Wednesday and Thursday: Night with the Lord and Work Orientation

Wednesday:
Today I am going back to campus and will spend half of my time talking to people and half the time with my discipler. We go to campus at 11 and I walk around with Kyle, my discipler for this summer. We spend about an hour talking with two people on campus before going to lunch. First we got to talk to Mustafa, who is a professor at the school. He grew up in Palestine and it was really cool talking to him and learning about his experiences traveling around the world and where he came from spiritually. The second person we talked to was named Mossaid. He was also an international student. We got talking to him and he said he really like living in Chicago but also really likes Columbus. Then I asked him when he has been to Columbus and he said he has been there a couple times and would be going to Columbus this fall for school. I asked him where in Columbus he was going to be studying and he said The Ohio State University! I got really excited and told him that’s where I go to school! We continued talking until he had to go to class but then I got his number and email in hopes that I could meet up with him again this summer and maybe even in the fall at OSU! Continue reading

Tuesday: First Day Sharing at UIC

Catch Phrase Party

Today my group is meeting at 10 to go to the UIC campus. I have to run to Chick-fil-a to drop off paperwork at 10am so I will be meeting them later at the campus. Ryan and I drop off our paperwork and then he heads to University of Chicago as I go with Jay to UIC. We arrive on campus and go to the food court. I wait there and eat my lunch until my group meets to switch partners. I am paired up with Cheyenne, and we go off to talk to someone. Neither she or I have used Soularium before to initiate a conversation but she was with someone who used them earlier that day, so we decided to give them a try. Soularium is a deck of cards with pictures on them. We give them the cards and ask them questions where they can select pictures that describe their answer to the question. See more about Soularium here. Continue reading

Monday Task: Job Hunt

Today’s main goal is to find a job in Chicago for the rest of this summer. Some students have jobs already lined up before they got here but most of us are going out job hunting today. We had a quick meeting at 8am for those looking for jobs and then we left to go into the city. I have an interview at Chick-fil-A today at 2pm so I am more or less just going to be walking around for the first part of the day. I go with another guy named Josh to Navy Pier and find out that everything there is closed until about 10am. Since it is about 9 when we get there he decides to wait until the shops open up. I decide to head back into the city and walk around a little bit. I discover a faster way to get from the pier to the red line instead of just walking. Once I arrive back in the room I hang out with some of my roommates who stayed in to apply online to jobs. Soon after, Ryan comes back from his interview from Chick-fil-A and says he got the job! We make some lunch then I get ready to leave for my interview. As I go to the interview, I arrive a little early so I hang out in a nearby Dunkin Donuts (there’s got to be one on every corner it seems). I am feeling nervous and excited for the interview as I sit there drinking my chocolate milk I got from Dunkin. Yummm! I go to the interview and it is a really nice and decent sized Chick-fil-A. At the end of the interview the interviewer gives me a job and returns with some paperwork for me to fill out! Yay! I’m employed! So I head back to the Lofts and fill out the paperwork. Then we go to the Church we went to on Sunday where we have Portillo’s hot dogs and some other food. It was really good. Then we have our first training session while we are here in Chicago, along with some worship and a testimony. We also got to see the three winners of the roommate video challenge. Unfortunately ours didn’t make the cut but it was really cool to see what others came up with! This meeting is a little longer than normal because it is the first week but we leave and head home at around 10pm. When we get back I am exhausted. We were going to try this new game called Betrayal but I ended up going to bed a little early tonight. God provided me with a job today, tomorrow He takes me to a campus to hopefully meet and get to talk to some students during their day.

Day 2 and 3: Scavenger Hunt and Meeting the Campus

Team on Pier
Day 1:
This morning breakfast was provided for the meeting we had which started our day. We went through a lot of the logistics of the summer, talked about the city, and about what we will be doing in the city. Then we were free for lunch so we went and ate with another room for lunch. After that we all met in the lobby and got into teams for our scavenger hunt in the city. We were in teams of about 6 including one staff member. Using the public transportation we made our way over town taking pictures of items on the list and posting them to Instagram. Halfway through we decided to just explore the city and have some fun so we went to Navy Pier and Millennium Park to just look around. At 5 we decided to go get dinner as a group and went to a place called Quartino Ristorante and the food they had there was family portions to share. We got a couple different items and split the cost between us. It was so good! After dinner we came back to the lofts and hung around until our second meeting at 8 but this one was a little bit more fun. We played a game before we all went back to our rooms. Several people were having problems setting up their routers and so I went to go help them and met up with Stuart and Ryan on the trip and the three of us went around at the geek squad for the night. After that I went to my room to sleep but ended up talking to my roommates for another couple hours which was awesome! Continue reading

Day 1: Move in!

Yesterday we arrived at the Dwight Lofts early in the morning to unload my stuff for registration! Registration started at 10ish and they had music and excitement and everything! I met one of my roommates in the lobby as I was preparing to move my stuff up to my floor. We both headed up and had problems with getting our keys to work on our door. My roommate Jay went up to the 11th floor to fix his key and eventually we both get into our room. He unloads his stuff into room B and I unload into room A. Once we unload we head up to the sky lounge to relax a bit, meet some others, and do some activities. Then we head with a group to the train station to get a pass for the month for unlimited transit in the city. Then we went back to our room to begin unpacking. One of our roommates stuff is in Jays room so we think Ryan is here. As we unpack, another box of stuff comes up to be unloaded into my room. The guy says it is Ryan’s stuff and then we discovered that the rooms were originally mislabeled and so Evan had put his stuff in Jays room. We unloaded Ryan’s stuff into my room and then we all went up again to the sky lounge to hang out for a bit. Ryan left to get his pass and Jay and I headed back down to the room. When Ryan got back we all decided it was too much work to switch all the stuff and so we ended up just switching rooms. We spent the next couple hours setting up the room and man these rooms are nice! Continue reading