Back on the Mountain

2^nd trip fundraising = finished! Saturday afternoon at around 4pm, after knocking on our last door asking for donations, Orlando, Ana, Julio and I met at an intersection in an Ithaca neighborhood and sang and danced in the street. “Boquisina boquisina boquisina!!! Our new (Portuguese) theme song. This fundraising trip has not been as much like a rollercoaster as the first trip. I think I have developed a thicker skin, and the people and the nature of what I am doing have not taken as big a toll on me. That being said, 13 straight days of fundraising 10 hour days with only two half days off is HARD. It took about a day to get out of the mental fog I seemed to have gone into during the trip and I have spent a lot of time sleeping and fighting off a cold.

There were bad moments. The days when I knew we had to raise a certain amount of money to even come close to our halfway goal, knowing we are coming into winter and the next two trips are going to be vastly more difficult, and not having the faintest idea where we were going to raise the money from or how. Yes, I did almost start to cry the city hall of Syracuse. Yes, we opted to eat pasta for 13 days straight so that we could save some of our $4/day food budget to ‘go in the can’. And yes, even though our team worked our butts off, we still came in about $1,000 under goal.

But there were also good (and definitely some memorable!) moments. Our couch surfer accommodation was with some very cool people. The first week was right in the city centre with a bunch of college students. The second week I ate my breakfast every morning either on a hammock or dock overlooking a beautiful lake. I had the most surreal experience of my life when we were invited for (a free!) dinner at what turned out to be a fully fledged cult, the Twelve Tribes - words cannot really describe, but we managed to get some picture evidence. Very nice people and some interesting conversations, but I can safely say I will not be joining their communal lifestyle of sacrifice, unity, and worship of their master “Joshua’.

And last night I celebrated reaching the halfway point of fundraising in a way that perhaps best exemplifies the extreme cultural diversity and in the end, commonality, of this place. In the middle of watching a movie in my bed, Brian and I were invited to try some Korean food in the dining room, which ended up turning into a full blown Korean party. Sitting around the table eating tons of kimchee and pork belly lettuce wraps, drinking Korean vodka, and playing Korean drinking games made funnier by the constant translation. We then moved on up to one of the houses to go to Brazilian party, which was about as different from the Korean party as you can get. Loud Portuguese music and a dance party complete with a strobe light.

Good to be back on the mountain!