GSE Send Off Party!

On September 20th, 2009 Our GSE Japan team met for the last time before our departure to Japan! The event was held at Terry B's Restaurant in Dexter, Michiagn and hosted by the Dexter Rotary Club. We had a great turn out of Rotary members and the team's family members! The team would like to send out a big THANK YOU! To our sponsoring Rotary Clubs, the GSE committee and all the support we have recieved from District 6380 in our prepartions for our trip!

Also a thank you to the Outbound Australia Team for showing their support and helping us through the process and for "passing the hat" on to Team Japan!

16 days till departure...

The Team met for our last official 'business' meeting on September 12th at Lori's house in Dexter, Michigan. With a countdown of only 16 days now, everyone is getting pretty excited! The main focus of our meeting was finishing up last minute details and perfecting our Japanese presentations. We all took turns at presenting our introductions to each other in Japanese and all did quite well!!! Thanks to the help of Tamie for helping with our pronounciation! and also a big Thanks to Nicole on the Canadian side for all her help with the presentation as well!

I think we are all feeling a little better now about speaking Japanese...well at least for our introductions!

Reminder: Sunday, September 20th is our send off party at Terry B's Restaurant in Dexter, Michigan from 1400-1600 h.

27 days to go!!!WooHoo!!!

We are all getting very excited. We received our itinerary and it jammed packed full of what will become awesome experiences! We're busy fine tuning our presentations, finishing up our gifts and wondering how we are going pack everything! We have been learning our japanese

translations, as you can see in the pic below Jennifer is in deep concentration at one of our recent "coaching" sessions. Thanks again Nicole for being so patient with us and repeating, repeating, repeating. We're are going to sound awesome!

Jen and I also did an informal presentation to the Tilbury Rotary Club (Jen's sponsor) We presented on the GSE process and preparations for Japan. I did my presentation in public for the first time amidst some butterflies, while Jen translated. We were able to show off our hand made squashbook gifts, our letters of endorsement from dignitaries and talk briefly about our itinerary. They wished us safe travels and gave Jen a great send off!

August 25, 2009 - Update on Activity

The team utilized conference calls in the month of August to continue discussions. Many thanks to Jewish Vocational Service who generously donated the use of their conference call center for one of the calls.

The finishing touches on business cards, thank you notes, and the brouchure are in process and they should be on their way to the printers within a week. In addition, many hours have been spent on the presentation and we all look forward to our next meeting, where we will have an opportunity to practice.

In a little over a month, we will be on our way. Our thanks to Kim Pierce, who is coordinating our itineary overseas - we can't wait to meet our host families and explore and learn more about Japan with them.

Team activities over the past few weeks include drafting business cards, thank you cards and a brochure, as well as working on a presentation. We would like to acknowledge the help we have received in translation of the documents to Japanese. Kudos to our volunteers Laura Hewlett and Tamie O'Grady. On the Canada side of the border we would like to thank Nicole Melton, Rotary exchange student from 2008, for the awesome coaching. Our next steps include practice with language coaches and finalizing the printing of the material. Great work everyone!

Team Meeting #3 Rochester Hills, Michigan

On July 10th and 11th our team met for an overnight meeting at our Alternate Team Leader Susan Earp's home in Rochester Hills, Michigan. This meeting was to better get to know each other and to get hammering away at our 'to do' list before travelling to Japan on September 30th, 2009.
On July 10th we first met up with our photographer of Seraphinoff Photography for some professional shots of our group and individually for our business cards and team brochure. The pictures turned out great!

We then all met up at Susan's home for a sushi dinner and team building exercises! Which proved to be very entertaining and enlightening! Many thanks to Dr. Jeannette Saquet and Troy Rotarian Eileen Heasley who volunteered their time to help us learn about and appreciate each other's differences and also led us on a subartic survival situation where the synergistic interactive efforts of our group had a greater impact than the sum of our independent efforts. We actually would have survived the plane crash in the subartic region!
On July 11th, it was up bright and early to get rolling on some of our tasks at hand. Heather and Dustin brought samples of the work they have done in creating our business cards and brochures. We all had a chance for some final input and minor changes. Now the business collateral is off for translation and Elizabeth is taking care of printing quotes.
On the agenda was also to final of our uniforms! All the uniforms have now been choosen and purchased. Jennifer is to take care of getting our golf shirts printed with our 'building bridges' logo and our GSE patches sewn on. Another major task completed!
Lori again led the team in some Japanese language lessons and provided us with some quick reference sheets for our most commonly used phrases and words.
Chantal has done a great job in preparing our presentation! The group had opportunity for input and it is now in the final stages. The tricky part now of course will be actually presenting in Japanese! The next team meeting will be held in August via teleconference.

Team Meeting #2 Tilbury

June 6th, 2009 was the second team meeting for our team. There was a 3 page agenda! Scary at first but we managed to cover it all and even squeeze in a BBQ!One of the highlights of our meeting was our group language lesson lead by our fearless team leader Lori Sprague. I think we all managed to get down 'Ohayoo gozaimasu Watashi no namae wa Jennifer desu. Kanada-jin desu.'Translation- Good morning my name is Jennifer. I am Canadian.This language lesson also included a rendition of Mr. Roboto by Preya. Domo Arigatoo Preya! Very well done! I think we are going to have a bright future in Karaoke!We also learned some other useful words, one of which was 'Ashita' which means tomorrow. This is where we learned there is no shit in Japan......meaning we pronounce it Ashta. Needless to say language lessons may just be more entertaining then we could have imagined.We are well on our way in planning, so far all the paperwork is up to date, we have decided on uniforms, presentation is getting started and now looking forward to our next meeting which will be held in Michigan and will include a visit to an authentic Japanese restaurant!

In photo (left to right) Elizabeth, Chantal, Susan,Jennifer, Lori, Preya, Dustin; absent: Heather