Blog!

Greetings! Welcome to my blog. This website is kindly hosted by Mennonite.net, a small non-profit based in Goshen (IN) that provides web hosting for a number of organizations and churches. I spent the spring and summer of 2017 working for Mennonite.net, loved it, and hope to continue doing so upon my return from China.

If you’d like to learn more about Mennonite.net, feel free to visit our (newly recreated!) website at, you guessed it, mennonite.net. You are also welcome to email info@mennonite.net, particularly if your organization or church has need of any web hosting services!

I am currently in China for Goshen College’s SST. SST, or Study-Service Term, is a study abroad program that focuses on immersion as a primary teacher, giving some 80% of GC’s students a chance to live for a semester with a host family in another country (currently one of Cambodia, China, Peru, Senegal, and Tanzania). You can learn more about SST at goshen.edu/sst, and more about the China unit at goshen.edu/china. We have a group blog, which I encourage you to read in tandem with mine: goshen.edu/china/current-blog.

I originally started my updates as (somewhat lengthy) emails, but eventually realized that a blog format is preferable for a few reasons:

• More people can access a blog, and it’s easier to share – it isn’t shared by word of mouth so much as a pasted link. I figure more people will end up reading it this way; that isn’t necessarily my goal (actually, this is all a ploy to gain millions of followers and start a movement for some important as-yet undecided thing), but I’m sure there are people out there who didn’t realize I was writing stuff about China and would have loved to receive updates had they known.
• Pictures are also pretty hard in an email, particularly writing on an iPad (and even more so when I take the pictures on my phone). Hopefully a blog will be a nicer format for sending pictures, because I know at least a few people who want to see some.
• Blogs also feel less formal, which is just relaxing as I write. I’m not writing to anyone: I’m just writing stuff and putting it on the internet (and you’re reading it! It’s working!). It’s possible my writing quality will suffer as a result, but that’s a risk I guess I’m willing to take.
• Finally, I can keep writing after I get back. This is probably the biggest advantage, in my mind; I can turn this into an all-purpose blog – with China as one important section – and keep chronicling my life (to some extent). Particularly if I have future cross-cultural, international, and/or even just interesting adventures (I plan on it, God willing), I figure it’ll be useful to have a place to write (and I’ll be encouraged to do so).
• Oh, and I also really enjoy reading other peoples’ blogs. Right now I’m thinking of my mother’s blog in particular, and if you know her and haven’t visited it yet I’m sure you’ll appreciate doing so: buckshefusethiopia.wordpress.com. (See how easy that was? No need to contact her, no email list shenanigans, just a link from one blog to another. Us family bloggers gotta stick together).
• Plus Mennonite.net is pretty cool, and now I have all this experience with WordPress… might as well make use of it :).

In any case, I hope you find something interesting, insightful, and enjoyable here!