Orientation!

In about a half-hour my compañeros and I will board a van from Princeton to JFK and embark on our long-awaited journey to Bolivia.  I’m all packed up (surprisingly with room to spare), so right now I’m listening to Ricardo Arjona music and writing from my bed in a modern, air-conditioned quad dorm room in Butler Residential College. The Bridge Year staff seem to have gotten us into the nicest dorms on campus for our 4-day orientation, so no complaints about that.
It is an interesting time of year at Princeton- none of the students are here yet, so it’s basically just 35 Bridge Year participants and all the fall-sport athletes here. If you walked around campus this week, the people you would see are much taller, stronger, and more physically fit than the average Princeton student. Kind of a funny scene, and I must admit also a little intimidating.  

I got to Princeton on Saturday with my family. I was definitely ready to go, but saying goodbye to my family was still tough. I knew how hard this would be for them, especially my mom (love you!). 

 
Most of the Bridge Year participants share the sentiment that orientation drags out a bit too long; the last four days have been packed with hours of lectures and meetings. At least we have had time to get to know each other. I am already getting close with my fellow travelers to Bolivia, and I look forward to building even stronger bonds throughout the trip. Real relationships are formed when life gets tougher and we’re not all going out of our way to be polite and make friends. We’ve got nine months to do that, and it’s inevitable to happen with time.

For your sake I’ll withhold the longer and duller details about orientation, but I’ll share one prevailing theme or common observation I have made: we have an incredible amount of support behind us on this trip. First of all, Gina, our on-site program leader from Where There be Dragons, is amazing. She has a contagiously bubbly and energetic personality, has spent years on Peace Corps and leading trekking excursions in Bolivia, and is profoundly cognizant of the balance between educating us in preparation for a safe trip and allowing us to keep an open mind to facilitate learning through experience. When we ask Gina a question about something she would rather us figure out in Bolivia, she just smiles widely and says, “we’ll talk about that.” In addition to Gina, there will be two other Dragons on-site staff members (Aaron and Pedro), and based on how Gina talks about them I know they will be fantastic, too.

Beyond the support from Dragons, it’s obvious that we have a strong network thinking about us back at Princeton. We have three full-time Bridge Year staff (John, Scott, and Barbara) monitoring our progress and making sure we are safe, and during orientation I learned that we have even more support in other places. For our trip we were given a “faculty fellow,” dance professor Judith Hamera, who studies the arts’ impact on politics- an extremely relevant topic in Bolivia. Professor Hamera read up on Bolivia and our trip, she prepared us some relevant readings, she gave us great tidbits of advice (such as recording the sounds on the street that we can play back at home as a memory), and most importantly, she was genuinely excited for the seven of us and wanted to stay in touch as much as possible. Both she and dean of the college Jill Dolan said they hope to visit us this year. It’s really unbelievable- I had no expectation that any of the faculty or administration would take such an interest in our adventure. It makes me feel very grateful to attend such an amazing school like Princeton.

 

Our group with faculty fellow Judith Hamera (3rd from left) and dean Jill Dolan (center)

 
Anyway, at this point I am excited to board the plane to Bolivia, and by late tomorrow I will be in the beautiful town of Coroico at a downright low altitude of 5,000 feet. The rest of my blog posts will definitely be much shorter and come from a prettier and more interesting place in the world. For the first month especially, I will have inconsistent or nonexistent access to Internet, so I may post anywhere from 0-10 times in September- I really have no idea. I hope you enjoy reading it, and please know that I read all of your comments and really appreciate them.

Abrazos,

Jacob