I sit here on the couch of my host family beside Vittoria the daughter of the seriously badass single mom who hosted both myself and Alice from England this week waiting for us to leave for the train station in Monseliece to go to Mestre, which is the town near Venice that I stayed at in my Airbnb that I will again call home for the next two weeks. I have been assigned a two week camp there and I am very excited because I will be working with two of the tutors that I met at my orientation week in Nevegal, Monique a seriously cool chick from NYC who is a chef and has travelled the world working for Club Med and on cruise ships, and Jessica a funny ECE from Australia. I know that the three of us are going to tear it up at camp and have a blast.
Ospedaletto is a very small little town and our camp this week only had 19 kids, but it was a truly wonderful group of kids that warmed my heart immensely. I got the chance to work with the older children which was my dream come true because our work was a process drama which is an extended story we create together collaboratively and our story was about a group of us being in a plane crash and ending up on an island where we meet indigenous people and have to decide on how we will interact with them and what we will do to survive. My kids were so lovely and sweet they all agreed immediately to leave each other alone and respect one another's cultures. The Italian kids did a presentation about their culture, and the Indigenous kids created a culture where they had a sacred pigeon named Rosito. One of the episodes involved a monsoon coming in and on a whim I decided to say that Rosito had died, resulting in the kids deciding to build a memorial pizzeria in her honor. On their own they decided to announce her death to the rest of the children and the camp and the other little campers came to pay respects at the shrine we had built in her name with little flowers they had all made with crepe paper and even the camp director made balloon flowers to leave for us. At the end of the story we had to decide if they wanted to leave on a rescue ship and they unanimously decided to stay. It was so much fun and the kids were just complete pleasures to teach.
Our camp director was not very good at organization and on the Sunday night we went to Ferrara for the Busker Festival and she couldn't find where we had parked so we were wandering the streets until about midnight and it was an hour's trip home. Monday morning the school was locked so it was a mad scramble to get things ready. From what I have heard this is very common for her personality and her heart was in the right place, but there were a few moments this week that were slightly disastrous because of lack of organization. Listening to stories from other camps I think I got suuuuper lucky and the family I stayed with was lovely.
I had to share a bedroom with Alice from England and I would be lying if I said I wasn't very ready to have my own space again. Alice is a bit of a mess, constantly falling over, bitten by bugs and she developed a terrible abscess in her wisdom tooth that led to her going for an emergency dental appointment and snoring so loudly last night even my noise cancelling headphones wouldn't do and I ended up on the couch. But it's been a fun week and my host mom has made super delicious food, wraps and getting special cheese for me because I said the cheese here is so good, making pepper pasta and gnocchi and tasty things every night even after working all day in an amazing dance workshop she is doing about domestic violence.
It's been a girl power week here, the other class that Aaron the Italian Irish man that I came here with had was all girls with one boy and they decided to be ninjas and arrest him. It's been hilarious watching him sit in the corner and build fake dynamite and the girls have been strong and practicing ninja fight moves. We talked a lot about Harry Potter and stories with strong women and how my host mom decided to leave her husband to find her own happiness when she realized she was carrying his weight and it's a familiar story to me for sure! I love her spirit and I see so much of the good parts of my own mom in her and how she and her ex are working together and getting along to build a better life for Vittoria and keep her world as open to possibility as possible.
I'm excited for my next place, and I'm grateful for the gifts this one has had for me as well. And I've been losing weight somehow so I will return to Canada as the freakish woman who went to Italy and actually lost weight. Though Italy still has two more weeks to try and fatten me up, there will be a bicycle at the next house for me to get to camp on and I'm afraid of biking in Toronto and getting hit by a car like a few of my friends have but in the Italian small towns I think it will be safe and beautiful to bike around and feel the freedom of my own body's momentum riding in the golden Italian sun to my next stop.
Oh, and I have been speaking to Rafaelle, he's in India but has invited me to stay with him in Milan before my flight on my last weekend, and next weekend some of my orientation friends want to meet up in Milan so he said he will postpone his trip to see his family until Saturday if I come stay over Friday so it will hopefully be a wonderful time in store for me and a reunion with some of my great new friends!
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