Home.

Home. It’s amazing how a place can feel like home once you’ve been away from it. On the bus ride back to Costa Rica, we all marveled at the fact that we felt like we were coming home – we’d been gone for two weeks and all we wanted was to see our family, sleep in our own beds, and feel at home.

I’ve been gone now for over six weeks, and it’s amazing to me how the time has flown by. At the beginning I was dubious when the staff told us to savor each moment because it was going to be gone before we knew it. I was doubtful all of September. But now I’ve done a month of language school and a two-week trip to Nicaragua and lived here, really lived here, and feel at home. And I recognize now that the rest of the semester is going to literally fly by.

For the next two weeks, I have scattered classes and work on papers and presentations. Next weekend I’ll be going to a wedding with my family, which will be wonderful experience, and then the week after that we have Fall Break. Immediately following Fall Break, I leave for Panama for two weeks. A week after my return from Panama, I’ll be spending the weekend in Nicaragua to see my mom (my real mom!). After that, it’s two more weeks in Costa Rica followed by a two week trip to Guatemala. Straight from Guatemala we’ll fly to Miami for 3 days of debrief and then I’ll be home. It’s a lot going on in a short two months that we have left.

Now that I’ve looked forward, I might as well look back a little bit. My trip to Nicaragua was wonderful. Not everything went perfectly, but now I know I wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Although I got a cold, ended up dehydrated, hurt my foot, and lost a contact, better things outweigh the bad: Nicaragua is a beautiful, beautiful country, with amazing and loving people, I got to cross over to Honduras (without a passport!), I saw Ciudad Antigua (a city Captain Morgan pirated), I got to know more of the LASP students better, and I got to see the diverse reality of Nicaragua, the 2nd poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

So, check out my pictures here. The album is kind of scattered between pre-home stay and home stay periods, but i didn't really have time to do more than that. Good luck deciphering... The titles of the pictures might help a bit (side note: finca = farm).

As always, I hope you’re doing well. Forgive me if this blog was a bit long – it’s bee a long time since I’ve put my thoughts together to put together a blog, and I tried to be as short as possible. Hopefully the pictures say plenty.