You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2008.
The sun was just rising when I hopped on my bike to head to out. Only -15ºC this morning, roads were almost clear, and there would be hot coffee and breakfast just moments away. Coming from north of Bloor Street, every road is downhill in Toronto which makes life easy when zipping down the back streets to make it to meet the YCI staff on time. Clipping my bike to the iron fence outside, a minute later I was overheating with all my layers, toque, gloves, and long-johns.
Fun Day commences.
“Fun Day?” you might ask. ”What could a group of young office workers need with a Fun Day?” Ah, dear reader, the Fun Day is a time honoured tradition in the world of spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, papers and photocopiers: to leave the office for one day to let loose and, as they say, “break it down.”
Now, I’m sure you’ve gotten the wrong idea already. We don’t work in a typical office. No, no, no. The office that houses Youth Challenge International, tropical heat blasting from ancient heaters, half-cut walls that allow quirky conversations and beckoning calls to check out wild snaps from the field, not to mention the constant unleashing of jokes, quips, cracks, and rib-ticklers.
Yes, we work. Of course we work. We work so hard, in fact, that we have been planning this Fun Day for nearly a year!
We start at Cora’s Restaurant, close to the SkyDome where I was boiling in my thermal underwear after riding my bike in. Dragon was there already, talking with Erin (sporting a very fashionable, yet affordable apres ski sweater, complete with neck-de-turtle and kaleidoscope Charlie Brown zig-zag around the shoulders) and sipping back a bottomless cup of coffee. Ryan and Ben amble in a bit later (our resident semi-amateur hockey player staff members who regularly refuse after work pints for games of shinny at the park) followed by Rebecca. We felt awful that Laura was at home sick, and that Jane was working from home in Hamilton that day.
Breakfast was our strategy against the winds and snow squalls that raged outside. The coffee our imperative fuel, the jovial chatter a necessary insulation from the bitter elements that awaited us. (I had the brie, mushroom omelette, which was exquisite).
On we go, into the snowstorm. Most cars drove at painful trolls, not a snowplow to be seen. But further we travailed through in the winter wonderland (wondering what we were doing outside, that is) to our final destination: Harbour Front Centre…
Skating. Yes, skating. Like the back of a Canadian $5, or those last three kids who still want to one day play for the Leafs, we were going to lace up specially made boots with slabs of steel embedded into them. Skating. A study from Oxford University suggests that the earliest ice skating happened in Southern Finland about 4000 years ago (so says Wikipedia). This was our Fun Day. I haven’t been on skates since a traumatic experience in grade three, nearly 21 years ago. It’s been a while for this lanky, unbalanced man to have been on thin pieces of metal on very slick, very hard ice.
But we went. The snow stopped, the rambunctious teeny-boppers from the school group left, and the EZ rock thundered out of the mounted speakers like some demented Hair Bands on Ice. I’m talking Scorpions, Vanilla Ice (I’m not even joking), and Toto.
Ben and Ryan helped Dragon around on the rink,
Amanda and Erin glided around like a pair of Cindy Klassens.
With ankles buckling under the stress, arms flailing and grasping for balance, I brought my 6′5″ frame across the rubberized walkway and hesitated like a kid about to jump into the lake in early spring. Calculating quickly in my head how many feet my ass would fall at 32 feet per second squared, I wondered more about the bruise that would form on said buttocks and the following days at my desk, sitting uncomfortably, and suspended fear for that brief second to step out on the ice.
If you’ve ever watched a hockey game, winter Olympics, or even been out on a frozen pond or arena yourself, you know that there’s a very specific sound that is made by skates on ice. A slicing sound, higher pitched, but with a scraping. I was so pleased to have heard this sound rather than the large crack of bones that I expected.
We skated around that rink for hours, giggling, sliding through the accumulated powdery snow, sliding into the light drifts, and thanking the gods of winter that we weren’t that Japanese tourist who spent more time flat on his back that up on those blades. With “Rock Me Like a Hurricane” blaring out, air guitar in hand, I felt like a modern day Kurt Browning (he’s still around, right?) I teetered my way across the rink with my excitable co-workers and broadly smiled that it was Fun Day. For us, those who work in an overly heated office, working with partners in Tanzania or Vanuatu, or Guyana, tropical sun and palm trees typically enter into the mind. This Fun Day it was clear that we had embraced every minute of a perfect Canadian afternoon overlooking Lake Ontario with our apres patinage waiting for us at the pub down the street.
It was a very fun day.
Steve Sloot
In the summer of 2002, I was 23 and had been working at very odd jobs for the past 5 years – cook at the Hard Rock Cafe and as an author’s representative for a publisher of plays and musicals. I had dabbled in post-secondary education: cooking school and courses on computer skills, editing and fundraising. I guess you could say I had not yet decided what to do with my life. I was unemployed when I saw the posting for an Office Manager on Charity Village. The mission and vision of YCI appealed to me and after being interviewed by the then-Executive Director, Mark Ely, and then-Youth Program Manager, Shauna Houlton, I was offered the job.
At the time YCI was working in just three countries: Vanuatu, Guyana and Costa Rica. Since that time, we have also worked in Benin and Nicaragua and in 2008 we have projects in Kenya, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Guyana, Vanuatu, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Not only is that a mouthful, but those countries represent many more languages! Besides English, Bislama and Spanish, we are regularly advising on how a preparing Volunteer can go about learning Kiswahili or Twi or Amharic. All the mail we receive from our partners means that we have a colorful collection of stamps to set aside for Oxfam and mementos from staff visits to these countries has resulted in a very eclectic office decor.
Preparation materials were packaged and sent by mail to selected applicants as recently as 2006. This meant that, as Office Manager, I was the one responsible for photocopying the materials, stapling or binding them and putting the several booklets that made up the Preparation Package into a folder and then into an envelope to be sent out at the end of the week, along with the dozen or so other Preparation Packages. These days we are working with Taking IT Global (TIG) and have Project Pages for each host country. Not only can Volunteers (then referred to as ‘Challengers’) access all the resources they need for preparation, but they can also access a Discussion Board, or connect with other Volunteers heading to the same country. In fact, most recently we have been using TIG technology to allow Volunteers to fundraise via their own personalized fundraising page. Having been responsible for our bookkeeping, I have plenty of horror stories of trying to decipher hand-written cheque submission forms, or needing to send cheques back to donors because they had written the date in the signature field and vice versa!
When Volunteers called for assistance in hosting an information session, I would select some slides that were appropriate for the country they were heading to, slip them into an envelope and stick them in the mail. When we had the occasion to obtain a scanner, we started to scan the photos that were tucked away in filing cabinets and desk drawers and pinned up on the walls. Before long we started to have more and more Volunteers simply e-mail digital images to us, or simply a CD full of their project photos. In some cases, Volunteers are transferring their images to photo hosting sites while still on project, allowing YCI staff to get a personal look into what is happening in the field. I have fond memories of the purchase and arrival of our first LCD projector, meaning that we could finally use Powerpoint, rather than overhead transparencies, during staff meetings and pre-departure training sessions. Out went the slides! In came the ability to deliver multi-media presentations and, very occasionally, watch a movie (educational and related to our work, of course), projected onto our white board, during our lunch hour. Both our slide viewer and overhead projector were donated to Sketch, where they are put to good use.
Back in 2002, our storage closet was stacked with computers that had been recently retired: monitors, keyboard and even CPUs that only had a drive for a floppy disk. Not a 3.5 inch floppy, but an actual old-school floppy. Now the YCI desks have Apple desktops or laptops sitting on them and we are gradually being won over by these nifty machines – iChat, PhotoBooth…oh the possibilities! Our very patient IT consultant does what he can with our older PCs and we donate the rest to Reboot. We have flash drives that allow us to send field staff overseas loaded with resources for the partner organization. Our international program staff now have the ability to take their work with them on visits to our partners overseas, instead of working from an internet cafe or relying on the already-stretched resources of the partner organization.
Perhaps you are a subscriber to our e-news, which is put together by our incredible Volunteer Program Administrator, Laura Gourley. This wonderful example of html coding is a far cry from the Word template that was a nightmare to work with. It took much swearing to coax it into accepting changes and once it was complete, a handful of copies would be printed out using our lone inkjet printer, but also e-mailed as a pdf to anyone in our database that we happened to have a current e-mail address for.
Speaking of e-mail, can you believe that we do not have e-mail addresses for the majority of our alumni? In 1989, when YCI started operations and collecting contact information of applicants and participants, few people had e-mail addresses. As a result, our contact with alumni is fairly limited to those people who volunteered with YCI in the past 5 years. (If you are reading this and suspect we don’t have your current e-mail address, now would be a great time to e-mail Laura with your updated contact information!) Now it’s not uncommon for us to keep in touch with our alumni and preparing Volunteers via e-mail and Facebook and this blog. We can see their photos on Facebook or Flickr and see their videos on YouTube!
I appreciate the chance to share this walk down memory lane with the YCI blog readers. It is truly amazing the changes I have seen YCI go through is just 5 1/2 years!
Rebecca Lee is YCI’s Volunteer Program Manager and also coordinates Volunteers heading to Ghana, Guatemala and Grenada. In the spring of 2005 she had the opportunity to visit two project groups in Costa Rica. However, for the most part, she has been living vicariously through the 967 Volunteers that have come through YCI’s doors (metaphorically, of course) during her time with YCI. She is looking forward to seeing her own daughter, Madalyn, participate in a YCI program sometime after 2023.
