I haven’t written in two weeks. This is only because every time I thought about writing this post, I imagined myself sobbing while typing. Two weeks ago, I broke my jaw in Bethlehem. Now, I’m back in Nashville with my…
This past Monday, I started my “Spoken Arabic for Foreigners” class at Bethlehem University. I go to class Monday and Wednesday afternoons from 5:00 to 6:30. It’s right after work and the university is even on my route home. The class…
Before coming down to Honduras, I heard over and over again how noble, how selfless, how kind my heart was to sacrifice my summer and energy to come down here and serve. It really built me up, like in the…
“Normal” is a subjective word; one person’s normal may look different than another’s. In Palestine, “normal” looks a lot different than it does in the States. Normal often means suffering; to suffer is normal. I was inspired to write this post…
Last Wednesday, I celebrated my twenty-second birthday here in Honduras with the sweetest second family. Birthdays have always been moments of pause for me, where you think about everything that has happened in the last year, and you dream about…
The idea of writing this final post has been, in a word, overwhelming. I have certainly struggled throughout this experience with how to best articulate all of the complex experiences I’ve had into accessible and engaging posts for this blog,…
When you live anywhere in the world, there are great things about your country, but there are also some not-so-great things. I’ve found many things to love about Palestinian culture in my month here. Between the hospitality, the food, the…
I’ve had the pleasure to meet a lot of different types of people this summer, as groups traveled down to Honduras to serve with Mission Lazarus in a variety of fashions. Some were here for the first time, their first…
In an effort to convey the reality of international travel, its ups and downs, and specifically the ups and downs of my experience in Bethlehem, I’m going to talk about the main difficulty I’ve had since moving to Bethlehem, and…
I had enough. It started my third week of being here, that stomach thing: sick by day with diarrhea, awake by night throwing up. Some days were better than others, but after three weeks, my condition worsened. I went back…