One Month

It is exactly one month until I arrive in Colombia to live and teach for a year. I have been expecting it for months and only now is it starting to actually sink in.

This is my attempt to start a blog about the new and improved Lovely Adventures of Me. As some of you readers may know, I stopped writing in my past blog about a year ago... and I really have no good excuse. But to catch you up quick, the past year has consisted of:

a busy semester of student teaching

a college graduation

summer camp counseling

 

Cupcakes .....                                                                                    

 

and a last few months of living with my parents and nannying for three lovely children in Atlanta

 A great year indeed, but it is now time for bigger and better things...

So, I'm moving to Colombia... and when I say Colombia I don't mean South Carolina, graduate school or seminary... I'm talking about the country. I have received various reactions when explaining my future plans. Anything from "oh my goodness I am so worried about you, I can't believe you're moving there... you're probably going to get kidnapped and become a drug mule" to "oh yeah, that's cool. Everyone's teaching English abroad these days". However, the most common response is usually something along the lines of "oh that is going to be such a great experience". Then followed by a long series of predictable questions (that I hope to answer in this post).
 
A great experience... I really have no concept about how amazingly great it will actually be.  I'm expecting a mixture between an amazing time of my life experience and an awful worst thing in the world experience. I have never lived abroad before. Most people out of college these days have studied abroad for a semester, traveled around for a summer or taken a year off to explore the world... but my major in college and my bank account never allowed me to be able live abroad. Sure, I've traveled... I went on a few week long family trips to other countries, some mission trips and a month long trip to Greece with a class in college. I loved every minute of every trip (even when I hated it, if you know what I mean). However, I have always had a strong desire to actually live abroad, and I think now is just about the most perfect time I could possibly go.

Before graduation I searched and searched and searched for a good program to travel with and teach English. I was too afraid to just up and move somewhere alone and all the programs I could find were just those super expensive, no-guarantee job afterward training programs.... until one day a friend of a friend of a friend told me about her friend (yeah, I know... reliable, right?) who went on a program called WorldTeach. After hearing the name I started researching the program some more and absolutely fell in love. I was dreading the incredibly long and tedious application involved but I thought why not just give it a try? I finished the application right then and there, emailed my professors for recommendations, wrote three essays the next day, had an interview a week later, found out I was accepted three weeks after that and confirmed the day after. It was fabulous (and I'm usually a procrastinator...).

So why Colombia you ask? Well, I knew I wanted to go to a Spanish-speaking country and the WorldTeach program offers teaching experience in about 5 other Spanish-speaking countries. After doing some research and some comparing and contrasting I just kept coming back to Colombia. All these years thinking about teaching abroad, Colombia never even crossed my mind... but there was something about it that I just couldn't pull away from.

So here I am... a month away from living in a foreign country with a bunch of strangers and a very tiny supply of Spanish vocabulary in my brain.... I don't have my placement of where I will be living or where I will be teaching and I am anxiously but patiently awaiting... until then all I can do is dream about the things to come....

Hasta luego!