Nicaragua: Sharing all the world

This past week I celebrated another anniversary of the day I was born--the 2nd consecutive birthday which I have celebrated in a foreign country. It was without a doubt the hottest birthday I have ever experienced in my life, and pretty much just a day like any other. I was at school by 7:30am and returned to my house around midday. Since it was a particularly sunny day, I washed my clothes in the afternoon due to the high probability that they would dry within the same day of washing them (but then it still took 2 days for them to dry...silly humidity). In the evening I was invited to go out for fruit smoothies, and that wrapped up the day's activities. Simple...the way life should be. 

Birthdays, I reckon, can be considered a sort of personal new year in which the celebrant should take some time to reflect on the past year and make some goals looking toward the year to come. For me, the past year has been an incredible whirlwind of a ride lived 16% in Mexico City, 25% in Minnesota, 25% on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, and 34% on the Atlantic side. I like visual aids, therefore you can see this breakdown in the chart above. Looking towards the coming year, the year-end chart should be mostly all one color (representing having spent the majority of the year in Nicaragua). My goals are to continue dedicating myself to the job which Peace Corps has laid out for us, incorporated with my personal challenge of improving each day, living a little bit better and a little bit wiser than the previous day.  

Between teaching class, planning business competitions, working with business owners in my community, and planning activities for the upcoming "summer vacation", my schedule continues to fill up. That's not to say that I'm left without time for myself; I think many a volunteer would agree that we have a lot of time to simply sit and think about things. 

So what is my closing thought for today? Upon "completing my 23rd year" (as the phrase is directly translated from Spanish) it is fair to say that I have experienced quite a few changes and new experiences throughout the past 12 months. Perfect and/or easy are not adjectives which I would choose to describe this life, but that is not to say that I'm ungrateful for the challenges thrown my way. All of us, no matter where we find ourselves, have the opportunity to embrace new experiences, add to our existing knowledge, break down what we have previously learned, all the while stretching our minds to conceive and understand something greater than we once knew. The only present I opened on my birthday this year was the dawn of a new day (a gift which we often times fail to acknowledge) and I wouldn't have it any other way. Here's to many more dawns to come.