The Blossoming of Compassion
"Anything will help. God bless you." "Mother of 4." "Homeless. In Need." Everyday as I drive to school I pass signs resembling these. I sit nervously tapping my foot on the gas pedal trying to...
Read More 2 min read
Florence, Oregon – A Sandlot Full Of Dune Buggy Fun
Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area in coastal southern Oregon provides active families buckets of fun -- in a unique setting of enormous sand dunes near the town of Florence. No matter how...
Read More 6 min read
Life at 10,000 Feet
They told me oxygen would be scarcer, but they didn’t tell me it was the mountains that would take my breath away. I was deep in the heart of the Peruvian Andes, in a small village called Ollantaytambo....
Read More 3 min read
Navigating the Dark in the City of Light
Travel is the insane desire to become lost. Lost in a culture, a language, lost in ourselves. And when I decided to study abroad for a year, I was completely unaware of how my world would change, of how...
Read More 2 min read
Storming Castles and Hunting Dwarves in Poland
As a kid with an incredibly active imagination, I loved acting out the stories that my Mom read to me or what I saw in movies. I taped flashlights to my arms to shoot lasers like Buzz Lightyear, and built...
Read More 2 min read
A Grand Design
No one had to tell me to feel the way I did. I felt it all on my own. With depths as bottomless as the ocean, and craters so vast they seemed to spread across the world forever, the view was like nothing...
Read More 3 min read
International Deprogramming: The truth About Nigeria
“So there I was, spear in hand,” I recounted to my thoroughly American friends, “The lion charged at me, jaws agape, snarling like the devil himself.” They’re all paying rapt attention...
Read More 2 min read
China in Transit
Hangzhou, China is beautiful in the spring. The weather is lovely, the trees are in bloom, and if you look above the buildings, the sky is even blue. On the west lies a long, gleaming lake; on the east...
Read More 2 min read
