Journal Prompts and Quotes

Journal:

Students have begun their journals during the pre-trip preparation. Various homework assignments have been assigned to be taped in. The Code of the Road and Group Dynamics pages were provided at the last meeting to be taped in the journal.

What follows are journal prompts and a few quotes to be taped into the journal. 

SUGGESTED JOURNAL PROMPTS

Culture and Environment

-What is your first impression of Ollantaytambo? Describe which ways your first impression changes and which ways it is confirmed as time passes.  

-How does the hotel-hostel feel? Is it how you thought it would be?   

-Have you felt welcomed in general in Ollanta? When do you feel conspicuous (like you are very noticed) and when do you feel almost invisible?   

-What do you view as strange and very different in Ollanta when compared to the Denver area?   

-What in the cultural and social structures of Ollanta do you reject? What do you embrace?     uHow are buildings, roads and transportation different?    

-Describe nature: Trees? Shrubs? Mountains? Sketch some of the flora and fauna.

Family

-What are the values of your home-stay family? How can you determine what the family values?   

-What are their dreams?   

-What are the likes, dislikes and stories of your family?  

-What does your family think of you and US people and culture in general?   

-What are you enjoying about your family? What makes you uncomfortable with the family?    uHow does your family make a living?   

-Where and when do the children go to school?   

-Where do grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins live?   

Group Dynamics

-Whose behavior in the group surprises you because you had not seen that side of him/her before?   

-Who in the group impresses you with their inclusive concern for everyone, not just their better friends?   

-What conflicts are arising within the group and how are the conflicts being managed?    uWhat are you contributing to the group? What is your influence?    

-How are you helping someone(s) in the group manage a personal challenge or fear?

Self-reflection

-What do you feel really good about so far?

-What are you worrying about?

-What are you really grateful for at this moment?

-What made you laugh recently?

-What made you sad?

-Are you opening yourself up to others?

-Are you listening and observing?

-How are you being perceived?

-What are you learning about yourself?

-How are you managing a personal challenge or fear?

QUOTES

Kofi Annan:

To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.

Lily Walker, Australian Aboriginal:

If you’ve come to help, you are wasting your time, but if you’ve come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, let’s work together.

Lao-tsu:

To lead people, walk beside them ... When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’

Richard Leider:

The first person you have to lead every day is yourself.
If you can’t see yourself, you can’t
see others.
If you can’t see others, you can’t lead them.

Bono:

It’s an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty. We have the science, the technology and the wealth. What we don’t have is the will, and that’s not a reason that history will accept.

Margaret J. Wheatley:

Our willingness to acknowledge that we only see half the picture creates the conditions that make us more attractive to others. The more sincerely we acknowledge our need for their different insights and perspectives, the more they will be magnetized to join us. 

Miller:

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” –

Mark Twain:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Dagobert D. Runes

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”

Cesare Pavese:

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

Miriam Beard:

 “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

Steve Case:

You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.

Martin Buber:

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

Bill Bryson:

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”

T.S. Eliot:

“The journey not the arrival matters.”

Mark Jenkins:

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”

Thomas Merton:

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. 

Rumi:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”

Galileo:

“The sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do.”

“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”― Rumi

Richard Rohr:

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.

You have to find some way to not become a cynical or negative person, a person who keeps walking around and opening your eyes in the outside world but inside you close down, a person who stops expecting tomorrow to be better than today.

Arnold H. Glasow:

A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.