For the next couple months, we’re going to let those Edgies who experienced this summer’s project, speak with their own voices about their time, the people they met, their experiences-good and bad-and what their adventure meant to them.
This will provide a great opportunity for those interested in Edge to hear about the various experiences from peers with all different abilities, gifting, expectations and from different places in life.
Hold on and enjoy the ride.
Kira Bester
I feel my internship played out rather naturally in Altea, with Edge. The media side was basically a continuation of what I do whenever when I’m in a new place, namely take pictures of everything. Not having reliable access to wifi made it a bit of a struggle, but other than that, I feel good about it. Altea is a beautiful place, so it made the picture side ridiculously easy.
The project part of my internship also worked out well. I’ve been wanting to do a project on friendship and relationships for a long time now, and Edge’s focus on community made it really easy; Altea is a relational community, its whole set up being prime for investing in people. Having to walk everywhere also contributes to this, creating yet another space to interact with one another, and to commiserate over the heat and stairs.
There were a few specific relationships that I built at Edge that pushed me to actually do a friendship project. The mixture of old and new friends, and the wide variety of their personalities and our friendships was basically everything that I wanted to explore about friendship, and everyone was stuck with me in a foreign country, so they couldn’t say no! It all worked out.
Assisting with the gallery also turned out to not be as daunting as I expected it to be. We were blessed with pieces that worked well together, and working alongside Cate, Devan, and Kate made it an absolute joy. “MacGyvering” some of the finer points of gallery set up was interesting, but we never really had anything major go wrong, so I think it counts as a success.
Overall, I think it all went well! There was a bit of confusion initially in terms of who was actually “in charge” of me, but that was cleared up and all was well. I think having Steph as my mentor worked out well, because she supported me in what I wanted to do, but also pushed me to get things done. She made sure that I knew what I was doing and that I felt good about it, and always made herself available to help me if I needed it. Also she is the best and I would do anything she told me to, short of sacrilege or heresy, of course.
Other than my project, my primary purpose was to assist others in what they were doing, and I feel like I did that at least a little bit. In summation: time in Altea + internship = good.
