Letter#1
Dear Everyone,
Well, hello and greetings from
All went well until I sat down near my gate and decided to open a little gift that Dad had told me to open on the plane (I figured the gate was close enough to the plane and I had about an hour to wait). Another bad idea – there were like 5 old guys over 60 staring at me as I sniffled in my seat over some CDs and a card. Finally it was time to board… I hoped I would sit next to a really interesting and fun person that I could talk to. I watched the seat numbers, and when I came to mine I looked down at the occupant – kind of a shock, actually. A very old man who didn’t smell very nice was there. I quickly slid into my seat and hoped the flight would be over fast. The plane wasn’t one of those nice ones with little TVs in each seat… it had only 1 main TV that I had to crane my head to see. I was starving and exhausted… I hoped there would be some dinner on the flight, although I wasn’t sure since we took off at 10:17pm. I was relieved when they announced the dinner, but I decided I would try to find a comfortable spot to sleep while I waited. I fidgeted this way and that and no doubt drove the old man next to me crazy, although he never complained (thank goodness!).
Finally I drifted off, even though I felt very uncomfortable. When I opened my eyes again the old man next to me was asleep and the stewardess was just collecting his empty dinner tray. I was to tired to ask for dinner, so I tried to go back to sleep. I dozed on and off throughout the ride, fitfully trying to find a comfortable place to put my head. Finally when we had 1 ½ hrs left I felt sort of awake… we were ser
ved some breakfast – yogurt, a kitkat bar and a roll with meat and cheese. The roll was disgusting – I only managed to eat 2 bites. The kitkat and yogurt weren’t to bad though. We did get there finally. I tensely watched all of the videos that were playing on the main screen giving info on connecting flights in
I found an empty seat and started reading Jane Eyre. Before I knew it an hour had passed and I was boarding the second plane headed for Düsseldorf. This one was less crowded – I was alone in a 3 seat row, which was really nice b/c I had some room to stretch out and catch a little more sleep. I was still hungry, but we didn’t get anything to eat, the flight was only 30 min. long. I was so excited when we finally landed. I grabbed my stuff and soon found the baggage claim where I loaded my two gigantic suitcases onto a cart. As soon as I walked through the door I saw Nathalie Bergman, Ann-Kathrin Erstfeld and Judith Frewer, three girls from my old YW sitting on the bench waiting for me. Soon I was giving each of them big hugs and grinning broadly. It felt like coming home. Nathalie had brought her car so we heaved my bags into the back and drove back to
Nathalie drove me to her house where I was greeted first by the new addition to their family – a little dog called Chito (pronounced Ketoe). Kerstin, Nathalie’s mom, hugged me and took me to the living room where I received a glass of multi-vitamin juice with carbonated water (not my favorite beverage but so like
I can never go to sleep during a movie, and this one wasn’t to bad except it was a little violent and went to fast to really comprehend (maybe that’s just because I was tired). I was dizzy when we walked out into the cold blustery night (I was already regretting my decision to bring summer stuff) and was extremely relieved when I dropped into bed that night. Surprisingly I woke up only once very briefly, and was somewhat refreshed on Sunday morning at seven when Dirk Bergman came in to wake us up. The sun was shining – a rarity in
After church the Sandners were so kind to transport my luggage for me (it would never have fit in the Northrup’s car), and Dennis I-forget-his-last-name drove Giovanna, Judith and me to the Northrup’s home. Nathan had started some delicious taco salad and soon we were merrily feasting together in Giovanna’s green living room (she just got it repainted). Later two of the missionaries came over and we had some dessert – it was a heavenly creation called celestial squares. After clean-up I wrote in my journal, then went to bed at 9:00. This morning I woke up at 6 (a massive improvement to the 4:30 that I usually do in the
Yep, I was nervous. I bought a ticket at the front of the bus and rode the two stops to Oberbarmen Bahnhof. There I caught the 646 that took me all the way to Kickersburg. I was getting anxious. The bus had been late and was stopping at every stop. By the time I got out I had about 6 min. to find the place where I was supposed to be. I followed two guys towards the Dupont building, and asked them where I could find gate 2. They told me to go up and around, and it would take me probably 15 min. to get there. My hopes of punctuality sank, but I power walked all the way up a long hill and around the corner till I finally found gate 2. It was exactly 8:30, which made me precisely on time (I was pretty quick). Standing just outside the gate I pulled out my letter that I had received from Mrs. Walden, the coordinator for students in Dupont. I scanned it again, and let out a groan. I was supposed to go in at gate 1 after all! I chided myself for not reading the letter more carefully and started jogging back the way I came.
When I finally came to the gate again I went into the office in the front, and showed the man the paper I had from Mrs. Walden. “You will get picked up at once” he told me. I thanked him and tried to fix my wind-blown hair a little. A lady came to the door and I went out to meet her. She brought me to a room where a lady and a girl who looked about my age were waiting for me. “We had almost given up on you” was the only reference she made to my lateness. I apologized and explained what happened, and she was very nice about it. She wasn’t Frau Walden though, she was Frau Werth. Frau Walden, she explained, was on vacation. She gave us some general info on the company and what they make, and gave us directions on what we had to do if we were sick. After about an hour she took us to get some steel toed shoes, a lab coat (called a Kittel), and a pair of protection glasses. Finally, she showed us the cafeteria and took us both to our different buildings.
On the stairs Frau Werth told us that we needed to be sure to use the railing all the time, as a safety precaution. This was kind of tricky for me because I was holding my wallet and a pencil and some papers, so I just sort of dragged my hand along the railing. We dropped Vanessa off first. Her mentor looked pretty nice, so I was hopeful. We walked to the building 221 and climbed a couple flights of stairs. Dr. Klosterman was on a safety audit and seemed to have forgotten that I was coming today, so I got taken over by someone else… he knew my Dad which was nice, so I wished him a happy Monday. It proved to be a nice ice breaker, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten his name already. He spent 1 ½ hours going over some of the basic chemistry. I wish I had done more in high school… I couldn’t remember much at all. Luckily, the man seemed to be patient, and I think I did understand some of the jargon he used because it was similar to English. The most important things I learned were that resins are made up of monomers that then undergo polymerization, poly addition or poly condensation to become polymers, and that the Dupont lab uses all thee of these techniques to make their resins. What he told me was, of course, the super condensed version and I’m giving you another super condensed version, so guess how accurate that’s going to be.
After that he took me to meet all the people in the labs which seemed to be over 100 new faces and names to remember, but in reality couldn’t have been more than 40 I think. Some of them knew my Dad and I wished them a happy Monday which made them laugh – it had been my Dad’s tradition. Introductions took a surprisingly long time – every time I was introduced, the man (why can’t I remember his name??) told my whole story: I was Margaret Ebeling one of the daughters of Karl Ebeling working here for about three weeks doing a praktikum; after that we’d chat and at the end the man would say I should definitely spend at least a few hours with this person to lean some of what they knew. After all of that we figured that Mr. Weike should be my main contact person, and that he would be guiding my progress throughout my stay. I liked him; he’s a short man with light hair and eyes and he kind of reminds me of Brother Barluschke. He started giving me some more theory, but after 15 min. it was time for the lunch break.
I headed down to the cafeteria with Frau Van Der Mond and another college from
When I got back to the lab Mr. Weike was ready for me. He first gave me some more theory… I didn’t get half of it but I pretended I did. At times he tried to explain things in English, but I understood his German better. My brain was feeling kind of like applesauce after so much information that was added to it. Luckily this only lasted another hour or so. Just when I thought I was going to die he showed me around the lab some more and explained some safety rules. It actually took a while, because there are quite a few rules to explain. Finally he gave me a paper to sign that said that I had been informed about the safety precautions for the building and that I would be sure to follow them.
Well, then the fun part was over. He took me to book room and pulled out two big volumes of “beginning” resins, and told me to start reading. I went to my desk (yes, I have my own!) and started to read. It wasn’t easy reading, that’s for sure. I didn’t understand half of it again, and it didn’t help that for some reason the page kept swimming in front of my eyes and my head felt like it had been through a blender and I simply couldn’t focus on the words at all. I was actually impressed at how far I got. Luckily there were a lot of diagrams that I didn’t understand but I was able to skip over. I had realized at this point that any chemistry I had learned in high school I had completely forgotten about and wasn’t helping me much. Every once in a while I would remember little bits and pieces, but not enough for me to get the big picture.
I was extremely relieved when he let me go at 3:30; luckily I get to leave at 3:30 every day instead of 5:00 like my Dad said. I went down stairs to find the locker room. I couldn’t remember exactly where it was though. I came to the place that I thought it was and tried my key. It wouldn’t even fit in the slot – it was to fat. I tried again but to no avail. I retraced my steps and was pretty sure I was in the right place. I tried the key a third time with no success. Feeling foolish I went all the way back up the 4 flights of stairs to the lab. I told Mr. Weike I couldn’t find my locker and it felt like the 1st day of High School. He said he’d take me there and it turned out I had gone down one story to far. I don’t know how I missed that.
Anyway, I got my stuff and then walked up the hill to get the 635 to the Elberfelder Hauptbahnhof (main train station). I smiled as I walked through the familiar tunnel that I had walked through a million times before already and eagerly took in the Turkish Döner shops and flower shops and the bustling streets. My problem now was to find an ATM that I could use. I saw a Sparkasse (a German Bank) and went in that direction, but you could only enter if you had a Sparkasse debit card. I didn’t know what to do. I went into City Arkaden, the mall close by, and found the information booth. I asked the lady what I should do and she didn’t know. I walked back out and prayed for help. As I opened the door of the mall I spotted a Citibank down an alleyway. I decided it couldn’t hurt to try. The door also had one of those slots for your card, so I pushed my card in. Nothing happened. I heard a voice behind me say “It’s open already!” A big burly man pushed the door open. I thanked him and quickly made my way to an ATM. Everything worked perfectly, and I said another thank-you prayer.
I bought a bus ticket and caught a Schwebebahn back to Oberbarmen. When I got home I started writing this email until it was time for family home evening with the Northrups. My favorite part of that was refreshments – mini Magnum ice cream bars. Americans don’t know what real ice cream bars taste like. Magnums are simply heaven on a stick. I then spent a while trying to figure out if there was a way to transfer this email on my memory stick for my camera from my computer to the Northrup’s computer, but it didn’t work, and since I wasn’t really finished anyway I gave up and went to bed.
This morning I got up at 5:30 and kept on working on this letter. Guilanna woke up soon and showed me the letter and money that the tooth fairy had left for her. I ate a hurried breakfast, and had to rush out the door in the end. I got to work with time to spare which I enjoyed. I found my locker, donned my lab coat, steel-toed shoes and glasses and headed up to the lab. I was very happy to hear that we would be doing some more practical stuff today. My first job was to measure the “Festkörper” (I think that means the solidity of the resin, or the percent of solid “bodies” in the substance) of a resin that Mr. Weike had finished yesterday. Of course he gave me the theoretical background for the experiment first, and I didn’t really get it, but I hoped it wouldn’t matter much (I know that sounds dumb). He showed me on the first sample and told me I could do the second sample on my own. I tried to be extremely careful… it wasn’t to hard. I just had to use an extremely exact balance to weigh a plate and the resin on the plate so we could cook them and figure the Festkörper, whatever that was.
While it was cooking I was sent back to those two text books on my desk. I had the same problems as yesterday… that book seems to make me physically ill. I got dizzy and I couldn’t read or focus on anything, I felt tired and exhausted and my brain turned back into pulp. I desperately wanted to get up and do something. After what seemed to be an eternity and ½ he called me over to do the analysis. He did sample 1 again and told me to do the second. I weighed sample 2, then subtracted the weight of the plate from that, divided it by the original mass of the resin, multiplied it by 100 and got an answer that was within 0.1 % of his. He praised me for my work and I felt pretty good about it. Then it was back to the books, and my spirit groaned within me. After a while Mr. Weike said that if I wanted to leave ½ hr. later for lunch break he would be able to show me the reaction of the resin when water gets added to it. I agreed, but that meant some more book reading. I stared at the pages.
Finally he called me over and showed me how to add water to the resin mixture that he had neutralized with Amine, a derivative of Ammonium. As the water was stirred into the yellow mixture it started to turn white like milk and to foam at the top. The “viskosität” (I think that’s density, but I could be wrong) of the mixture increased until a certain point, then the mixture transformed and the “viskosität” went down again. It was really interesting and all, but I was starved. I hurried down to the Cafeteria, murmuring the traditional greeting for people who are going to lunch (“Mahlzeit!”) and was soon digging in to a mountain of mashed potatoes with mushroom sauce and a “hunter” burger. It was very good, but it was hot and I only had a 30min. break, of which I would need 10 min. to get back and forth from the Cafeteria to the lab. I wolfed my food all down and hurried back.
Happily, Mr. Weike had another experiment planned for me. I was going to measure the acidity of the resin (the Säurezahl). Unhappily, at least in my opinion, he tried to explain all the theory behind it first. He can actually explain really well, I only understood about half of it though. When that agonizing process was over my patient mentor took me over to a balance and told me to weigh in some of the resin. He did the first sample again, and I did the second. Then we added 100ml of some fluid (I forget the name, it’s really really long), put a bar magnet in the glass, and put it on a magnetic stirring machine. After about ¼ hr. we took the mixture that looked kind of like semi clear milk and put it onto this other stirring machine with a bottle of some chemical right behind it. There was a special pipette attached to the bottle that would drop the liquid into the mixture one drop at a time while taking the exact measurement of how much was going in. He showed me how to work it on the first sample, then told me to do the second one.
First I added about 8 drops of indicator to the mixture, then I set the pipette right over the mixture so nothing would spill. I slowly pushed a button and a few drops of liquid fell into the mixture, causing it to turn purple for a second before it disappeared as it was stirred into the mixture. When the mixture stayed pink for at least 10 seconds, I stopped adding the chemical and recorded the amount I had added. To analyze my data I used a formula that Mr. Weike had shown me how to derive (Again, I didn’t really understand where it came from), and compared my results. Well, they weren’t very good at all. I got 7 something for the 1st sample and 12 something for the 2nd sample. I recalculated everything, and got the same answers. I took it to Mr. Weike. He looked at it and saw that I hadn’t put in enough resin in the 1st sample in the beginning, so he told me to do the whole thing over again for that sample.
I had written the entire process out so I wouldn’t forget, and I was very glad I had that to fall back on. I did everything very carefully, and was sure I had done everything right. I sat down back at my table waiting for my mixture again, and writing in my school journal (Mr. Weike hadn’t told me I could, but I didn’t think he would mind). I then finished up the experiment and did my new calculations. I couldn’t wait for the triumph of having a very good result. To my dismay the numbers were just the same as last time: 12 and 7. I recalculated everything 4 times, hoping against hope that it would turn out better, but to no avail. I got the same stinking answer every time without fail. Feeling embaressed, I showed my results to Mr. Weike, waiting for a severe reproof. Luckily, he only said that he would look at them tomorrow and told me I could leave! Thus my 2nd day at work ended. Yep. That’s my life right now. I think that I deserve a response from you now that I’ve written you a 6 page letter… please write back!!
Can’t wait to hear how everything is going back home!
Love and miss you,
Margaret
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