Hello, everyone! Or should I say: zdravo (здраво!) Privet (привет!) Hola! Salve! 

مرحبا!

Hello in all of the languages I know that word in! (*FULL DISCLOSURE*: “hello” in Arabic is basically the only word I know in Arabic, but it counted because I do know it).

Welcome to the blog. As most of you know, I kept it up everyday last summer when I spent my time in Ibague, Colombia, for many reasons:

1) To document my experiences in a (hopefully) engaging manner for those interested in my life.

2) To let my family and friends know that yes, I was safe, and am not quite dead yet (that was a serious concern, from tripping over a rock to being kidnapped by rogue forces).

The blog was brought to a sad halt when my camera died and it became increasingly difficult to run a blog with curated photos from my phone alone. And though my camera came to a poetically exotic end- a grain of sand from the white beaches of Santa Marta had lodged itself in the rotator-vision thingy at the front and refused to be dis-lodged, and the cost of repair was more than the cost of the camera itself, the nice Best Buy man told me- the fact remains that it did in fact come to an end.

On Tuesday I fly off to Sarajevo for two months and couldn’t be more excited. I have acquired a new camera, a Canon t5, and it’s my new baby (not that I ever had an old one). Sample shots from my traipse through life immediately after purchase include:

I’ll try to keep it up everyday from this point onward- I’m currently training at the World Affairs Council before I jet off and so I’m pretty busy, but it’s a good kind of busy: I met the President of Costa Rica, Bill Clinton’s old taste tester, Anthea Roussou (founder of South Africa’s Dreamcathers’ organization), and I’ve learned a lot (thanks mainly to the meticulous and untiring attention and patience of Danielle, the person I’m replacing but I would rather she didn’t leave).

I’ve adopted watercolor as a hobby, and while a painting of the mountains quickly became a likeness of Mordor, two others turned out better (check my instagram here):

Lastly, per usual, I’ve been reading quite a lot. I finished The Winter Palace yesterday, and while I’m not normally one for historical fiction, anything about Russian intrigues and the Romanovs is fine by me, and I highly recommend. I also finished the Journal of Charlotte S. Forten, the diary of an educated Northern African-American woman in post-slavery America who taught in the South, and that was also worth the read. I read a shorter journal of an African American woman from the South who served as a nurse for an African-American regiment (Reminiscences of My Life in Camp by Susie King Taylor), Black Like Me by John Griffin, and Ben Franklin’s autobiography. Black Like Me was a wonderful read and quite insightful in the wake of recent events regarding race in the United States today, but all were worth the read (if you click the titles, it takes you to their Amazon page, and most are available for super cheap used or on Kindle!). I’m reading The Tusk That Did the Damage right now (the story of poaching from an elephant’s point of view) but I’ll hold off judgment until I’m more than three chapters in.

Anyway, until tomorrow, and welcome back!