moving forward

Today was a good day for many reasons:

• We now have a MICROWAVE at the office! Heather and I are thrilled; this greatly expands our lunch options!! 

• We got Google Voice for our office cell phone. It can transcribe messages and email them to you, and we are beyond excited about this. We get lots of calls and we don't have the staff capacity to go through them, especially during the weekend when no one checks the messages. Having to listen to 15 voicemails on a Monday morning is not the best feeling. Though the transcription will obviously not be perfect (especially when we are taking messages from refugees), it will be extremely helpful and cut down on the amount of time we spend going through the messages. 

• I rode my bike for the first time. I have been avoiding it because riding in the city makes me very nervous. But Heather and I had a meeting today and the best way to get there was via bike, and she is much more experienced than I am with the biking. It felt good to be riding a bike again, even though I am woefully out of shape.
  
  The best part about today was the meeting that Heather and I had. Last week I received a call from a man who is a manager of an apartment complex. He explained that nearly all of their tenants (28/34 families) are refugee families (and the remaining families are Spanish-speaking.) The owner the refugees to learn about Thanksgiving and they were looking for a group who worked with refugees to come do some sort of presentation about Thanksgiving.We are now working with them on preparing this event for Thanksgiving Day. I won't write too much more about it now, but I feel so thankful to be a part of this!
  
  It was beyond encouraging to see firsthand how people with wealth and means are interested in making better the lives of others. So often it seems like business owners and apartment managers are inconsiderate of the people they work with and primarily concerned with profit. This is clearly not the case at this particular apartment complex: instead they are interested in building a community and creating a welcoming place for refugees. Seeing this gave me a concrete example of some of the ways my many business major friends might be able effect change in their futures, and that was an exciting prospect for me, too. I'm looking forward to our participation in this project and having something so worthwhile to be a part of on my Thanksgiving Day. As I told Heather on our way back, that meeting was the kind of experience that made me think: "This is why I am doing this."