A few of us were privileged today to visit The Kilns (the former home of C.S. Lewis) and receive a personal tour by Mr. Aidan Mackey, an almost-89-year-old G.K. Chesterton expert. I didn't realize that the house is still used by scholars who wish to live there and study for a period of time. The house has been restored nearly to the state it was when Mr. Lewis lived there.
California Claire with her palm tree
Recreation of attic playroom at The Kilns
Part of the garden at The Kilns
Library at The Kilns
Original Eagle and Child sign
Narnia stamps
The Kilns
Narnia!
Since it's Oxford Open Doors weekend, we also got to go into other colleges that normally charge for visitors. New College, founded in 1379, is beautiful. It's amazing to be in such old buildings that are still used for their original purpose. We don't have anything like that in America!
New College
Part of the New College cloister
New College hall
New College - to the left is one of the original city walls
I hope you're all doing well in the States or wherever else around the world you're reading this from!
Love from the island,
Rebecca
P.S. Besides the spiders in our flat, we had a friend named Batty in the downstairs bathroom:
Haven't seen him in a day or two :(
P.P.S. And here's a few pictures of my room and flatmate (flattie) Claire!
P.P.P.S. Last thing, I promise...Thomas, can you and Nat send me your mailing addresses? Thanks!
…And went to Oxford. One of my fellow American students—a self-described Anglophile—marched us straight to one of the most famous pubs in the city on our first day together, the place C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien frequented with their group called the ‘Inklings’. (The pub’s real name: The Eagle and Child. The pub’s name according to the Inklings: The Bird and Baby.)
But back to the beginning…
After navigating Heathrow en route to Oxford, I got to a sweet bed and breakfast called Cotswold House.
My room at Cotswold House
The stairwell at Cotswold House
I got out of my taxi and knocked on the front door and was greeted by name. I got there hours ahead of schedule, so while I sat and waited for my room to be ready I got to meet the owner’s wife. She fed me juice and biscuits and told me she was mothering me—a welcome feeling in a strange new town. Her friend and friend’s kids were there, so the next thing I got to do in Oxford was hold a beautiful baby. After a lonely trip, it was good to connect with believers (the owner is also the pastor of a local church, and the friend became a Christian at their church).
The strangest thing was being awake after a red-eye flight—it was ten in the morning and I felt like I had accomplished so much, since I had just had a 24-hour day. I sat, freezing (I did NOT pack enough warm clothes and blankets), in my little room and decided to go for a jog and see a little bit of town, then tried to get internet in Starbucks. The minute I finally got on, Starbucks closed for the evening—at 7 p.m. Everything closes early here. Little did I know it would be a week before I got reliable internet!
I got to my college housing the next morning—it’s about 2 miles away from the city center (where the Jesus College campus is)—before any other students. I wandered around for a few minutes until the housing caretaker found me and led me to my room. Before long I heard a knock and went to the door to find three other students. The guy in the blazer and sunglasses said, “You’re American!”
Next thing I knew I was headed into the city to get bus passes, explore campus, go to a pub, and get to know my new friends from Catholic University, Azusa Pacific University, and George Mason University. And that was day one as an OPUS (Oxford Programme for Undergraduate Students) student!
Jesus College campus
More of Jesus College
Jesus College chapel
Since then we've had orientation, started our lecture series, had a field trip to the Ashmolean museum, and--guilty confession--I haven't taken very many pictures or, as you know, been blogging coherently. But if you want to see/hear more, check out my wonderful flatmate Claire's great blog!
NEW YORK – Woody Woodfin and his urban basketball ministry, Street 2 Street, have a potential participation pool of 1.3 million.
That's how many kids live in New York City.
Woody and Renee Woodfin. Rebecca Dell
A ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ International, Street 2 Street aims to provide disadvantaged kids with the chance to play in competitive basketball tournaments. The name comes from the connection between the kids playing ball on the streets with the donors from Wall Street who want the opportunity to use their plenty to help others.
At the tournaments, participants hear the gospel: the message that Jesus can be their Savior and that He loves them even when it seems like no one else does. Local churches provide volunteers for the tournaments and follow up with participants in the weeks and years after the event.
This message is illuminated when kids see Woodfin and his team living out what they preach.
Woodfin is the kind of guy who will buy you lunch the first day you meet him. He'll stop on a crowded Manhattan sidewalk to open a door for deliverymen. He'll stop talking, silent for a moment, until his voice clears and he can continue talking about his love for the kids who are dumped by everyone except God.
Originally from Georgia, Woodfin played baseball and majored in communications at Tennessee Temple University.
There he met his future wife Renee, the attractive cheerleader who worked at the gym office. They married and joined staff with Campus Crusade's high school ministry, Student Venture, in 1995. They settled back in Chattanooga, Tenn., and started raising their family.
Years earlier, Renee had visited New York and told her parents she would live there someday.
"Because she had a heart for it, I did," her husband said.
So when the call came for a team to go to New York in the wake of 9/11, the Woodfins packed up and moved. The city was still in a daze when they arrived.
"Kids didn’t know which way to turn," Woody Woodfin said. The team worked at several different schools with Student Venture, providing "spiritual relief"
It wasn't easy to reach the kids, however. With his southern accent and white skin, Woody looked like an out-of-town cop and kids wanted nothing to do with him. He wondered what he could do to tear down those barriers.
Then one day in early 2005, Woodfin was walking through a neighborhood in Brooklyn for what seemed like the eight thousandth time. He saw some kids playing basketball. But this time, instead of seeing hoops and pavement, he saw a path opening between a white guy from Georgia and kids from broken homes in the projects of Brooklyn.
That February, Woodfin and local Damian Rosado started planning. In August, 128 kids came out for the first tournament. A chaplain for the New York Yankees and the New Jersey Nets delivered the Bible message.
"Twenty-something kids stood up in front of their friends to say yes to Jesus," Woodfin said. "I was hooked!"
He and Rosado had a way to reach hundreds of kids at once—a feat that previously would have taken months.
One memorable participant, Taishawn Bellvue, was known as "Lil LeBron" around his neighborhood. When youth pastor Desmond Wedderburn was looking to start a basketball team and a core group of youth for a youth church in the neighborhood, he recruited Bellvue.
On the court, Bellvue was brilliant, winning tournament MVP and character awards.
Bellvue heard the gospel for the first time that June and decided to give his life to God on a Student Venture retreat later that summer.
Six months later, Bellvue received a distress call from a friend in Union Square. When Bellvue came out of the subway station, he was stabbed to death.
Woodfin recalled the tragedy with sadness and hope: because of basketball, Bellvue put his hope in God before he died. He might never have heard about Jesus' saving power without Street 2 Street.
As the organization grows, Woody and Renee continue to work on logistics and ideas. Their own kids, Abbey, 20, Allison, 18, and Will, 13, plan their summers around the tournaments. The biggest challenge right now is figuring out how to raise support for full-time city staff.
"We live in a think tank together, don't we?" Renee Woodfin said.
"Yeah we do," her husband answered.
In addition to a tournament in Florida and one in Arizona earlier this year, this summer there will be 20 Street 2 Street tournaments throughout New York City, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Twelve hundred kids will get to play basketball and hear that God loves them.
Rebecca Dell can be reached at becca_2@myfairpoint.net
From left, Lawrence McGugins, experienced AAU coach and director, talks with Woody Woodfin and Damian Rosado about the possibility of starting a Street 2 Street AAU team. Rebecca Dell
A pile of promotional bookmarks and schedules wait to be handed out to invite kids to the 2011 summer tournaments. Rebecca Dell
Each participant got a drawstring backpack at the inaugural Street 2 Street tournament in 2005. The backpacks came stuffed with, among other things, a Bible and a hip-hop CD. Rebecca Dell
In response to state budget cuts, public higher education institutions have to find creative ways like premium graduate programs to bolster their budgets while keeping the public education mission alive.
For example, George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., is working on specialized graduate-level programs that will bring in a profit to the university, said Provost Peter Stearns. These programs will be designed for professional enhancement.
Mason already opened an on-campus hotel in 2010, with two-fold benefits: the space for on-campus conferences and speaker hosting, and the opportunity to raise funds from outside of the student body.
These are examples of institutions reacting to budget cuts by acting more like a private schools, said Stearns. In fact, Georgetown and George Washington, said Stearns, are making similar strides toward behaving like businesses.
There is always the option of raising tuition to make up for a gap between costs and funds.
"Many institutions must shift the cost to the students. If the costs have to be made up in the academic areas of the institution, it can lead to larger classes (and lower class availability), and lower support for faculty research," said Andrew Flagel, George Mason University Associate Vice President for Enrollment Development and Dean of Admissions.
The lack of funding can have devastating effects on schools. Virginia Commonwealth University faces larger reductions than any other 4-year Virginia state institution between now and 2012, according to VCU.
"VCU cannot sustain its core mission as a major research university focused on student learning at current revenue levels, let alone reduced levels. The consequences of not raising tuition, or even a small tuition increase, are profound," VCU says.
As schools turn increasingly to business solutions, complete privatization of state universities is not necessarily an option. For Mason, the cost would be too high.
"For an institution like Mason right now to go private would be foolish, because we don't have the philanthropy base," Stearns said. "We would lose 25% of our operating budget."
Stearns also said that if such a drastic change were to happen, some financial aid for in-state students would be lost. Another consequence would be the loss of building funding—academic buildings are largely funded by state bonds. For example, $60 million of Mason's new engineering building was paid for by the state.
The Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel, located on George Mason University's Fairfax, Va., campus, offers space and revenue. As public universities suffer state funding cuts, they have to look for new sources of revenue. Photo by Rebecca Dell
LONG ISLAND, N.Y. – For every athlete who wants to play professionally, there are untold numbers who do not make it. Brent Brockman is not one of those.
Brockman, a Pennsylvania native who majored in education and wants to eventually go into full-time coaching, graduated in December from George Mason University. He moved to Long Island in March to play defense for F.C. New York, a brand-new United Soccer Leagues PROteam.
While it is the same game, Brockman said that the professional style of play is more technical than the college style.
"Everything is so much cleaner," Brockman said. Professional players are more in control of the play and further developed in their athletic prowess. They also have to think faster to keep up with the game.
Playing professionally also means playing with more international "footballers," as much of the world calls soccer players. This exposes athletes to different styles of play and different game philosophies.
American players tend to focus more on fitness and nutrition, said Ben Algar, a British player for F.C. New York.
"In England, you do a lot more ball work," Algar said.
But the cultural glamour alone of playing professional sports is not enough to justify the work and adjustments involved.
"You really have to want it," said F.C. New York player Troy Cole. "It's a misconception that it is easy."
The USL PRO season runs from March to August, twice as long as the college season. Once their season ends, many players train with a Major League Soccer team until the end of that season in November. The physical and mental grind rises to a level that it never reached in college. It requires a new kind of discipline.
In addition to the physical and mental adjustments, Brockman has another hurdle to face: a torn right ACL that has sent him to the sidelines for the remainder of the 2011 season.
It is not a new situation for Brockman. As a freshman at Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania, he tore his left ACL in a spring match against Mason, the school to which he would eventually transfer. He was forced to sit out his sophomore season.
In 2009, he transferred to Mason, a school with about 30,000 more students than Saint Francis and head coach Greg Andrulis, a former MLS coach.
Now Brockman hopes to spend his off-season working with his former team at Mason, recovering from surgery so he can play again in the spring.
Brent Brockman looks on as his team, F.C. New York, practices on a foggy May morning. Brockman is out for the season with a torn ACL but hopes to be back on the pitch by next year. Photo by Rebecca Dell
The hour is early, but F.C. New York players remain focused during practice. Photo by Rebecca Dell
Brockman shares a house—dubbed "The Jungle"—with several of his teammates, and soccer gear fills the house and yard. Photo by Rebecca Dell
MANHATTAN – High school math teacher Amy DeGiulio was bored.
Her previous experience as an actuaryhelped her develop efficient work habits. So while many other teachers had to take work home at the end of the day, she took up hobbies, eventually starting her own business: Sugar Flower Cake Shop, a decorated-cake shop located in the Fashion District.
It all started in the early 2000s when she took a series of four baking classes that ended in a lesson on making sugar flowers.
"That's kind of where my eyes just opened up," DeGiulio said.
She bought books and kept practicing, learning by trial and error. In 2006, she started her own business. Her first customers were bakers and brides. DeGiulio explained that as the economy took a downturn, do-it-yourself projects became more popular. Young brides who wanted to save on a cake could have a friend make it and decorate it with DeGiulio's flowers.
Now DeGiulio bakes cakes and decorates them with buttercream frosting as well as rolled fondant, a clay-like sugar mixture. She carefully dusts colored powder on leaves and petals made out of sugar paste, gently blowing off extra powder to get the right hue. Intern Katie Bosch sits across the room cutting a playing card out of rolled fondant for an Alice in Wonderland-themed cake.
Bosch, a former pastry student at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, is involved with everything from baking the cakes and making the buttercream to rolling fondant for the decorations.
"I like having a project," Bosch said. At a pastry shop, she might be cooking the same thing all day—what she described as "seven hours of chocolate chip cookies"—but at Sugar Flower Cake Shop the work is always evolving.
While DeGiulio isn't sure whether the business will expand into a store front, she is interested in working with television to produce a show. She's committed to providing a high level of service to customers and she's passionate about her commitment to local and sustainable cake ingredients.
Rebecca Dell can be reached at becca_2@myfairpoint.net
Sugar Flower Cake Shop intern Katie Bosch carefully paints a teapot decoration for an Alice in Wonderland-themed cake.
Sugar Flower Cake Shop intern Katie Bosch works at one of the shop's all-purpose counters.
