Good Food (Days 2-4)

So I was partially wrong (and also really bad at continuously blogging). The next day wasn't so bad. Well the day sucked as we spent basically the whole time in orientation meetings letting us know what we could and couldn't do and talking about insurance [Yay our insurance covers the repatriation of our remains!!! (did they really need to tell us that? it was a little weird)]. Anyway the actually interesting part of the day was dinner. One of our faculty had a friend in New Orleans that he had gone to high school with and that guy was now living in New Orleans and sharing a house with a profession Creole cook. So they invited us over to their house (located in the historic french quarter) onto their back patio and the cook made us amazing gumbo and jambalaya. Actually amazing doesn't even begin to describe it.

Looking back now I really don't remember anything memorable about Wednesday other than we started to get to know each other better and we began to meet our country coordinator Sherrilynn (who was awesome and had an adorable 5 month old with her. Thursday was a more exciting day. Sherrilynn wanted us to know that after this amazing experience we are embarking on a lot of us may want to do something, so she set up small dinners with a large number of young activists working in New Orleans. My group of 4 selected Alan Williams who works for a tech startup called Neighborland. the idea behind the company is to set up a social network where people can communicate ideas about how to improve their neighborhoods and cities. The site is set up so that everything is presented as "I want ________(idea, service or thing) in ____________(neighborhood, intersection or city)." If you are on the site you can post your own statements or click "I agree" on other people's statements. The idea is the statements that receive more support, then people know that is what is wanted by the public. They have done some cool things (like convincing the New Orleans transportation department to publicly release the city bus GPS information so that people can build 3-rd party software to actively track how far away the next bus is) to more mundane things (convincing someone to open a bakery in a neighborhood as there was demand for one). I'm still not convinced this isn't a feature that should just be better integrated into existing social networks (solves the problem of convincing everyone to join) but he was passionate and very interesting to talk to. I don't again remember what we did on Thursday during the day, but I don't remember it being too riveting.