Our Newest Volunteer Corps Member
As of June 1, 2014, Katie Schultz is our latest Volunteer Corps member! She completed her internship with the team in New Mexico and has decided to stay on longer. We asked her if she had any thoughts she wanted to share about her experience so far, and here is what she wrote:Hey folks!The stirrings and bubbles of every one watching the pot is over—it has boiled! I am cooked! They say, well-done! The internship is rolling to the end, and I will stay in New Mexico to roll on and sizzle under the sun with the Gallup team.
I could not resist seeing what more surprises will bloom out of these four corners! I can feel my mind opening to the Fourth World paradigm: this is truly a whole nother landscape of living. In the Story Garden, I hear a young girl we know talk about her ceremony transporting her to womanhood and feel a tulip budding behind my ear. I see an older child extending a puzzle to welcome a little boy, and green vines shoot out the ends of my braid. Up in Gamerco, we make mountains wondering how to fix the swing, then ride the contours of the valley when we can swing again after solving the riddle.I have been traveling down a Technicolor river of discovery with the kids at our street libraries. Every day presents new challenges to bend and twist and expand my own imagination, take it up another notch, add another log to the creative fire. It has been quite a crazy exploration, learning how to plan and prepare and then adjust when kids bend the rules and change the pattern. Learning from the different styles everyone on our team brings and the way their brains build projects from opposite angles. But whether these activities are a huge success, or we find lots of room for improvement, there is no love lost at the street libraries. It is another world for all of us together, where reality never disappears, but softens its fangs a little bit.I draw inspiration from a magic source.I am inspired because there is a protective force that has kept me safe through many hardships.I am inspired because there is a bountiful force which has provided all my needs for me in very barren times.I am inspired because there is a creative force which always seems to bring out life and color to bleak and stormy days.I have called this force by many names, I have seen it manifested in many ways throughout my life. I seem to gravitate to where it is. Here in the desert, where I see this oasis spring from is working with ATD Fourth World, from the volunteers, and from our interactions with the community. I guess that is the reason why I declared today I am happy to stay and work with them.-Katie Schultz, Gallup’s ex-Intern