New Thrilling Challenges!

Well, classes started this week and now things seem like they are going to be REALLY busy and start to fly by. Between taking at least two buses to classes every day and being in class for at least 3½ hours or more a day, my day is “poof” gone before I know it! It’s only going to pick up faster as we have a bunch of papers and assignments due in the next 5 weeks, which I HAVE to do all in Spanish! Which brings me to a BIG change that I have made for this semester. There are 3 different concentrations for the last month of the semester that students chose to do in LASP’s program. This past Tuesday LASP told us that they had about 20+ people in the Latin American Studies concentration and only 7 – 10 in each of the two other groups (International Business & Advanced Language and Literature). They asked people to think about whether or not they would want to switch to even out the groups, but nothing was at all required. So I decided to inquire of the Advanced Language and Literature (ALL) concentration. After talking with the advisor for ALL…I decided to switch over and go for it!!! This kicks up in the intensity of my semester a huge amount and completely changes how I will be spending my time from October 27 – Dec 8! Here are the new adventures and challenges that I will be facing. 1) All of my work for our Perspectives on Latin American History & Culture class must be submitted only in Spanish. This includes a few short reflection papers, two biblical reflection responses, and…………a 7-10 page research paper on the critique of globalization! Oh boy, what am I getting myself into?! Haha (Keep in mind this is on top of all the other Spanish papers and presentations I have to give for my Spanish classes) 2) I will be spending the month of November in a town called La Grecia (I’m not exactly sure how it’s spelt), which is outside of San Jose in another part of the country somewhere. Each ALL student will be living with a new family, and all of these families are from the same church that we will be in community with. In addition while we are there we are assigned some sort of “community involvement”, which is kind of like a service project/internship. And we will be doing all of this while at the same time studying Spanish twice a week together and reading a selected amount of Spanish literature (poems, short stories, and a mini novel) for our other class focus a few times a week as well. 3) While many of you may have heard from me that I was probably going to go to Cuba at the end of the semester, which is another thing that has changed since I switched concentrations. As ALL students, we will spend our last 10 days in Panama. We go to an island in the Caribbean and live with an indigenous Panama Indian tribe. I will once again live with another family in their grass hut. Quite the adventure! The neat thing is that this tribe’s SECOND language is Spanish just like all of us, so that will provide an incredible bond with people who have the same 2nd language as us. However, English is not their first language (obviously). They speak a tribal language that we will be trying to learn some of as our 3rd language. My advisor said that when we are in Panama, Spanish becomes our “comfort” language! How crazy! The ALL students are the ones who are usually apparently the “go getters” who are willing to live anywhere and be put in any situation where they can work hard and benefit greatly from every trying experience! Living in community alongside of other people in order to walk in their shoes and relate to them is exactly what Christ did and calls us to do, so I am extremely privileged to have received this incredible opportunity that I couldn’t have found anywhere else! So, all of these crazy, new, last minute changes have altered my semester DRASTICALLY! It is going to be 10 times more challenging than I had anticipated in preparing to come down here, but I want to make the most of this experience and push myself to the bitter end! In the end it will all be so worth it, the experience, the language, the struggle, and the numerous opportunities to humble myself and serve in ways that I had not even thought possible before! Please continue to keep me in your prayers! (I might need it a little more now) haha I am once again so excited to see what God has in store for me in the next few months, and I can’t wait to share more with you when I return!