One Wild and Precious Life

 The end of the year is, for a lot of people, a time of looking back and looking ahead.  This year, I find myself thinking a lot about both--how the last year has been a year of huge change and transition for me and how the year ahead will be shaped by my journey of service.   As I finished up my first term of school and I started thinking about what goals I have for the next term, I was brought back to my why.  BTW: if you haven't read Start with Why , I encourage you to pick it up.    Why  am I doing this?  One of my whys is simply because the call to service was so loud that I couldn't ignore it.  But another why is that I wanted to challenge myself in new ways while giving and sharing of myself.   It's the why   that helps me get through the hard times.  And as I've talked about, this experience has been hard in a lot of ways.  There were certain things that I knew would be hard--and they have been hard.  Being away from family and friends and familiar culture.  Mi

 I'm a week later than intended with this post, but last Sunday turned out a bit differently than I had expected (more on that below) and I didn't have it in me to sit at the computer and write.  We are approaching the end of the term here and 12/05 will mark 6 months of service for me.  These benchmarks along with thanksgiving, have had me thinking a lot about gratitude.  So today I'd like to share some of the things that I am particularly grateful for.  The opportunity to work with children and see them succeed .  The past couple of weeks have brought some success stories from school.  The picture at the right is a student who I've been working with during lunchtimes--when I assessed him, his reading was far below grade level.  In our early sessions, I could see that he needed help with both phonemic and phonological awareness.  He's been working on both with me and he has started practicing his reading with a cousin at home!  On the day of this picture, he was ab