At the capitol, I have two main projects that I'm working on. The first project has to do with the Native American tribes, and the other has to do with International business. Representative Jett wants to put together an advisory board of college professors to discuss how to better market OK globally. That's the international business project, however, I haven't worked on that much lately. I've been concentrating on getting the information that we need from all the NA tribes in OK. There are 39 tribes in OK - more than any other state. What Jett is trying to do is initiate a better relationship between the state government and the tribes. Each of the tribes is a separate nation, not all of the tribal "chiefs" go by that title. There are many different titles: President, Chairman/Chairperson (yes, there are some female tribal leaders), Mekko (pronounced Meeko), Principal Chief, CEO, etc. The information that Jett wants has to do with the "Chiefs" and the tribal councils. Last week I fininshed making contact with all the tribes (some of them didn't return my calls and so I had to call again, ocassionally several times). One tribe flat out that they didn't want to cooperate, but I expect that ther rest of them will work with us. This week I'll have to start designing binders for the information. The binders will be given to leaders of the NA caucus. So that's the main project that I've been working on. Helping Ms. Jo (Jett's legislative assistant), runing stuff between the House and Senate, looking up voter info, and shadowing Rep. Jett are a few of the other things I do.
Mr. Bedford, the head of Gov/Rel, left for Pennsylvania this Sunday. His home is up there and he went to fix it up and sell it. He will be gone for about a month. Pray that everything will go well for him and his family. Jonathan Jessup will have quite a job taking over some of Mr. Bedford's responsibilities with Gov/Rel on top of his law studies and his job in the finance department. You can pray for him, too. Pray for me to make the best use of my time everyday. Also pray that I will do well in my class work. Studying is boring, but educational. I'm learning a lot, but learning is work.
Anyway, I'll leave you with a picture of Jonathan Jessup.
