Sore As Hell

I arived in Camden on Thursday and was thrown into the fire imediately. I got here at about 2pm, was shown where I would be living, introduced to my roomates and then had my first day of the after school program at 3. The first day went pretty well. I am going to be taking over the 8th grade class for an intern who is leaving. The class seemed pretty fun and by the end of the first day they had learned my name and had stopped calling me "tattoos" or "muscles". I also was able to play basketball for about an hour against some random guy from the neighborhood who wondered into the gym after program (program is short for after school program incase you are half retarded and couldn't pick up on that). He won 11 to 10 on a pretty nice pull up jumper but i'll get him next time. Yesterday the entire Urban Promise staff took a tour of Camden. This city is pretty rediculous and really run down. Buce Main (founder of urban) sat next to me on the bus and I was able to chat with him a bit. He seems like a really amazing guy and it turns out he is an APU graduate. My roomates seem chill so far. A couple of the other guys in the house and I have gotten cigars and smoked out on our porch the last couple nights which has been nice. The kids here are so much fun and aparantly are extremely fond of batman because i've had someone pioint at my tattoo and say, "Is that the joker?... man, thats live!" about four times a day since I got here. Today two other interns and I packed two cars full of kids (8th-10th graders) and headed to a skate park that is under an overpass in Philidelphia. The kids were pretty awsome skaters. Most of them are far better than I have EVER been. They do, however, now all think that I am crazy because I have absolutely no regard for my health/safety and was trying things that they wouldn't dream of trying. Needless to say, I have bruises everywhere and am going to be extremely sore tomorrow. At one point I dropped into the 6 foot half pipe from a ledge that was two feet above the top and I fell in the middle slamming my shoulder into the opposite wall of the half pipe. I have a feeling my shoulder will be sore for at least a week. After the skatepark we took the kids to a church youthgroup service in Cherry Hill which is near bye city that is quite a bit nicer than Camden. We pulled up in our two cars, blasting System of a Down and Atreyu, banging our heads and going crazy. All the suburban chruch kids thought we were insane. We skated in their parking lot for a while, sat throught the service, went to Mcdonalds and bought the kids dinner, and then dropped em off at their houses. After that I sat down at my computer and wrote this blog... You are now all up to date. It's going to be a crazy, intence, difficult, amazing 8 months.

Philly Skate Park

Our kids skating

My House.

After School Program