Unfortunately, I think I'm now an adult

So I guess normally the title phrase would have the word Diamonds, but I've never actually had any of those in my life.  But as a military brat, there's always a chance that baby's first word will actually be an acronym, and even though my life is no longer that of a child (*insert semi sad face because taxes...grrrr) or of a military affiliate, there are still a lot of important acronyms in it. Obviously, YASC is a popular one. I added into my autocorrect ages ago because of how often I use it. And during my experience with YASC, I've learned another acronym. ABCD (Asset Based Community Developement) is a model implemented around the world by Episcopal Relief and Development  and encouraged to be the primary option for community development programs involving YASCers as well.  Part of our training and preparation for our missions this year included training on ABCD.  There are several mentions of it on blogs of other YASCers whose placement heavily includes ABCD....

Story time! When I was very young (because I am retelling this story as it was told to me by my mother because I don't remember it) I used to have a lot of nightmares.  Any time I was too afraid to sleep, I would wake up my mom (pretty sure she wasn't thrilled about this).  She would take me back to my room, put her arms around me, sing a song to or with me, and we would talk about why I was afraid.  And then, we would pray about it.  And nearly every time I would go back to sleep quite quickly.  But, according to her telling, there was one night when we prayed that I mentioned that I was ok because my angel had arrived to guard me.  This kinda freaked her out, and even more so when I pointed to the foot of the bed behind where she sat to a place with another indentation, despite the fact that no one had sat there and my legs didn't reach that far down the bed to muss the covers. So what does an angel look like? Well, for the angel in that story, I h...

* WARNING: This post contains an embedded YouTube video that will not show up if you receive this via email.  Please head to the web or mobile site to watch. So it's been a little over a week, and what a week it has been! When last I wrote, I had been in Goiânia for a couple days already.  I've stayed in 3 other cities since then and attended a spiritual retreat, school wide Christmas party, and started Portuguese lessons (not in that order)... Speaking of "not in that order" for those who might not guess, it's quite difficult to rearrange pictures in this type of blog post. Also, I can be kinda lazy about some things, so in order to get this post to you this week instead of never (it's already 5 days later than planned) I'm just gonna caption these with details and warn you now that they jump back and forth between events.  They say variety is the spice of life, so consider this collection well seasoned. The kitchen crew (well, kinda) for the Chri...