High School Teacher at Boarding School for Refugees in Middle East
Track:Teaching track
Region:Middle East
I am a California native, and a 2013 college grad with a degree in Music.
I love coffee, exploring old places, and conversations with people who are very different from me. Especially over food. The musical nature of everyday life is beautiful to me.
I have a heart for people that are displaced across the world, and God has given me a passion for people in North Africa specifically.
I live in a crowded city of 20 million people…I come from a small town of 13,000.
One stark difference between these two places (minus the difference in population) is how people choose to get from point A to point B. Now, you would think that every person in the city would often stay and work in the district they live in, right? WRONG. It seems as though every single person needs to get someplace else everyday…which leads to major crowds in every method of transportation you choose. Often, local people with good jobs…
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Fasting has never been an attractive topic for me. When I was in high school, I didn’t eat much. Because of some issues with self-esteem and control, I wanted desperately to lose weight, and so I made a decision to control my eating habits as much as I was able to. When I fully gave myself to Christ in college, I began to treat my body well, and now I am in a place today where I am content with who I am created to be and LOVE food as a celebration of life and time of community together. I walk as a testimony of God’s…
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So, no big news since I last wrote, right? (Just kidding)
If I am speaking honestly, when I found out that Trump was elected, I was furious beyond belief, and my poor roommate got quite the earful (though it gave us a break from talking about Brexit for a bit, which was good). I could not believe that what I had perceived to be the impossible had happened in him taking office! For me, character is such an important issue in choice for a leader, and for me to have someone of poor public character represent me as an American expat is a hard…
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As I reflect on this past year, I am so, so thankful for the opportunity to learn a new language, and for the opportunity to speak to people about what I love in that language! This year has been a year of tremendous change, but as I am looking back, it is a joy to see how the Father has worked in my life through that change! Though maybe not so funny at the time, I am thankful also to have many stories of making mistakes in the language. My dad encouraged me since I was learning Spanish as a kid to laugh at my mistakes because SOCKS (or in Spanish, that’s just the way it is). Mistakes and…
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I began teaching music in a school for African refugees, which has been accompanied by joy, sorrow, pain, and laughter in an ever-repeating flood. This school operates in a small cultural bubble inside of the culture that I live in. Having to live as a functional human being in one new culture is hard, and I am still learning how after nine months of being here. However, now that I have discovered this new cultural layer of displaced refugees on top of the local culture, everything I have learned thus far has become once more convoluted. Of course, in saying that, I wouldn’t trade any of it…
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