Just around the corner...

First, an enormous thank you is in order.

Because... WE DID IT! WE RAISED $10,000!

I sometimes like to think I can do everything myself. Fundraising for this journey has been an incredible wake-up call and reinforced two little lessons. 1. I don't have to do everything by myself (no, we don't get brownie points at the end if we don't ask for help) and 2. People want to help. Even after donations were sent in, people have continued to follow up, lend their support and empathy as I prepare in earnest for that flight on September 6th. And your words are just as (if not more) valuable than the dollars.

So now it's official. I'm going. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Over the past few months, during fundraising and visiting friends and family, I've been answering the same few questions (Why? When? What are you doing there?) The trouble is, when you tell a story over and over again, it can become mechanical. More than anything else, it becomes impersonal, the way you recount a NY Times article or the latest celebrity gossip. So when I touched down at Logan Airport yesterday in Boston after visiting family in Minnesota (scroll down for pics), I had a nice big, bug-eyed, reality-check-slap-you-upside-the-head-moment in roughly this order:

It's August 18th.
I leave September 6th.
That's... wait... 30 days past September, April, June, and November... in 19 days!!
The next time I'm on a plane, it won't be to visit family or go back to Seattle. It will be to move. Because I'm moving to San Salvador.

Not San Salvador like I've been saying it over and over again for the past few months. But San Salvador as home. San Salvador as a real, physical place, with an apartment building somewhere that will be my apartment building, and a language that will no longer be a neat thing to be fluent in, but suddenly as pervasive as the air I breathe, and the pupusas I eat, and suddenly I'm going to be dunked headfirst into a world I don't even know how to adequately anticipate. Oh boy.

So stay tuned... it's about to get real.

Hannah

The boys (bros and cousin) revisiting LEGO memories

All the cousins together again!

My cousin Kakia, Mommy, and me