putting a lot of time into work we’ve also still been taking time to enjoy being here. We spent Fourth of July lounging down at the pool (I ate a hamburger and fries in the true spirit of the holiday). We also got to visit the Bahrain national museum, which was very cool, it had everything from ancient history exhibits to modern art. We also enjoyed watching the world cup game between Spain and Germany downstairs at the hotel in a crowd literally from all over the world and hopefully we’ll get to see the final as well. I got to try my hand at traditional weaving, which was fun, got dragged along to see the new twilight movie, which was not fun, and went to visit the US naval base here which was actually pretty interesting.
I finally bought my ticket from here to Jordan so I’m getting incredibly excited about that but it’s really making me realize I don’t have much time left in Bahrain though I’m definitely looking forward to whatever then next few weeks will hold. Hopefully we’ll get everything figured out for work, I think now that we’ve had a couple days practice and some time to make our own alterations it will start going much more smoothly. Hopefully the tent will be put up soon, as great as the club is, since it allows us tons of space and lots of volunteers I must say I’m excited to see what that tents going to look like, even if it does mean we rework some of our plans again.

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