allergic to mangos

Does anyone else feel like January was super long?? My last blog post was a little bit after Christmas and so much has happened since! As a nice little vacation before classes started, Mauricio and I went with his coworkers on a camping trip in the mountains. I had no expectations beforehand, but wow was I not disappointed! The first night we stayed up on the mountain where the views were spectacular, the air was colder, and the sunset beautiful. Instead of cooking things like hot dogs and hamburgers, we made steak, grilled vegetables, and baked potatoes. Apparently this is the usual???

At the top of the mountain we camped on a beautiful property that had tiny pools overlooking the views. Although the water was freezing, it was the perfect way to wake up and try something new. The following day, we made our way down the mountain where a super clean river ran in between Honduras and El Salvador. We spent the majority of the day swimming, hammocking, and making chicken noodle soup...Definitely an experience to mark off the bucket list.

After this trip, we somehow woke up at 3:30am the next morning to go with Mauricio's family to the beach. It was a relaxful day with plenty of fried fish and the most incredible sunset. You can imagine that by the end of this week we were both dead beat tired and ready for some rest.

Thus, these past few weeks I have been prepping for my photography, English conversation, and violin classes. We officially started last week and although it was very hectic, it was so nice to meet with students again. I'm excited for this term and have lot's of fun lessons, activities, and games planned.

With everything going fairly decent, of course something had to go wrong. A few Monday's ago, I made a delicious tomato soup....until I found myself in the hospital with food poisoning. It's been a slow, but successful healing process since. However, it was just another reminder of how much caution I need to have. Mangos are slowly coming into season and after eating just one, I now have a rash in between my fingers. One of the most humbling lessons I've learned since being here is that I'm not invincible--and I've definitely learned this the hard way.

February 13th is my birthday and Februrary 22nd will mark my one year since being deported from El Salvador. It's amazing how much has happened in just one year. It's all beautiful, scary, emotional, and challenging obstacles that the Lord has presented. I never thought that my time of volunteer service would look like this, but things usually don't go how we imagine them. Last year at this time, I was saying goodbye to everyone I loved, could not speak Spanish, moving everything back into my parents house, and trudging through snow. Now a year later, I can speak Spanish pretty well, Mauricio is in my life, I live with a wonderful woman named Marta, I walk at minimum two miles a day, and I now find air conditioning too cold.

I say all of this for my own sense of reflection, but also to demonstrate that following the Lord doesn't make us stronger or happier or wiser. If anything, it proves to us more so, our humanity and just how much stronger God is.

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