The meals at the Metta Karuna Center are simple but well prepared and plentiful. There hasn’t been one negative comment about the food. For breakfast we had French bread, fruit, and a rice porridge.
Before we started the morning session, several staff posed for pictures at a statue representing the Woman at the Well in John’s gospel. They most certainly had no idea of the connection between the statue and the well beside it.
One of the objectives of our time together is to allow the staff to get to know each other better and to become more comfortable with communications between the deaf and hearing staff. This morning we had a one-on-one exercise to facilitate the type of personal communications we want.
Then we got going with the first session of the day. We talked about personal budgets, the budgets of DDP, and the constraints placed upon us by our funding situation.
Part of the exercise was asking each of the staff to prepare a personal budget showing their income and expenditures. Most had never done anything like this.
This year for the first tiime we offered some child care for staff who otherwise would not have been able to coome. Here Karen Bortvedt plays with the infant daughter of Korn Maly our Sign Language Project manager.
In the afternoon we had another activity which tried to help staff learn how to achieve individual goals while also fulfilling the group’s goals.
We ask the staff to wear long pants and appropriate clothes for our working sessions but once those are over and for the meals they were free to dress much more casually.
After supper we showed some photographs taken during the day here and then various groups got together for a quiet evening of board games and snacks until lights out at 10:00 PM.