End of one chapter; start of another

Time to start writing again, a task I did not take the time to do nor did I find relevant when living in Duluth, Minnesota. For the past two years I have been serving in the AmeriCorps program- Promise Fellows at a public middle school in Duluth, working with 7th and 8th grade students, and they taught me far more than I ever could have taught them. We did awesome service projects, I coached 7th grade girls basketball, and I am super happy to get to know such an impressive group of young people.

There will likely be more posts about my AmeriCorps experience and how it helped to get me to my next adventure: Venezuela.

I will spend (at least) the next ten months:

-bumbling around Anaco, Venezuela

-learning as much español as possible

-sweating

-teaching pre-kindergarden and elementary writing to wonderful kids

-making guava smoothies 

I arrived at the Barcelona airport, about 60km from Anaco, on Friday August 2nd. It was over 80 degrees outside when we finally touched down. I arrived with two other teachers, one returning, one new to the game, who I met up with in Miami. We were selected by the customs officials to go through the line in front of many others (apparently they can even smell the gringos), and with a quick "si, si, soy tourista" we were (mostly) legally allowed into Venezuela.

 Getting our bags was an amusing feat- imagine an airport baggage claim, but without the carousel. The bags were chucked through the hole in the wall, and all of the passengers swarm around the hole, happily pulling out their own bags and passing the ones that aren't theirs to those behind them. The majority of the bags are wrapped in thick plastic wrap, so it was relatively easy to find my giant duffel bags. Once we found all of our stuff, we met the director of the school who was waiting at the arrivals gate. We quickly piled our stuff into the truck and drove for an hour to Anaco and onto the grounds of the school!