seeing it come together

there was a play on campus last year and it was entitled things fall apart.  it was a wonderful play, and i enjoyed it for many reasons.  and the phrase "things fall apart," has this way of sounding so elegant, so poignant, beautifully sad.  i guess it came to might today, because of how i am feeling, however i am feeling more like "things fall together".

last summer about this time i was working on a powerpoint presentation.  why?  i was out of school, an intern for an organization doing ministry with youth in the inner city.  why was i sitting in a living room with my laptop in my lap deciding between bold or italics for 100 pt font on slides?  struggling to use the shapes tool to create little blob-shaped people?  at that time, i knew that i wanted to develop a presentation for an audience of high school students about human trafficking and modern day slavery.  and what did i have to do that?  power point.  so inspired, right?

as time went on i completed my little computer presentation, and what did i find?  i found i was overflowing with ideas and desires that i had little resources for.  i didn't want the presentation to be all pictures and words on a screen.  my vision was that there would be drama involved, on-stage theatre– skits– that there would be fun and popping visuals, and that there would be presenters.  what did i have?  me.  and my laptop.

time went on.  i was in school, and i let the presentation sit in its lonely folder of dreams and unlikely ideas.  sometimes i brought it up and i moved slides around or i twiddled with coloring, etc. etc.  i figured i would polish the presentation up my senior year and write a long paper about what i would have done with it if i could have done something and that would be pretty much that.  maybe i would get to present a piece of it to a group of high school kids with some random connection.

a connection did come.  through Addie i was connected with Sara Pomeroy, the woman who heads up the RJI, Richmond Justice Initiative.  i heard that she was looking to do awareness in a high school in the area, and so i jumped at the chance (nervously– nervously leapt) at the opportunity to share with her what i had constructed.  i had a sit down with her at one point and because of technological complications (darn PCs), the best i could do was send her a PDF version of what i had drawn up months previously without a whole lot of editing since.

time went on.  RJI got a grant to do awareness in a specific high school; the ties came together and soon they had a definite group of students they would be working with.  as they were working tirelessly to develop an excellent curriculum to guide their students through, i was in school, pretty sure that they had better contacts with more expertise and talent; when i was invited to some of the conference meetings about the project (titled The Prevention Project) i figured this would be great experience for me as a college student, to sit and listen to how people flesh out all the necessary elements of creating and organizing an educational awareness campaign in a school– after all this was still what i wanted to be a part of some day.

time went on.  i received emails, i heard calls, etc.  i thought about my powerpoint frequently, like an old friend.  i wanted to do something.  i have a wonderful friend named Vanessa, she's got all the talent and passion for art pretty much ever possible.  i think, hey i should get her input on this.  so i send her some of my slides and give her some ideas; she gets back to me with some custom-made .gifs.  i'm amazed.  a whole new door to a whole new world has opened, like Narnia.  i feel re-invigorated about this project.  do i know where it's going now?  heck no.

then toward the start of this summer Addie came back from abroad and we met up with Sara again.  Sara mentioned wanting to speak with me about my presentation in reference to The Prevention Project.  i didn't think much of it, my mind immersed in this-summer-of-research-thoughts.  then a few weeks ago came.  i got the chance to skype with Sara and she told me that she had gone over my PDF presentation with some other people on the Prevention Project board and from IJM and they were all impressed.  i'm sorry– wait– my presentation isn't sitting in dust somewhere??  i was really really very pleasantly surprised to hear this.  it isn't that i didn't think my presentation was good– i had gotten great feedback from several people– i guess i just didn't expect that it would go somewhere without my hounding somebody about it.  Sara wanted to know if i could go over it, clean it up a little, make it accessible for other people to proctor, make it work as an introduction to trafficking for one of the first weeks of the curriculum.  okay, so i would want to take out animations, rethink or reframe the drama elements, eliminate my voice from the equation– my mind was going a million miles a minute.  would i be okay with it becoming a part of The Prevention Project, she asked.  YES.

i tear into the powerpoint again, redesigning slides almost from ground-up.  no animation, but more color.  clean fonts, justified lettering, no serifs.  some serifs.  (can you tell i just read a book about typography?)  suddenly i have a clearer view of how everything has to look.  i email Vanessa, so excited to tell her that YES, your hard work on this will actually go somewhere!  i enlist her to create some images to replace my raggedy powerpoint-shape-tool ones.  and then i pretty much text her at every opportunity (hey girl how are you, draw anything recently? hope i'm not bothering you but have you drawn anything for me, hm, hm? :D)*

then i began to ramble on about this with Addie.  again, i didn't see myself as available to present this in the Fall with everything i have going on on-campus as is.  well, oh look at that– Addie is going to be interning for RJI this fall so she will probably be the person or one of the people presenting this material.  well hey, that makes editing with the presenter in mind a whole lot easier.  i sit down with Addie and we go over slides.  it's nitty gritty, things are getting reworked, reworded, colors are changing, slides are added, sliced, slivered, completely cut out.  there may have been a tear in my eye at one point.  but a good tear, it was a tear of progress.

so now i have a venue, an audience, a sponsor, a speaker, i have a graphic artist, and i have my revamped presentation, more coherent in content, and more sleek, simple and aesthetically pleasing in design.  i mean, that'd probably be enough wouldn't it?  but it's not all!

but drama.  what about the drama?  when this came up at first i thought it would just be completely cut.  Addie encouraged me to think otherwise; we know people with talent in this area, she said according to my paraphrasing, you should reach out.  so i did.  i reached out and you know what happened?  this awesome fellow student named Josh responded that yeah, he's become more passionate about the issue, he has the connections and resources to make this possible, the time table looks good and basically it's just what he's been looking for at the moment.

i mean, if there was ever a time to say Hallelujah!, it has to be now, right?

a year ago around this time i was by myself creating slides for a presentation that may never happen.  what do i have now?  let's go over that piece again: a venue, an audience, a sponsor, a speaker, a graphic artist, and a revamped presentation that is coherent and aesthetically pleasing.


i hope you all hear my heart on this.  this isn't about what i did, or accomplished or anything like that.  look, the thread in this post is everything that happened without me.  without RJI, Sara Pomeroy, the high school that opened its doors, the students who showed interest, Addie and Vanessa and Josh, a little raggedy powerpoint presentation on modern day slavery would simply be an old idea i had once in a folder somewhere on the desktop of the computer i spend too much time on anyway.

maybe you think that's just how networking works.  but on my blog i'm going to tell the truth, it's not.  networking can work that way, but a lot of the time, most of the time, things fall through.  i know ideas.  i know a lot of people who have ideas.  think of all the ideas you have had.  how many have actually come to fruition?  even the great ones!  i thank God because i remember praying to Him, if you want this to happen, if this is from you and i think that it is, please provide these pieces that are necessary.  i literally remember sitting in my room and praying that less than a year ago.  now the vision i had, that He gave me, it's changed since i first had it (i thought it would be a big assembly-type event, rather than a classroom-sized portion of a curriculum), but that's because as time has gone on and He's put things together, my vision has slowly been corrected and redirected into His purpose.

as far as what my thesis is going to be now, well that presentation was the bulk of it soooo... no ideas... Jesus take the wheel, haha, please.  again.  [:


for more info on RJI: http://www.richmondjusticeinitiative.org/
for more info on The Prevention Project: http://prevention-project.org/home.php
also look them up on Facebook!

*not an actual text, thank the Lord.