first week in Toppenish

This is from June 7... Just a little late.

I've now completed my week of training (May 25-30). That was spent in Denver, CO. We had lots of training sessions every day, on everything from our specific jobs on site to how to cook meals for 70 people. It was a very busy week but also very important. Then on the 30th I left Denver with my team (Jillian, Joe, and Bill) and we drove two days to Toppenish, WA. It was a long drive, but a very pretty one. We went through lots of mountains! Toppenish is in a nice area, the Yakima River valley. We're right to the east of the Cascades and in a big farming area. It's a little weird to me that there's so much farming 'cause the soil is light brown and it hardly every rains. But they grow a lot of everything: cherries, peaches, apples, grapes, hops, mint, asparagas, wheat, corn, etc etc. I think they just irrigate a lot. Toppenish itself is also very beautiful because it has tons of murals all over everywhere.

So we got here last Sunday night and spend all this last week unpacking and organizing. Mostly we mixed paint. A LOT of paint. I think we have like 150 1-gallon buckets and then a bunch of big 5-gallon buckets. So we had to mix it all to make sure it was good. And then we started organizing stuff here at the church too. And we've been getting to know the culture. Friday the Yakama Nation museum was free so we went over too look at that. Saturday we had a day off so we did a lot of cultural things. First, we went to see the mural-in-a-day here in Toppenish. Every year on the first Sat in June they paint a new mural all in one day. Then we went over to White Swan for treaty days (when the Yakama people signed the treaty with the US). So we went to the rodeo for a bit and then went to the powwow for a bit. And then we had to come back here to go to a graduation open house for our next door neighbors. They're a Mexican family and they always adopt the YouthWorks staff. They fed us dinner Friday night because we stopped by and they wanted us to eat. And then they fed us last night too because of the open house. And their kids helped carry lots of paint. So that's a great help.

This next week we're going to continue setting things up and organizing because our first group come in next Saturday! They're all new to YouthWorks so that's nice because then our first week isn't people who are comparing us to all their previous YW trips. Sometiems you can get people who think they know YW better than you do because they've been on trips for 6 years in a row. So it'll be nice to have the first week be new people. And then we'll all be more comfortable in our jobs by the time the alumni groups come.