Five Months Back...

You know it's the perfect time of year right now in El Salvador? It's 70 to 80 degrees each day, sunny, and pretty much no humidity or rain. In Illinois it's about 20 below zero every day with ice, snow, and slush. I'm missing El Salvador and my friends there! But I'm also loving living here at home again, in a place where I feel safe.


I miss these girls so much!!































After five months of being done with Peace Corps, I'm still shocked about some things, mainly the way we interact with immigrants here in the US. How is it that I could go to another country where I couldn't speak the language, didn't understand the customs, etc., but have such a welcome from the people there? People ALWAYS had so much patience in listening to me attempt to get across an idea and help me whenever I needed it. People always invited me into their homes to eat with them and spend time with them. When I see people from outside the US in the community, I always feel like they're shunned or something. No one has any patience to even attempt to figure out what they need/how we can help them. Don't get me wrong; people living here should absolutely learn English just as we should learn the language(s) of other countries we visit. But there is always a learning curve in new things like languages and we don't care to interact with people who haven't achieved absolute 100% success in learning the language. Why is that? How can we ignore the same people who had so much patience with me and who helped me whenever I needed it (which was a lot, trust me)! It's irritating to me and I'm not even sure how to even begin to address and/or change it. I suppose this is exactly what the third goal of Peace Corps aims to achieve: to spread what we've learned during our service with other Americans.

















Anyway, enough ranting about that. After traveling around like crazy at the end of last year and early this year (the Bahamas this January were awesome), I decided to start working here to save some cash before moving anywhere. Two weeks ago, I started working at a manufacturing company in Rockford and LOVE it! The people and environment are both amazing. Everyone is very driven and friendly and there is a ton of natural light coming into the workspaces. I have no doubt that this company will end up on the list of best companies to work for in the near future. In addition to having wonderful people and work areas, they do fun things! Example? At Thanksgiving, they decided to attempt to break the world record for the fastest cooking of a turkey. They moved one of the super huge ovens/burners (we're talking like the size of a truck) out on the lawn, invited a whole lot of customers, brought in a boatload of food, and all stood on the lawn while throwing a huge fireball into this oven to roast the turkey. How could you NOT fall in love with a company like that??



















So where do I stand currently in the "big" issues? ("Big" being identified as the things people ALWAYS ask immediately upon meeting.) Job? I have one. It's going amazingly well. I get to design databases and be a total nerd on the computer so I'm as happy as can be. Home? Living at home with the parents is actually working out better than I would have guessed. After 12 years of living alone, I figured it would be quite a change. But it's surprisingly working out quite nicely. Friends? This one could be going better. Friends from school, Peace Corps, and work are living in Washington, Ohio, DC, Florida, California, Virginia, Texas, and Chicago just to name a few places. Of course Chicago isn't that far away, but it's far enough where I can't just go out with them at night and then come back home so planning and figuring out who I will stay with always has to be figured out. And since we're living in one of those common incredibly small communities in Illinois, I'm surrounded by families, not single people my age. I'm finding that it's quite difficult to meet people to do things with and I'm missing that. I missed it while I was in El Salvador, but I figured it would come back once I was back in the US. I suppose it won't come back until I'm living in a big city again so that's definitely still in my future.

Well, that's about it with me at the moment! We'll see how these next few months go...