The Pieces are Coming Together

On Wednesday, May 24th, at 6:00 PM I met up with all the ILC cohorts at Lovonya DeJean Middle School for the School Board meeting, and to finally meet our wonderful chaperone. As I was on my way to the middle school I was rereading Don’s email to make sure that I wasn’t forgetting anything, fortunately everything was fine.

Upon arriving at the middle school there was a group of what seemed to look like protesters, standing outside of the multipurpose room. I hurriedly walked through the building and across the room to the courtyard, where I was pleased to see the familiar face of Don and other ILC members. I met up with Esmeralda and we chatted about how our finals were going for a while until Don instructed us to meet with our chaperones.

Our chaperone, Kendra Amerson, was already standing near us and we introduced ourselves. She was super nice, and she seemed like the perfect person to be our chaperone. We then discussed where we would be meeting up to get to know each other more. We all decided that painting pottery sounded really fun since we didn’t want the meetup to be completely centered around food. I have a strong passion for art, and love anything creative, so this felt like a great activity to do.

Discussing where we should go

We walked back into the multipurpose room and sat down in the front row. We held out our Brown University flag in front of us proudly. As the meeting began, I finally learned that the protesters were from Serra Adult School, many individuals from the school came up to speak about how they didn’t want their school to be closed.

When the school was done talking about their concerns, it was our time to get up and stand in front of the School Board, and have our chaperones and cohort speakers come up to the podium. I have to admit, I felt pretty nervous just standing up there. Don went up first and stated some very appalling statistics about the benefits that the ILC does for our members and communities. After Don’s impressive speech, the chaperones from each cohort came up and introduced each member to the board, then followed by the cohort speakers.

After everyone did their great speeches we headed back outside into the cold to take the group photo. It was extremely windy and everyone's hair was flying all over the place. While Don was snapping shots, I began to realize that everything has been happening so quickly. All of the pieces are coming together so quickly. It feels like just yesterday that I was at El Cerrito High School, waiting to go in for my interview. I am so grateful to be able to embark on this experience, and meet all of these wonderful people.

My cohort and the lovely Kendra Amerson.