training days

This week has been busy, to say the least. I spent the last three days training with the Park Street Church Freedom Trail tour guide team to prepare to meet the tourists today. Training was actually rather haphazard--our team leader spent the school year in France and is slowly adapting back to speaking English all the time and remembering how the trail worked last year.

Part of the training involved meeting with members of the ministerial staff to discuss how we should answer theological questions and what the church's official stance is on some sensitive issues. It's great to know that the ministers are so supportive of us, and they were constantly reminding us that not only is this a service job, it is community outreach and an opportunity for evangelism, with the right circumstances. I'm still rather nervous to begin, but I think I can handle it.

Also as part of our training, the team walked the Freedom Trail together. Well, most of it. We got the official, costumed guided tour from the visitor's center to Faniuel Hall, and then went on our own to Old North Church (we skipped the sites across the river because we were tired and hungry). The guide was entertaining, but we got to hear firsthand how little they actually say about the history of Park Street Church and the inaccuracies in the speech. It will be good to explain to visitors what it means to be a Congregational church and that the sails of Old Ironsides were not sewn in the church, but in the building previously on the spot, as well as just giving a more full picture of the broad history of the church and the many organizations it began.

The best part of the tour we took was visiting Old North Church. Our team leader was asking questions of one of the guides there, and when she told him who we were, he told us that our status as guides meant we got to have a "special tour." He immediately grabbed a key on a huge ring and led us to through a door in the entryway and up several flights of stairs. Our destination: the steeple. The first level up was a storage room, but then we entered a more attic-esque area of old wooden steps and dust. In all, we went up at least six full sets of twisty, wooden stairs, and numerous short turnings to move upward through the ever-narrowing space. Crys is afraid of heights, so she didn't make it all the way up, but the view from the top was amazing. I can see why this steeple was chosen to give the lantern signal over the river--you can see for miles, and in the days before skyscrapers, it would have been seen for miles as well. We didn't get to stay long, but I made sure to look down on the roof of David and Josiah's apartment below. If only I had brought my camera... (the plan had been to walk the trail on Thurs, but after looking at the weather Esther decided on Wed morning that we should do it that day instead) Old North was also a good stop just to hear how other sites do their tours. Their script is very short, so that gave us a sense of relief about how much we would have to memorize. And really, most of the time we will be answering questions rather than doing scripted tours, which should give us opportunity to remember all the different aspects of the history that might be forgotten in a single recitation.

I also got to poke around in the archive to set up the displays in the welcome center and sanctuary. The archive is rather small, since most of the materials are actually housed at the Congregational Library, around the corner. The archive is located in the basement of 3 Park Street, which used to be a commercial building. The basement has two bank vaults, one of which has been converted into the archive. I can't even describe how exciting it is to see a bank vault door on an archive. It's not locked (the door to the basement is instead), but that's beside the point.

This afternoon, after my shift at the library, I'll be headed back to church for the umpteenth time this week to finally start meeting the tourists. I'm still nervous, but also excited. I think this is going to be a good summer job for me.

-Kim