Team Building with Joey

I have posted a lot about the city and things we have seen, so here's a snippet of the function of BBI and the professionals who came with us this week.  Sunday was the forum, it is a big event that kicks off the week the professionals are here.  It is a partnership of a couple different organizations in the city that work together to provide leadership training and workshops to students.  The most popular lecture was on dating and marriage!  Anyways, it is really cool because over 600 students apply for 100 spots!  Every year it gets more and more popular.  So the forum gives all the student leaders opportunities to meet and talk with the professionals who come in to lecture.  Then, throughout the week the professionals are booked on different campuses throughout the city and students can see the schedule and go to one or schedule to have a professional come and talk to their group.  It is a great way to meet students and they are very open and excited to talk and connect with American professionals.  These students who come to the forum are the best of the best - the leaders on their individual campuses.  All the pictures I took at the forum are in RAW format, so I can't upload any of them. 

On Monday night, we got to tag along with Joey from Texas and help facilitate at his lecture about team building.  It is more of a workshop and really only meant for groups of 25 - 30 students.  Well, these lectures get really popular and when we showed up at the campus there were over 100 students ready to listen!  It was chaos.  We were able to involve about 45 students and the others ended up slowly leaving.  But it was a great place to build relationships.  Here are some pictures from the workshop.  They had to design and build a bridge using specific parameters as a team in under 20 minutes with just newspaper and tape.  It was really fun and the students got really into it!

As usual it's like we are rock stars.  These girls clobbered us after the workshop to ask all sorts of questions.  They kept telling me that Steven and I should consider children.  I tried to tell them yes, someday - they didn't really understand why we wouldn't have kids already.  "You been married three years and no kids?"  Anyways, here they all wanted their pictures with us.  The girls in the picture (not all the ones taking pictures)  were all language majors - French, Spanish and Italian in amongst them!  Yet their English was also very good.

Here we are with Joey, Brett and the four Chinese students who hosted us at this lecture.  The girl next to me, Angelina she was the club leader I think.  We went to dinner with them before and they were fun to get to know.  Steven had a great conversation with Richard (in the back by Steven) and they were supposed to meet this morning but it didn't work out.  BBI is doing some awesome stuff over here and we are excited to see what our future role may be working with them!