Hello Pittsburgh!

Okay, so this is my first attempt at blogging, and as you can already see I’m failing at it. Sorry for the lack of posts, but as I try to remember what I have been doing since April, I can’t think of anything too exciting that happened anyway :) I’ll try to be better about posting in the future, but I can see how easy it is to get caught up in things that are going on and forget about writing my experiences down so they can be shared through here.

Anyway, the past week has actually been exciting! I arrived here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Wednesday the 4th for the start of our orientation. At the time, a month of orientation sounded daunting, but I’m surprised at how fast the time has flown by so far! Coming here, I was most excited and apprehensive about meeting the other members of my “Honduras Community” whom I will be living and working with for the next year, but I have no idea why I was worried. We come from all across the country- two of us from Iowa, one from Seattle, one from Cleveland, and another from the Boston area, and amongst the group we have backgrounds in nursing, theology, biology and anthropology. It has been a lot of fun getting to know each other and finding out about our differences and similarities, but we have a easy going but driven group of people who hope to make the most of our next year together.

Orientation as a whole has been busy, but no fear, we’ve found some time for fun too- in case you were worried. :) During the morning and afternoon, we usually have guest speakers come in to talk to us about a variety of topics including acculturation, spirituality, communication techniques, etc. They’re preparing us for the obstacles we may encounter as we prepare to live in a new culture with new people in a challenging and stressful environment. It’s inevitable that we’ll all go through culture shock at some point in the next year, and though it sounds intimidating, as long as we can learn to accept the unchangeable differences between life in Honduras and life in the U.S. we will eventually become more comfortable in our environment. The five of us also spend time talking about our past living arrangements and how we are used to dealing with roommates and friends in hopes of promoting good communication and developing expectations for our community living before we get there. We’ll be living in a three- bedroom home in the middle of the town of Talanga. We have electricity until it periodically goes out, but no regular running water. I haven’t seen many photos, but one of our group members has been to Honduras and tries to illustrate the town for us the best she can. I’ll be sure elaborate more later!

But back to Pittsburgh, this town is great! We’re staying in a Passionist monastery/retreat house on a hill overlooking the city. We’ve met so many wonderful members of the Passionist Community while staying here, including all the Priests who live here and somehow know us all by name though we have a hard time keeping their names straight, the Passionists Associates who hosted a wonderful reception for us the second night we were here and even the great staff here. We had to endure the intense heat here for the first week, but we figure God was just preparing our two groups for what we can expect in Honduras and Jamaica :) To our relief though, we talked to our sources from each respective country and found out the heat and humidity aren’t even usually this bad there. We’ve spent some time touring the city, which strangely enough reminds me of Kentucky at times because of the excessive hills and windy roads. There are many, many bridges here which probably has something to do with why Pittsburgh is called the “City of Bridges.” We’ve driven through some of the beautiful college campuses and historical neighborhoods, and taken a trolley up to Mt. Washington which also overlooks the city. We’re within walking distance to Carson street which is a fun place to be, especially for college-aged people like ourselves. We went to a Pirates game the other night and enjoyed watching a win over the Washington Nationals, but I may have enjoyed the relay race between the Presidential mascots of the Nationals and the Polish pierogie dumpling-like-things a bit more than that.

It’s been hard lately because we’ve been pretty disconnected from the world here, but I guess it’s something I need to get used to. We obviously have Internet access, but it’s something we all share each night. We haven’t seen much TV or read any newspapers, so it’s been hard trying to keep up with what is going on in Iowa. Usually Iowa isn’t too exciting, and it wouldn’t really matter much what was happening there, but this flooding ordeal just blows my mind. When I left just over a week ago, everything was fine, but since then things have obviously changed. It’s hard to imagine Iowa City now, and the streets that I drove everyday being underwater. Or the fact that a huge portion of Cedar Rapids is submerged too, but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how much things have changed when I get back. It’s crazy to think so much can happen in a couple short weeks, and it’s even harder to imagine how different things will be coming back home after a whole year away.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all that has been going on here. We head out tomorrow morning for a 6-hour road trip to West Virginia where the Passionists have a domestic volunteer program. We’re looking forward to seeing the work they do there, and having the chance to work at some of their worksites on Monday. I’ll try to write about our trip and upcoming adventures sometime in the near future!