Happy Holidays!

As the holidays are coming up, I wanted to take the opportunity to wish all of you a happy holidays!  I will be flying back to the states next week for a three or four weeks and will be able to spend Christmas with my family, which I am extremely thankful for.

Also, if any of you are in the Bay area during the holidays and would like to see me, please feel free to let me know.  And thank you all again so much for reading my blog.  The support has been greatly appreciated throughout the past two years of my Peace Corps experience.

Where Do I go From Here?

Where do I go from here?  What am I doing with my life?  What will my life look like after my Peace Corps service?  I am only a few months away from finishing my service in Ethiopia and I have asking myself these questions among others recently.  In some ways, I actually joined Peace Corps because I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do with my life right after graduating for college.  It’s strange that two and a half years later and four months away from finishing my Peace Corps service, and I am still trying to figure that out. 

Sometimes, volunteers decide to extend their service and do one additional year of service.  Some volunteers do this because they want to prolong that time and hope that that additional year will help and give them the time they need to figure all of this out.  For me though, I don’t necessarily feel that one additional year in Ethiopia would actually help me.  I am at a point in my service where I feel like I have done as much as I can possibly do and that I would be able to better figure out what to do with the rest of my life back in the states.

I do know this though:  I really do want to go into the health field and I do enjoy working with people on a one-on-one basis (or individual basis).  I am currently in the process of applying to nursing and public health graduate programs.  Soon, I will also start looking into potential job opportunities as well.  In some ways, this is a difficult process because the Internet can be very limited and/or slow here in Ethiopia…. Which makes it difficult to do research and work on applications.   In some ways, this is why I am not extending my service at all.  I feel that even if one more year in Ethiopia were to help me have a better idea of what I wanted to do, Internet would still be a challenge to deal with.

To be honest, I have no way of knowing what my life will look like after my service is over.  Yes, I am working on graduate school applications and doing job research.  But will I be going to graduate school or working right after service?  If the answer is graduate school, then will it be nursing and/or public health?  And where will I go to graduate school?  If I find a job, what kind of job will it be and where will it be located?  Despite all that I am currently doing, there are still so many unknowns.  In some ways it is scary, but at the same way it’s really exciting.

Honestly, I am okay with as many unknowns as there are because I am still in the process of working on myself as a persona and really discovering who I am.  As a good friend of mine pointed out to me the other day, I still have four months in Ethiopia to figure do as much of that as I possibly can.  That is partly why I joined Peace Corps.  As I have gotten closer and closer to the end of my service, I have forgotten this.  I almost forgot that I still have some time before I leave Ethiopia to do as much as I can in regards to working on myself.  In forgetting this, I was almost ready to give up and settle with how I currently am.  But I was extremely grateful for that reminder that I should not settle just to settle, that there is always time for growth and discovery.

Despite the unknowns that are still a large part of my future, I should be only excited.  No matter where I am in my life, I should always continue to work on making myself better and aiming to making sure I am happy with who I am and with how my life is.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I want to wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving!  Please eat as much turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie for me as you can!

And thank you all for continuing to read my blog.  As I am nearing the end of my Peace Corps service in Ethiopia, the continued support means so much to me.

A new post will be coming soon!

Denmark Photos

I wanted to be able to share a handful of the photos I took while in Denmark, so here you go:

*I have a handful of other pictures, but was only able to get these up due to limited wifi.  If you would like to see more, let me know.  :)

Visiting a First World Country After 20+ Months in a Developing Country

I have been living in Ethiopia for about 22/23 months (of my 27 total months) now.  Also, I just left Africa for the first time in those 22 months to visit my brother in Denmark (October 21-27).  It was a strange, amazing, crazy, and relaxing experience.  I give this trip some many adjectives because not only am I different now, it’s almost as if the idea of a first world country is a foreign concept to me now because I have been living in a third world country for as long as I have.

It was strange in a way getting out of Ethiopia, a country where everyone constantly sees me as a foreigner who only speaks English despite having lived in this country for almost two years now.  Leaving this, I found myself in a country where I was able to blend in and people would see me and try to speak to me in Danish.  It was a strange feeling, blending in.  I have been so used to sticking out that it was an odd feeling, yet it was kind of nice.

One of the oddest parts of my trip was that I saw an elephant for the first time in two years...

In some ways, I was able to feel almost normal because I was able to blend in so well.  It was nice to have that sense or normality.  At the same time though, sticking out in Ethiopia has in some ways become normality because that has been my life for two years.  With that being said, traveling to a first world country almost felt foreign to me.  And this was so strange to me because I lived in the states for the first 23 years of my life and then moved to Ethiopia.  It’s amazing what living in a developing country for two years can do to you, how it can change what is normal to you and your overall perspective on the world and life in general.

The good things that came out of this trip:

• I was able to see my brother for the first time in two years.
• I was able to re-experience what it is like to be in a first world country.
• I was able to get an idea of what it will be like for me when I move back to the states:  in some ways it will be difficult and in some ways it will be easy.
• I realized that in some ways I am extremely ready to rap of my experience in Ethiopia and move onto the next chapter of my life.

This building used to be the summer residence of the Royal family.

I am so glad that I was able to visit my brother in Denmark and be able to experience a new place and new culture.  I may not ever get the chance to visit Denmark again, so I am glad that I took the opportunity to go when I had.  This trip also, made me extremely excited to travel more in the future.

*If you have any questions/comments about my trip, please send them my way!