Thursday, April 26

We find ourselves in a bit of a bind.  Today and tomorrow are scheduled to be vocational experiences, meaning one GSE Team Member (sometimes more than one) meeting with a business owner, educator, etc., one-on-one to learn about how his/her profession is practiced in another culture.  Our Asan hosts, however, have scheduled a series of tours which address our vocational interests but involve all 10 Team members in two-hour tours rather than individual, in depth explorations individually.

We felt we had negotiated this last night, but our hosts seem to be back on their original schedule.  We negotiate some more, working to get each team member a one-on-one visit, with other team members taking some free time when their vocational experience isn't happening.  This has taken us from the expected two vocational days down to one 2-3 hour time each.  Team members seem to be ok, with only one or two worrying that they won't meet the expectations set by their employers when they gave them the time to come on GSE.

Sadly, our Asan hosts secured reservations for 10 people for each of these tours, so we're having to fight to get real vocational times - not tours - every couple of hours.

By the end of the day, our hosts see us as terribly demanding and not helpful...we see them as not working to meet GSE program expectations.  Worse, I think our translator is making things worse all the way around.  He claims to be explaining our positions, but by mid-day he's rolling his eyes every time we come to another negotiation time, which seems to be about every two hours.

Pile on top of all this the fact that we've been asked to cut our presentations in half for the District Conference, which starts Saturday.  Since we've seen no schedule for the conference, we have to prepare as if we'll be up first Saturday morning.

We've decided that our best presentation will involve as little introduction of team members, which we've done in laughable Korean, as possible, followed by a slide show of pictures from our experience.  The audience will then get to see themselves or their friends and remember the things they've done.  Of course, we have to do all this in our free time, which has dwindled quickly.

Walter and I work in the morning to compile and winnow down the 8-10,000 pictures taken by team members and get team members to whittle their personal intros down to 30 seconds from the 2-6 minutes they've each taken.  We then will turn the task of fashioning a 180-slide show from the 6-700 we've reduced.

Best news for the day:  dinner is in a restaurant with chairs!  My hips cheer loudly!