Standstill.

I knew that at some point I would want to dust off this blog and start writing again.  Today is the day.

It's like we're living in a movie, isn't it?

For those that need a refresher, I've been living in Pretoria, South Africa for about ten months now, running programming and training for Peace Corps.  It's been quite a ten months.  I've got some stories that maybe I'll start sharing and some that I hope are never spoken again.  I have a deep love and respect for Peace Corps, having served as a Volunteer in Benin 2009-2011, and I haven't really left Africa much since then.

In my ten months in this role, I've managed some significantly stressful events.  Consolidations, behavioral issues, staffing challenges, even the death of a Volunteer.  I thought it couldn't get any more stressful than that.

I was wrong. Welcome to March 2020, where Peace Corps evacuated all 7000+ Volunteers from across the globe in a matter of days, while up against an ever-changing landscape of flight cancellations and border closures, staff anxiety, increasing infection numbers, and questions about what this all means.

So here we are.  The photo above is today's newspaper, and I bought a copy thinking this is one of those moments I'll want to tell my grand-nieces and grand-nephews someday.  This is my generations' second life-transforming event; I remember distinctly the vast differences of life before and after 9/11, having been in college at the time, and now I believe our lives will be segmented once again to life-before and life-after the virus.

And I welcome you to peek into my little corner of the world.

Love, Krissy