So I have to devote time to an Angela page. Angela is this girl in the MSID group that the rest of us are having a hard time with. She is about the whitest (culturally I mean) person I've ever known. She has long blond hair that she is very fond of, and wears sundresses and a colorful wicker hat and sorority girl style club clothes. She is a little bit of a space cadet and I think a little insane in new age sort of way. Not in an endearing way. In fact, in a really irritating way. She is very naive and I fluctuate between feeling sorry for her and repressing urges to snap at her. She is very good for the rest of us as far as working on our patience.
She does really dumb things that have relatively little to do with what one should or could do all the time. She is always late for everything, even when she knows that we are all in a hurry. She ordered a salad yesterday that she didn't like so she wanted to send it back and exchange it for a different one. The rest of us tried to say that you take a risk when ordering new foods that it might be something you don't like; there was nothing actually wrong with the salad. She insisted though, and since her French is really poor (far far worse than anyone else in the group) she wanted Nadia, this girl who lived in France on and off as a kid to do it for her.
Poor Nadia. Anyway. I am trying not to treat her like a child; although that's the way she acts. She bugs the shit out of me...we are all making a group effort to not scream at her and to be patient. When we were all waiting for her (again) one day before we were about to leave for an environmental education/recreational day in this river system with hella islands, Desola asked Angela if she had ever gotten a whoopin and informed her that she better start hurrying it up.
I was torn between being uncomfortable at the group ostracism of Angela and wanting to laugh cuz it was exactly what I was thinking. I'm not down with ostracizing her, I don't think any of us are, but it's sort of happening anyway cuz she is just not at all on the same page as the rest of us. She is one of the ones staying for the year, and she is also going to an organic farm. If we get placed on the same farm im going to ask for a transfer to another one cuz I really do not want to deal with being that girl's babysitter/psychotherapist/mother/American bonding person/etc.
