The Advocates’ Arrival

My teammates and I at the 3-D Dinosaur Movie

at the San Diego Natural History Museum last Sunday

 Concentrating on my crayon sketch of T-Rex at the Dinosaur Exhibit

A large group of us volunteered last Saturday to clean up and help 

paint a local high school before school starts up

It is truly a blessing to have a weekend to rest and recharge after going hard for about 55 hrs at the office last week. The last two weeks at the Invisible Children office have been incredibly dense with trainings on everything from public speaking and merchandise to van and personal hygiene (yes, they want us to be clean!).

We have also been booking screenings like crazy during the earlier hours of the days. I’m proud to say that I received 3 screening agreements this week and our team, East Coast, is out in front with 79 screenings as of Friday night! As a whole, the tour has about 715 screenings booked, leaving another 285 to go to reach our goal. It was crucial to make as much headway as possible this past week because we knew that on Friday afternoon, the remaining members of our teams were flying in…

If you want to see where I work and some of the people I work with, check out this Justin Bieber lip-sync video that we made during lunch break (I'm not in it though)



So there we were, deep into a gender/team relations training that Margie Dillenburg (former head of Movement Dept, current head of Alumni Relations) was leading, when Zach Barrows (current head of Movement Dept) interrupted the meeting and said, “This is probably the worst training to have to cut short, but we have to—your advocates have just landed.” It was as if we had all practiced an emergency office evacuation drill several times before: in less than five minutes there were 60 employees loaded into all the vans and down the parking garage!

We were short on time and it just so happened to be rush hour in downtown San Diego. Thankfully it was only a mile or two away and we were parked in about 10 minutes. Everyone burst out of the vans and began sprinting full speed toward the airport lobby—Dale ran so hard that he actually broke both of his flip-flops in the process! It took us a minute to figure out just which way they would be coming from, but then we spotted two dozen Ugandans all wearing the same Invisible Children shirts; we ran faster than the wind until we collided with them and greeted them with a 20-minute long hug fest!

To my surprise, we didn’t get disciplined by the airport security, but they were definitely paying close attention to our massive and loud group. Here is a photo of our completed East Coast team after things settled down a little bit:

from left to right: Lawrence, Dale, Sunday, Me, Tracy and Jaymie

Today we met up with our Ugandan teammates again at Mission Beach to swim and play soccer before another long week at the office.  There is only one full week of booking left and our team has a practice screening (but real audience) on Tuesday and Sunday this week.  We will be launching out on September 8th for a 3,000 mile drive out to West Virginia to start out our East Coast tour for 10 weeks -- we can't wait!

Week One as a Roadie!

You would think that after being involved with an organization for over four years, you would have a good grip on all the projects going on; I definitely learned a lesson in humility this week on just how much I still had to learn about the company I now work for, Invisible Children.  I am thrilled to now share some of that with you, but first let me tell you about living in a house in San Diego with 60 other full-time volunteers!

I arrived in beautiful, always 72 and sunny San Diego (it truly is!) last Sunday and had 60 new names and faces to memorize, as well as having to adjust to living out of a suitcase and in a room with 14 other guys; I had more space when I lived in my college dorm! It’s a good challenge though and it’s only for another 3 weeks which I will then be living out of a van and sleeping in stranger’s homes for 10 weeks.  The Roadie/Intern house is a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath house at the top of a hill in La Mesa, CA and fits 60 people quite snuggly.  Our landlord and neighbors are saints who have a ton of grace and understanding, thankful that its only this packed for one month.

My teammates that I will be on the road with are Dale, Tracy, and Jaymie, plus Sunday and Lawrence, our two Ugandan teammates who will arrive next week along with 20 other Ugandan advocates.  We have already formed a great bond and are thankful that we are all Christians and will be able to come to one another for prayer and devotions (most, but not all roadies are Christian). We have been attending a local church together along with many other roadies.

The western sunsets have been remarkably beautiful, especially with the hills in the foreground.  I am really loving the geography here.  The mountains here are such a drastic contrast to the soggy plains of most of Florida.  Because of the surrounding hills, our house actually reminds me so much of the house in Freetown, Sierra Leone that I stayed in during my trip in 2007. We have also had a chance to take the trolly (!!!) to downtown San Diego and see the bay as well as a trip yesterday to Ocean Beach. (Click on panorama below for larger view of my new backyard!)

Tuesday was our first official day as full-time unpaid volunteers of Invisible Children, which started off with a most remarkable and inspiring welcome message from founder Jason “Radical” Russell.  We were also introduced to all of the department heads and their staff.  It’s crazy because in having been an advocate on the ground in Orlando for several years, I met about 9 sets of roadies; what’s more is that many of the current staff had been Deep South roadies at one time or another that visited Orlando.  In fact, off the top of my head I can count 6 former Deep South roadies who are still working for Invisible Children, just not necessarily as roadies.

Our training has been quite rigorous but we have all been sponges ready to soak it all in.  Like I said, I have been blown away by how little I knew before this week; or let me rephrase that: I was surprised at how much more that there was to learn about the history of the war, the programs of the company, and the direction it is headed. So much care is taken to ensure that all of the Ugandan programs are developed and implemented by Ugandan experts, not Americans. I will spare you the lessons on all our programs and such for now, but I hope to do some future blogs that will break down each program into more detail.  Schools for Schools is the program that we will be mostly focused on this semester, but we also have the Legacy Scholarship Program, MEND, Conservation Cotton Initiative, and a few others.

Thanks for taking the time to read about my first week, and I can't wait to tell you more as things progress!