Getting ready to go back.

Deceiving though the title of this blog page may be, it's the best I could come up with. I actually am more than half-way done with my Peace Corps service. With 11 months to go, I had been out of the United States for 16 months living in rural Nicaragua when I came home to visit for the holidays a couple weeks back. One would think reverse culture shock would've taken its hold, but I actually transitioned back into States-side living a little too well. There were the typical initial shocks: watching people walk out of Starbucks with coffees the size of my head, eating a salad large enough for 3 meals, etc., but once at home, I was more relaxed than I had been in, well, 16 months. As a parting (and very liberating) gesture before I go back to Nicaragua, I donated 11 inches of my hair to Locks of Love (Google it- the link wasn't working for me).

Of course, I had to take the before and after pictures:

Kindly ignore the fact that I look drugged in this picture.

Yay! Look how happy and not-drugged I am!

So in a couple of days I'll be heading back, and though I'm nervous, I'm pretty excited to get back to my host family, my friends, and of course, my dog. I have a number of projects lined up- the first of which will be a collaborative effort with all the volunteers in my department (we're a small group at 8). We'll be giving one teacher workshop in each of our sites to 50 teachers in the area on a variety of topics ranging all the way from First Aid in the classroom (done by a Health volunteer) to creative fundraising and budgeting (done by a Small Business volunteer). By the end of January, we hope to have finished all 8 workshops so that when school starts in February, we're free to start our own projects within our sites.

So enjoy the new website! I hope to have a lot more pictures and maybe even videos to make the words just that more interesting.