28 Jun Reaching Out

This week I had the opportunity to attend Tinkerfest at the Mid America Science Museum. The museum is a very hands-on kid-friendly museum where they focus on educating kids about STEM. The festival that day was Tinkerfest, and there were many kids attending. There were also vendors from various parts of the community presenting at booths. Doctors, businessmen and educators all attended, and let kids do anything from taking apart a car, learning about the human body, and making plastic note cards. There I was tabling in front of the Skins and Skulls presentations. My supervisor Miguel came along too, and we switched the tables we were presenting at as well. He was presenting a watershed model, where you could show kids on a plastic set of a city where contaminants come from and how then end up reaching our water resources. I’ve had experience reaching out to kids, but this was one of the most kid-friendly environments I’ve been to and it kind of made me miss being one. The rest of the week was spent trying to reach out and make connections with the Latino community here in Hot Springs. This was more difficult than I anticipated, but with the help of many connections I was able to find a committed group to make up the volunteer portion of our Latino Conservation Week event. We are planning on having a service-learning event, where a committed group will come and volunteer in the morning and then we’ll hold an educational fair with many tables to help educate the public about conservation and LWCF. Even with how busy this week was, I was still able to find time to go see Wonder Woman this week. I kept hearing about how great it was, so I’m glad to say that it is indeed a great movie. I was also able to get in a few runs this week, even though I rolled my ankle pretty bad on one. Trail running here is a lot different from back home in that the woods are very dense, and it’s easy to feel like you’re far away from civilization by going just little bit into the woods here. I also celebrated the summer solstice and had barbeque for the first down here.