PANAMA!!!

On Thursday afternoon we received a Fed-Ex package from the Peace Corps with our official invitation! We had received emails Tuesday morning telling us that the invitation was in the mail but that we would have to await its arrival before finding out the big news. Waiting for that package made those two days incredibly difficult but once I opened the package and read the invitation the wait was all worth it.

We will be going to PANAMA, staging is in DC starting on April 20th. That is so soon. It could not have worked out more perfectly that we had already decided to leave our jobs on this past Friday, February 26th. Our lease is up near the end of March and we have a month to see our families before heading out.  I am excited that it is happening more quickly than we had originally thought (we had been nominated to leave in June), now that I know where we are going to be I am totally ready to be there!

Sean is working as a Community Environmental Conservation (CEC) Extension Agent and I will be a Tourism and English Consultant. It sounds like we will both be contributing to sustainability projects and community education. I could not possibly be more excited with my assignment, or the country. I know/knew absolutely nothing about Panama. When we got our invitation we had no internet access to look up information so we walked to the bookstore and bought a guidebook. We've learned a lot and it has us very excited- and maybe a little nervous about the bugs and snakes...

Here is a section of the PC welcome book about the environment in Panama:

Panamá’s landscape varies from province to province, and each province has its own beauty. The tropical environment supports a large variety of flora and fauna, including orchids, bromeliads, fabulous quetzals, over 100 varieties of hummingbird, conejos pintados (large nocturnal rodents), and armadillos. Forests cover 40 percent of the land. The dominant topographical feature is the central spine of highlands called the Cordillera Central that forms the continental divide. The highest elevation is the Baru volcano, located near the border with Costa Rica, which rises to almost 11,550 feet (3,500 meters). The coastal areas are largely plains with gently sloping hills. Panamá has nearly 500 rivers, most of them not navigable. The Chagres is one of the longest and most vital of the approximately 150 rivers that flow into the Caribbean. In the sparsely populated eastern half of Panamá lies the Darien eco-region, a dense tropical forest that is a cradle of biological diversity

Pretty much wherever we are will be filled with natraul beauty! And it is a brand new kind of wilderness for us, so different than the mountains of Colorado...the temperature ranges form 70-90 degrees pretty much year round! The images I've seen of Panama are exactly what I always imagined when I dreamed about the Peace Corps. 65% of Panamanians live in poverty, and though many think of cosmopolitan Panama City when they think of the country, most of the country is struggling to develop as communities wrestle with stifiling poverty. We know that the work we will be doing is needed and will truly be helping the members of the community we live in. We don't know yet what community that will be, but it will be rural and between 2-16 hours from Panama City.  We were told not to count on electricity or potable water...(all part of the experience!)

So for the next two weeks we are continuing to work on our spanish, filling out a ton of paperwork for the PC, packing up our apartment and getting ready for the big adventure!

Family

OK I know I have been really slacking in the blog front and I apologize, but I have been BUSY! For those of you who don’t know, Sean and I are joining the Peace Corps and are just months away from our assignment. I say ‘months’ in a broad, general sense, because I really have no idea when we will be leaving, but it feels safe to say it will be sometime in 2010.


Our lease is up on March 21st, so our last day of work is going to be this Friday. This gives us a month to get things in order and come up with a plan, hopefully with information on our PC departure to help make those plans concrete. We have had very solid, exciting plans leading up to now but it is becoming apparent that we shouldn’t assume anything is set in stone until we get out official Peace Corps invitation. And no matter what, that invitation will be our focus- any other plans are very easy to put on hold for a departure! We are expecting it any day now (hopefully) and we will update you then on what our next steps will be.

It is a shame that I haven’t been good about posting because we had a very exciting December and January. Now the events feel so long ago that I feel silly posting too much about them, but they were all too memorable to ignore. All of the following pictures are taken from other people’s Kodak Gallery albums because I was a bad photographer during this time!


A few days before Christmas we headed back to Pennsylvania to spend the holiday with the Strongs. As is always (always!!) the case in the Strong household, those days were absolutely filled with laughter. And delicious food (another given). Sean and Chris spent a good amount of time playing in the snow- still cannot believe that we moved all the way out to CO and PA has way more snow than we do right now! We were able to spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas day together, it was so refreshing to have a traditional family-centered Christmas after having spent last year’s at Beaver Creek learning to snowboard. Mostly, though, we enjoyed just being able to be together-the first time the whole family has been able to get together since we moved to Denver.

Sean, me, Chris, Greg and Jocie on our last day (note the Eagles spirit. They won!)

Christmas tree! We haven't had one in a few years and it definitely put us in the Christmas spirit

Some of Sean's oldest friends came by to catch up during our visit

Sean on the snowskate

Chris snowskating

For New Years we headed to St. Louis where we celebrated my Grandma’s 90th birthday! 90!!!! It was so fun to be able to celebrate her amazing life with most of our family. Because Grey was just two weeks old, the Crick and Kate Helfrich family stayed in DC. They were greatly missed! Besides ‘just’ celebrating the big birthday, we also had quite a bit of fun exploring St. Louis with all our nieces and nephews. Trips to the Magic House and the unforgettable City Museum were tons of fun and the City Museum in particular was geared for not just the young, but the young at heart.

The Whole Clan (minus a few) Grandma and her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren

Trying to get the great grandkids to sit for this shot was not easy

Grandma plus most of the Helfrich family

Some of the group at the City Museum

Kaitlyn and Mattie on the train

Sean and Beth give the hamster wheel a try

Carrie enjoying the Magic House (I'm seeing 'unlimited minutes' in her future)

Enjoying some quality time with Tommy

Beautiful Zoӫ with a gorgeous hat made by her mama

In the middle of January we went to Charlotte for my mom’s surprise 60th birthday celebration. This time the entire family was able to make it. The weekend celebration involved a surprise luncheon, a delicious dinner with a beautiful slideshow and an absolutely fabulous Cast Iron Filter reunion concert! There was also a lot of family time down at Glassy to make the whole weekend complete.

Sorry mom, but this is the best way to show how surprised you were!

Once the shock was over she was very very happy

Mom and Dad enjoying the slideshow (a surprise for both of them)

Enjoying the CIF reunion show

Some of the family even joined in on stage

Meeting baby Grey for the first time

Looking at all of these pictures makes me realize how pictures only take you so far. The pictures don’t show you how it felt like to celebrate Christmas as a whole family or what it sounded like when Grandad’s voice came on Grandma’s slideshow. You can see my mom’s reaction to the surprise but you can’t feel what it was like to be a part of that moment. You can see all of those adorable Helfrich babies/kids, but it doesn’t express what it was really like holding my newest nephew for the first time or suddenly realizing my first niece is almost seven!



I think about all of these things as we get ready to go to the Peace Corps. For 2 years I will be living through pictures- pictures that I will be so thankful to see! But there is a big part of me that knows pictures only show you so much, that behind every picture is a laugh, a tear or special moment that I will have to wait to have in person- or some that I will just miss entirely. We treasure pictures because of the real-life moments that they represent, and though I will be able to get the gist of the moment I know I will be missing the memory making behind them. It is all a trade off, of course, as I know that wherever we are and whatever we are doing we will be making memories of our own. They might not have family at the center, but they are possible because of the families we have been blessed with. We grew up knowing the importance of helping others and of living life to the fullest- both which require sacrifices. Thousands of miles away, as we are every day, we have and will have our families guiding us and giving us strength. And there are always the memories to make when we get back.

Avalanche Course and The Season of Giving

We finally got to put those avalanche transceivers to use! Last weeek we took a 24-hour Level 1 Avalanche  course through Bryant Mountain Nordic Ski Patrol and Colorado Mountain Club Boulder (Boulder Mountain School). The class had about 30 students and 20 instrcutors. We did 8 hours of classroom instruction and 16 hours of field instruction between St. Mary's Glacier and Berthoud Pass (both in the Front Range).

Sean at St. Mary's Glacier

Our field days were exhausting, but also a ton of fun. And we learned A LOT. More important than learing the search and rescue techniques was learning how to read snow and weather patterns for clues of potential avalanche danger. We know how to take the right steps to hopefully avoid the situation all together. This is particularly helpful since a) Colorado has the highest number of avalanche fatalities in the country, and b) avalanche fatalities are more likely to happen to 20-30 year olds...

Sean and an instructor working on the snow pit

tap test

Saturday and Sunday (the field days) consisted of practicing beacon use, emergency rescue scenarios and digging/analyzing a snow pit. I found the rescue scenarios to be the most helpful and the most fun. The instructors had buried wet suits filled with snow, some with beacons and some without, and we had to find them and dig them out in a timely manner.

We are now certified by the National Ski Patrol and will probably take the Level 2 course in the not-too-distant future.

30+mph winds and snow during Saturday's field day

On Monday night a group of my friends and I prepared dinner for a local homeles shelter called The Delores Project (http://www.thedeloresproject.org/). The Delores project serves homeless women in Denver. It opens every day at 4pm and closes again at 8am. Women are served snacks in the afternoon and morning and dinner. All dinner is donated and all servers are volunteers. A few of us had served dinner for about 50 women in November and we will go back to serve the food we prepared last night. It is always more fun to volunteer in big groups and both cooking together and serving others helps get everyone in the holiday spirit!

baked ziti for about 65 (menu also includes green bean casserloe, brownies, applesauce, clementines and a big salad)

the prep crew relaxing

Deana and I shopped and organized the group- and we're definitely doing it again.

all of us

Giving Thanks

This Thanksgiving reminded me to be thankful...

for great friends to spend the holiday with

for delicious high-calorie food (thanks mom and dad!)

for a cozy 4-season tent that makes the winter nights a little less cold

for my wonderful husband

who stays out in the cold to boil snow

to make hot water bottles for our sleeping bags

and who puts our wet, cold boots (in a tarp of course) in his sleeping bag overnight

while I get to stay warm in my sleeping bag

who finds water for us along the trail in places I would never consider

and who makes me laugh by eating this at 7:30 in the morning

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and that you're preparing for the next round of holidays without too much stress! Miss you all :)

CMC Hike

Sean and I joined the Colroado Mountain Club (CMC) a few weeks ago in order to be able to get into a less expensive Avalanche course this winter. Being a member of the CMC has a ton of benefits outside of trainings- including access to the CMC library, tons of weekly trips organized by trained leaders and classes on all sorts of mountaineering subjects. We took our first trip with the club this weekend to James Peak via the St. Mary's Glacier. The pictures below were taken by another member of the club- our fully charged camera wouldn't turn on because it was too cold out...

 That is the trip leader standing in the middle there. The rest of us are switching from snowshoes to boots before getting on the glacier.

Even with a group of 11 being on the mountain is a solitary experience

Beautiful day- but the 40mph winds made it seem much colder than 30 degrees!

This is called Jamaica because it is the only place between treeline and the summit where you get away from the wind for at least a moment

Jamaice on the way down

So much easier with the wind at your back- and the snow not hitting your face

All in all it was a good, quick day. We were the youngest ones there by a longshot, but it is always nice climb with veterans of the mountains...we always have something to learn and they definitely had some wisdom to impart.