The plan was to leave the day after my beautiful sister's wedding in September and fly to Edinburgh, Scotland. I would stay in Scotland for a week then fly to Zagreb, via Frankfurt and get a bus to Bale. Then in December fly back to Seattle via Frankfurt again. With my schedule set, and money spent I committed to believing in the trip and the project.
Fast forward a few weeks and into my poor unsuspecting inbox comes the bombshell. An email from Winterbottom explaining that our partners in Croatia, the Mayor of Bale etc. have pulled out. Leaving us with nowhere to stay, no food, and no building materials.
The project is canceled.
Winterbottom was distraught and doing everything he could to find us a new project ASAP but the future of the project was looking pretty grim, and we might want to start looking for other options.
Understandably everyone in the program was heartbroken. I myself dealt with it by crying by a river for awhile. Besides the disappointing about not getting to go, I think all of us had already bought our tickets, and most of them were non-refundable. Classes here at UW were already full and a lot of people like myself had our hearts set on going abroad. Things looked like they were really going to suck.
I and I'm sure a lot of us spent the next week refreshing my email every hour, waiting for any kind of news, good or bad. I started to look into other options for fall quarter, such as an exchange or an individualized study abroad, but anything like that takes a lot of time and planning. I was just about to try to register for classes when we got an e-mail from Winterbottom asking those of us that could to come to a meeting at UW on Friday.
The meeting was fairly brief. Winterbottom explained what happened with the people in Bale, and how he has been awake for three weeks trying to fix this. He had two possible projects lined up, one at a psychiatric hospital on the Island of Rab in Croatia and the other in New Orleans. But it would still be a week at least before we knew for sure what our fate would be.
Upon returning home, into my poor, unsuspecting little inbox came my salvation! An email from Winterbottom, saying that the director of the psychiatric hospital on Rab had committed! She wants us there! We are going there! The hospital has gardens already for food and gardening therapy and we'll be building them a healing garden! It's happening, we are going!
The hospital looks beautiful, it already has a garden/agricultural feel to it from what I've seen of it from youtube videos and pictures on their facebook page page.
We'll be flying a bit by the seat of our pants, usually Winterbottom gets almost a year to do what he has done in the last three weeks, and we are extremely grateful for all the work he has done so we can go do this. He usually gets to go a few months before and check out the site and do some preliminary analysis, meet the people and form some connections for us over there. Not this time though, so it will be one heck of an adventure for sure. We'll be doing some in-the-moment problem solving, negotiating, re-thinking and fast acting.
This is going to be so cool! Only 42 days! Gah!
and here is a video about projects from a few years ago, very similar to what we'll be doing :)
and here is a video about projects from a few years ago, very similar to what we'll be doing :)