Allen Street and the Garden

My name is Claire, and I'm one of the summer interns now at HSC. I live in India but I'm here until July. For the last few weeks I've been the only intern around since I don't have school, so I got to do a lot in a short amount of time. I came during the last stages of the Ave. of the Immigrants project, so sometimes I had to paint names on the sidewalk for the day. Before we got started, we had a lot of issues with how to paint on the uneven concrete. To find a solution, I vandalized a small portion of another street by painting a whole bunch of "F"'s everywhere to experiment with different brushes, etc. I also had to fill the holes in a lot of databases which was pretty rough and I'd rather not do that again. I sat by the computer and the phone and had to find the mailing addresses for different contacts, which turned out to be difficult sometimes because some people had died and I had to explain to their relatives why I was trying to mail them stuff. After the opening of the project, which involved more chair moving than expected but was still great, we're now focusing on the garden, how to promote and take care of it. I experimented with different ways to do signs, which helped translate into different ways to do shirts. Alex and I designed a shirt with a tomato, around which is written "EAT ME! at the PS 134 Community Garden". It looks really cool but it was a pain to cut the tiny letters out of tape - so we're going to silkscreen the pattern. I also experimented with different ways we could tattoo the kids. We went low budget and cut out a carrot and a tomato, which I traced onto Alex with a marker. It was fun but pretty weird - I wasnt expecting to draw with markers on my supervison, but hey, whatever. I also went back to school a couple times in the last two days (once with Yanely) to give the kids seeds so that they can bring them back to the garden in July. Some of the classes were really cute and calm, and some of them were rowdy. But we got tons of vegetable seeds planted - probably only a fraction will come back.... We did a couple more things but this blog is really long and I'm hungry, so I'll write a better one later. But so far I'm having a great time at HSC!