Looking ahead to new beginnings

Happy 2008!  This means we can finally say, we're leaving for our trip this year, this month even!  Woop woop!

At this point, with less than 1 month before we leave, we're spending time enjoying friends and family and figuring out the logistics behind
getting rid of most of what we own.  We're keeping our dishes, pots and pans, some books and cds, and keepsakey stuff but getting rid of
our apartment, furniture, clothes, cars, and just about everything else.  It's sort of a project.

Kyle and I work 3 days this week and then a full next week, and that's it for working.  We'll have plenty of time to do that wrapping up our lives for a year to be out of the country.

We've gotten asked a bit how we'll keep in touch while we're traveling.  Overall, we'll aim to blog every week so people can keep track of where we are.  That said, don't panic if we don't post for a
few weeks, because it may just be that we don't have a good enough internet connection to log in well.  We'll probably end up posting stories and pictures in spurts because that's when we'll have an internet connection.  Email will be the best way to reach us if you need anything or if you want to update us about life stateside.

So, I'll throw it out in case we haven't done a good job spreading the word about the stuff we know so far about our trip:
- we fly from Chicago to Guatemala City early Wed, Jan 30
- we have a few days to explore in Guatemala before starting our language intensive homestay through Pop Wuj http://www.pop-wuj.org/
- on Sunday, Feb 3rd we meet the family we'll be staying with for 3 weeks and on Monday we start 5 hours of spanish lessons, 5 days a week

We're really excited about this language intensive program. It's built into the community thread so that it supports the locals.  The $160/week tuition pays for everything we're doing, but also enables local youth to attend school that they otherwise may not be able to
afford.  They also support 4 community projects: a daycare that enables moms to work; a greenhouse program that provides healthy food for the daycare and locals; a small clinic; and a very important stove building program that builds stoves in the ground that people can't easily burn themselves on and that has a pipe that ventilates to
outside.  I've been told and lung problems are fairly prevalent.  We're looking forward to volunteering at these programs while we're there.

Post our language program we're just going to travel around a bit, we'll keep you updated as we go along.  There's a strong chance I'll take a volunteer job of sorts in El Salvador for a few months starting in May.  I'll update everyone as we get more details.

Here's to big adventures and pursuing dreams in 2008!