The pre-adventure begins!

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog.  I'll be posting here throughout the coming 1.5 years leading up to and during my time in South Korea.  So stay tuned!

The main point of this post is to show you all where you can go to support me for my trip.  If you want to skip all the information and go straight to where you can donate, I won't mind a bit.  I need to raise $8000, and any amount helps!  Thanks!

Now for the information!  As of the placement event in Louisville a few weeks ago, I am headed to South Korea with two other Young Adult Volunteers (YAVs) for a year of service.  "Service" is a bit of a misnomer, however, because I will be getting much more out of this experience than I can give!  In fact, the YAV program points out that "being" is a much more important goal than "doing" in a commitment like this.  Rather, becoming part of a community, living a simplified life (right...), growing in faith and spirituality, and serving God are the aims of the program.

In spite of this, I know the first question anyone has for me is either, "What will you be doing?" or "Why South Korea?"  To the first question, all I can say is that I will be on campus at Hannam University in Daejeon.  Anna Shustitzky, Anna Curl, and I will be living in a house that was originally built for Presbyterian missionaries to use.  (Hey, now that's us!)  Our site coordinators, Simon and Haejung Park, live nearby, and all impressions point to them being the nicest people in the world.  For the first four months, we will be in intensive language training classes.  During this time, we will also be talking to placement supervisors to find where we might be most useful once we can roughly speak Korean.  We've discussed a few options so far including working at children's centers teaching English, and for me (my Masters is actually useful!) possibly working with university students in English or Christian Studies.  We might also make it to Japan to do some disaster relief work.

To answer the second question with a question, why wouldn't I want to go to South Korea?!  It's both similar to the U.S. in its troubles with globalization splitting the classes, and at the same time has a completely different culture.  There is a rich history of Presbyterian mission there that I am just beginning to learn about.  Thank you to all of you that have come forward to tell me about the connections to Korea you have, I had no idea there would be so many!  The eastern world is fascinating and I want to learn as much as I can about it.  And, all joking right now, the internet in South Korea is way faster than it is here.

So again, please head to this site to donate.  Thank you for making this a possibility for me!  Those of you at my home church, Covenant Presbyterian of Albuquerque, there will be several opportunities for you to support me at events throughout the summer, too!  The first is the Spring Swing dance this Saturday, April 9th, at 5pm for lessons, 6 for dinner, and 7 for the dance!  Don't miss it, Russ and Jeff Jolly's jazz quintet will be performing!