A Life Left Half Behind.

As I write this, I am sitting on a patio, at the Students International base, in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic :) As I'm sitting here listening to the new sounds, cars and motorcycles on the street, dogs, young children, crickets, a weird sounding bird, I can't believe I'm acutally here.. it's really surreal.

The past few days have been insane!!!! We went through two chaotic days of orientation at Bethel to start this week off. Meeting the students from other schools and getting to know the other students from Bethel has been such a fun experience. I went on a zip-line for the first time.. so fun. There has been so much information thrown at us that I'm having a hard time processing it all. I can't wait to put all of it to action though as I start my life in Jarabacoa. The thing I'm most looking forward to right now is meeting my host family and building relationships with them.

Today, we spent about 12 or so hours travelling from Prairie Camp to Bethel to O'Hare to Miami to Santiago and finally Jarabacoa. Long day. It was a weird experience to call some of my family members and know that it might be the last time that I heard their voices for a few months. I have only felt excitement, however.. no sadness :) I wish we could have flown in here during the daytime becuase I'm sure that the drive from Santiago to Jarabacoa was beautiful. We met our team leaders Vicky and Josh tonight and they already laid down a couple of ground rules for us until tomorrow morning including:
no drinking water from the tap
no flushing toilet paper (yikes!)

Tomorrow we start orientation here on base, and will have that until Saturday I think. On Saturday we get to meet our host families and hopefully move in with them. That's when the real adventure begins. Hopefully this satisfies some of the need to know what's going on with me.. I don't know how often I'll be able to update, but I'm here and I'm loving life!