Boston

I recently went on a trip to Boston to attend a recovery conference. I attended it with program managers from 2succed which is the employment and education part of MHCD. It was a very nice conference. The first presentation I attended was about health. It was a presentation from the Health & Wellness Center from Arizona. They received a 1.2 million dollar grant to help people in recovery be healthy. If you smoked when you first come in they gave you sugar free candy and a paperclip to keep your hands busy while they approved you for services. You would then be eligible for services and what ever you would need to stop smoking. They also taught how to eat healthy and cook the food. After that first day of presentations we went for a walk to Fenway Park. It is the home of the Red Sox baseball team, from Boston. It is also home of the green monster, which eats up baseballs every time they hit a home run. On the walk there we went by what I will call a small river on which the banks were a community garden. It is not like the community gardens I see in Denver. Community gardens here have vegetables and such growing. The one in Boston had flowers growing and also raspberries. On the walk back to the hotel, we did not return back the same way in which we had came. We saw old buildings there that had faces and figures built in to the architect. Then we went on a walk through the St. Charles river in which I thought was different when I saw a sign that said “Do not feed the animals we want to keep them wild. I thought that was different because in Denver, people feed the geese and ducks bread. We also saw an old church that was built in the 1600’s the next day I went to another presentation on health. This one was about peer certified people who learn and train another peer certified person how to teach someone to be healthy. I also went on a presentation in which other states have peer run organizations. The difference between MHCD’s peer mentors and theirs is they have to be certified. Then it was our turn to present and because we had prepared and program manager knew about presentations it went well. We put them in a circle and let them ask questions. The asked the program managers about their employment model and I was able to tell them my experiences with Vocational Rehabilitation. It went well and the program managers did a very good job. The last night we were there, we went to Cheers the bar from the series of the 80’s. We went to the original and it is not like the one on TV. The owner of Cheers saw that so many people were coming to see the bar in the TV series that he built a duplicate one upstairs and a gift shop. You can also eat there and we did. On the walk back to the hotel, we went by the State Department and John Kerry’s house. We also saw the only cobbled stone street there in Boston. The weather was great throughout our stay in Boston. We saw the old North Church which is famous and was built in 1670. Also on the walk back we went through a park. I thought it was different because they had a merry go round there. Also they had animal enclosure but it was closed. The middle of the street we were walking back through was like a park also. It had benches where you could stop and sit. I am so glad that I took this trip with others, because we were able to go and see the sites when we were not preparing or doing something else. I saw a good portion of Boston. Walking and seeing sites is a lot better that a car or bus. It was a very nice recovery conference and trip.