Today, we had our first outing with Downeast Dog 2.0, the high school team putting together the December issue of Downeast Dog News. Up to this point, it's been a lot of me standing in front of the classroom babbling about how great being a journalist is, and then forcing my intrepid reporters to look things up online. Last week, we had a small presentation by DDN publisher Wendi Smith, designer Noreen Mullaney, and sales exec Pat Demos, which was excellent but, again, from the students' perspectives it was mostly them sitting quietly for two hours and listening to what other people had to say.
This afternoon, however, Youthlinks guru Scott Browning and I piled the students - Caleb, Mikayla, and Terri - into the YL van, and we headed to area animal rescues Camden-Rockport Animal Rescue League and the Humane Society of Knox County. The point was for the students to have an opportunity to get some photos of the animals, find out a little more about the workings and dynamics of these two shelters, and specifically to ask a couple of questions for an article they'll be doing for the paper. Mostly, though, I wanted the students to have an opportunity to see firsthand why I love what I do: you get to go meet amazing people doing great things for the community, AND you get to play with awesome animals. Seriously, now, what's not to love about that?
Though the shelters are only a few miles apart here in Knox County, they have entirely different atmospheres. The students are all familiar with HSKC, but have had limited exposure up to this point to CRARL; I was pleased that they had an opportunity to look critically at both set-ups, and see firsthand that there are many different breeds of animal shelter out there. At both shelters, we all got the chance to play with kittens and ooh and aahh over the dogs (and Poppy the Pig at HSKC, who was a huge hit), and we got tours of the facilities. CRARL shelter manager Laura Stupca did a great job of showing everyone around and making us feel welcome.
At the end of the afternoon, we had an opportunity to speak with HSKC shelter manager Theresa Gargan for a few minutes, and I got a glimpse of the vision I had when I first came up with the idea of having an issue of DDN written exclusively by teens. Because my Youthlinks gang is familiar with HSKC and they know Theresa quite well, the normal reserve between teens and adults vanished; there was joking, conversation, and plenty of questions. When we piled back into the van at the end of the day, Mikayla was listing all the cats she wanted to take home, Terri was pining over a deaf pit bull at the Camden-Rockport Animal Rescue League, and Caleb was still comparing the long-haired, half-blind cat we'd just met at the Humane Society to an elder in the Warriors series.
I'm having such fun getting to know these guys better, and have been so impressed with their compassion and devotion to the animals in our world. On Saturday, we head to Portland for a day of pit bull awareness with SOME Pit! - Terri's a HUGE pit bull fan, so she's totally psyched, and I'm pretty sure Caleb has never met a dog he didn't like. I imagine Mikayla will be plotting ways to sneak the bullies we meet back home, and with Kyla along for the trek, there's no worry that the Q&A session at the end of the SOME Pit! presentation will be dull. There's no doubt that it will be an interesting day for the whole gang - myself most definitely included!
Mikayla & Caleb with Fred the beagle
No comments:
Post a Comment