T-111 hours and 46 minutes

But hey, who's counting.

Welcome to my blog NepALI!* I hope to use this as a way to update everyone I love and share stories from my time in Nepal. As you likely know if you're reading this blog, I am headed to Nepal to serve with the Peace Corps as a Food Security and Agriculture specialist. In T-111 hours and (now 42 minutes) I will be headed off to the airport for teary goodbye with my dear parents to fly off to Chicago! There, I will meet N-203 (the 203rd group of volunteers in Nepal) and spend a night doing paper work and becoming fast friends before heading off to Nepal the next morning! I've spent the last 7 months since getting my invitation being incredibly excited, but the past week or so I've been pretty nervous. I feel incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful loving family and caring (read: goofy) group of friends that make it hard to say goodbye. Without getting sappy or sounding like a complete cliché, I truly would not have been able to do this without the knowledge that I am going with so much support from every corner of my life.

SO! Everyone asks what I am actually doing in Nepal, and this seems like a good opportunity to answer all those questions in a succinct clear way: I pretty much have no idea. I will be ~an hour outside of Kathmandu for about 3 months for pre-service training. During this time, I will be living with a host family and going to Peace Corps language and culture classes to become 100% fluent in Nepal so that when PST ends and I meet my host family, I will be able to communicate seamlessly. Or at least be able to say Namaste! Project-wise I am not sure what I will be doing, and won't until I am able to get a better feel for my village and my place in the community.

Anyway for now, you know about as much as I know! I am excited to keep up with this so that you can get a feel for the culture of Nepal and I can have a large audience to share my excitement with. For now, over and out. I'm going to stuff my face with some pizza and ice cream.



* (clever "blog name" props to Jake)