AAMP Retreat

This past weekend, I went on an AAMP retreat to Halona, despite my upcoming chemistry midterm.

I know that a number of my spiblings went on other retreats with their mentor groups: the girls across my room went with CLSA, and my roommate went with OBSA. I, along with Catherine Chen, were the only ones to go on the retreat from our spogro.

AAMP is the Asian American Mentor Program of Pomona College.

After a ride of about two hours, we arrived at our destination.

Catherine and I pose for the camera on our bus ride to Idyllwild

 

This is Halona

After resting a bit after our arrival, the AAMP mentors lead a few workshops, which included icebreakers, name-learning games, and things that taught us about Asian-American history around the world and at the Claremont Colleges.

Mentors and mentees sit together to play this name game thing

 

There was this game where somebody winks at someone, which causes the winked-at person to “die,” and one person who doesn’t know who the killer is stands in the middle and tries to find out who the killer is. Here, Angela Bi attempts to find out who killed Muhammad Jalal.

We got into some deep stuff.

AAMP Mentors guide us through an Asian-American timeline, which mentees put together. We learned about progress made for Asian-Americans, and also of some events which made me a bit uneasy, such as hate crimes and weird, discriminatory laws.

Basically, after this, we all had dinner, bonded some more, and then went to bed.

We left early the next morning.

There was this cool thing where each person got an envelope. The envelopes were put up on a wall, and they were left open for notes. People wrote each other little letters and put them in their respective envelopes, and on the bus ride home, the mentors gave the envelopes out, filled with the letters.

The wall with all the envelopes

All in all, I really enjoyed the trip, and it was definitely worth the time spent not studying for chemistry.

Thanks to AAMP!