Reflecting on 2020 – “I wanna be, where the people are..”

By the time we got home, the two week quarantine was in place. That meant Kari having to always keep distance from her hubby, Carolyn’s daughter having to stay at her dads, and no hugs – that is NO HUGS – or touching for two whole weeks. This is where the introverts really thrive.

If you have watched any of our videos, or followed us for some time, you may think that Kari is an extrovert and Carolyn is an introvert, but in fact, it is the opposite.  And in this case, it became abundantly clear that the extroverts do not do well in isolation. Sleeping alone, not seeing her kid, unable to come out to the farm or even run programs – Carolyn realized by day two that she did not do well in this kind of situation. It was by far the longest two weeks of her life.

All EAL programs were on hold – except for our Calgary Dream Center. We were lucky enough to be a part of essential services for that groups as it was directly related to addictions recovery.

What did become very clear, was that as people – we need people. We need interaction, we need touch, we need hugs and we need kindness.

Between the grocery store toilet paper battles and the world beginning to divide into Team COVID or Team Anti-COVID, we realized that this whole thing was not going away any time soon.

What we were able to do, however, was hunker down to be able to get the virtual training into place. We created an online platform, recorded A LOT of training videos for the platform and began to connect with everyone who had registered and got them into other courses. Not only did all this have to happen, we also had the technology to get into place for ourselves and for our facilitators to try to get this moving forward without a hitch. There were some trials and errors, but by time we were ready to go for the first course, we were exhausted, but thrilled with how the training would go! We knew that this was a new era in experiential learning and that we would make it work!