We're famous...well not really, but this is pretty cool :)

The Gainesville Sun, the main newspaper were Nate and I USED to live~ that was weird to say,~wrote a story about our upcoming Guyana adventure. Pretty cool huh? Check it out!

3 hours of packing in 1 min

3 hours of packing in 1 min. from n8stew on Vimeo.

After weeks of sorting, organizing, and staging.... we moved!

Thanks to you!

After 2 years of talking, planning, waiting, hoop-jumping, and more talking…. our plan to go to the Peace Corps is becoming a reality. Ilana and I like to talk about this change as more of a 90 degree turn than a pause. But the turn happens so slowly it can sneak up on you.

Until a few days ago it didn’t really feel real. Sharing the news with friends and family was exciting; their reactions overwhelmingly positive and supportive. Resigning from my job was a bit harder, I think because when I moved here in 2005 I didn’t know anyone or anything about teaching. I hesitated on the steps up to my office, I think because resigning meant giving up something I worked so hard to build. Even though it took ten times longer than I thought it would, it was cathartic to be putting things in boxes and selling everything. “Sometimes our things can end up owning us” I told myself… several deep breaths later everything we decided to keep was in 6 boxes bound for my parents’ storage unit. “Psshhh… this isn’t so hard,” I thought. Sneaky little turn.

But on Thanksgiving weekend a little crack started to show itself. Our friends Jon, Noemi, and Cat had decided to join us at my parents for Thanksgiving. It was epic… my family went all out: 2 huge trays of lobster, crab claws, and shrimp, cheese balls as big as your face, homemade cookies, 16 lbs of turk-ular glory, all the trimmings, then more trimmings. We were practically paralyzed with happiness the whole time. None of us even wanted to leave each other’s company to go to the bathroom, much less bed. Even after all the food I think I lost a pound or two from all the laughter. But something felt different… the Publix commercial (the one with the grandma baking the cake) left me misty-eyed; I didn’t check my email or phone once in 4 days; I got emotional when my brother left for NC even though I know I’m going to see him for Christmas. “What the hell,” I thought. Turned a little more.

Now, a few weeks later and only a little more than a day left in Gainesville I have an overwhelming feeling that skydivers must get right before they jump out of the plane. We’re really excited, a little scared… but not as much as I though we’d be. I think that’s because of how much support we feel from our family, friends, co-workers, even people we didn’t expect. If I had a nickel for all the times that Ilana or I have said how lucky we feel and how incredibly much we’ve learned from our community…. I’d have a sh-t ton of nickels. Thank you all so much!

P.S. I promise to make my future posts less sappy :)

We've been robbed! Well not really, we just sold it all.

We did it! We sold every single thing we owned in 9 hrs this past Saturday and it felt GREAT! (Can you sense the sarcasm?) It was actually really hard. Well...the selling part wasn't hard, considering we had about 100 people come in and out of our condo handing us money quicker than we could say "sold." Every time we would turn around we realized something else was gone, so the day was a bit of a blur. The hardest part was tagging all of our items for a fraction of a fraction of what we bought it for. For example, let say we bought a gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous dress for $150 one year, we probably would have sold it for $4. Just $4, and I only wore it twice!!!! Yes, this actually happened if you can't tell by now.

So this is how it all went down....The night before our sale we had Nate's mother, Karen, come up and help us tag and organize all of our stuff. She was an incredible help and I seriously don't think we could have done it with out her. It was a rough night. I slept about 2 hrs, I didn't eat anything for about 32 hrs (well...I probably drank my body weight in coffee), I cried probably twice and almost had a melt down, but "gosh darn it" we did it! I can honestly say that I am at peace with it all, OK you got me, I am not totally at peace with it yet, but I am getting there. I have probably vacuumed my floors 7 times since the sale just because I feel a bit violated having so many people walk in and out of my house and touch everything I own and then practically steal it! When you sell something for 25 cents you feel like you have been robbed. Seriously, you do. Anyway, we made some good money and now we will be taking that money and trying to buy all the items we need to be "Americanized" while in the Peace Corps. Funny how even when we try to embrace a new lifestyle and culture we still want to live at a certain comfort level. Oh well...

Needless to say,we slept in our empty apartment last night on our aero bed in the living room floor next to a candle. Our bedroom is now acting like a staging room for all of our Peace Corps luggage. It's nicely laid out on the floor and organized. Oh how I LOVE being organized. So, even though I slept pretty uncomfortably (it's weird sleeping on the floor in your own place; you almost feel like a stranger), I feel like my life just became uncluttered and extremely simple and that feeling is quite wonderful. For the next 10 days we will be "practicing" what our life will be like for the next two years. Eek! And I know what I am about to say will sound cheesy, but some day Nate and I will honestly be able to say that we "lived on just love." Many people say they don't need anything but each other, well we are truly about to find out, and to be honest it's a really exciting feeling.

Till next time!

Living Among Boxes

Remember when building a fort was fun? When covering your floor with boxes and draping a sheet over it stressed your parents out because every time they walked they banged their foot on a box or had to strategically move around your so-called "fortress" just so they wouldn't knock it down. You seriously couldn't figure out why they were so annoyed. Well....I get it! I know what you wondering, "Did it seriously take me 25 years to figure out why?" Give me a minute to explain this epiphany. I promise you will be in tears when I am done. Well not in tears, but you're interested now, right? OK so here it goes...

The weekend before thanksgiving was our "lets go through our stuff" weekend, where we packed boxes among boxes of things we would store, sell, or just plain throw away. We had so many piles of these three categories I swear I felt like I was training to join the circus with all the acrobatic movements I was doing to get around our tiny little condo. But it wasn't the piles of boxes that annoyed me or the fact that I think I might have stubbed my toes at least 12 times, it was the realization that boxes meant both the end and the beginning of a stage in life. After taking down the last frames off the walls, tears starting streaming down my face. I thought to myself, "Why in the world do I care so much about these belongings?" More than half of them were stored in a drawer or closet somewhere, and to be really honest, I have already forgotten half the stuff we have recently stored.

So why was I so sad? Well I was sad because I realized I won't get to look at my awesome possessions every day. Nope that's not it! I mean I know I have awesome stuff, but I really didn't care if my walls were bare. Maybe it's because I bought all these possessions with my hard-earned money. Nope, that still wasn't it. Then it hit me like a pile of bricks (or in this case like a pile of boxes) and I realized I wasn't actually sad, I was annoyed. I was annoyed because I am leaving every comfort I know and enjoy, and the thought of that is terrifying and also (I hate to admit it) extremely shallow. I was angry at myself for being so sad that I was boxing and selling my possessions. Seriously why do I need three hand-painted gator plates that I use only during tailgating season and then they just sit on top of my fridge collecting dust the rest of the year? Are my friends really that fancy that they need hand-painted plates to eat off of? Well I can assure you I am not that fancy, and well come to think of it, neither are my friends. That's why we are friends :)

By no means am I trying to sound enlightened. I know it's going to suck not having a blow dryer or my awesome Tempurpedic pillow while in Guyana, and I can guarantee when I come back I will be yearning for these things I once boxed up. The point is that it is really hard to let go of physical things, even though we all know money doesn't buy happiness.

But now I think I understand why my parents were annoyed at my fortress building, well at least I think I do. Other than it really is annoying to have to live among boxes and stub your toes over and over again; whether you are moving in with someone for the first time, moving down the street, to another state or country you lose a bit of your treasured comfort, and that's hard to swallow. I am still dealing with this loss and will probably deal with it for awhile, especially after the first time I have to hand-wash my own clothes...Oh jeez what am I getting myself into. But I really am happy that I get to challenge myself in a way I never imagined.

Anyway the weekend was difficult, but nothing a good meal and martini and some light-hearted conversation with "Nate the Great" doesn't make better.

Till next time.

And So It Begins...

On February 15, 2011 Nate & I will be leaving for Guyana, which is located in South America, and will be spending 27 months serving as Peace Corps volunteers in the areas of health and education. We thought it would be a good idea to document our experiences for those who want to follow us on our travels, those who are considering applying for the Peace Corps and those that get accepted and are in desperate need of finding information about the country they will soon be traveling to, if it wasn't for others blogs I don't think I would have ever been able to finalize a packing list, which I will share later.

I am thrilled to be writing my first-ever blog post. Can you believe in my 25 yrs of life I have never had a blog to document the incredibleness that is me! ~(can you sense the sarcasm) I tried to convince Nate to let me name our blog the "Incredible adventures of Ilana in Guyana (with Nate)," but for some reason he wasn't too keen on that idea. Instead, we decided to name it "It's Always Sunny in Guyana," yes just like the show, except we only have 2 people in our gang as opposed to the 5 in the show. Which means, we are still auditioning for three other parts for anyone who wants to disrupt their life and move to Guyana with us. Come on...you know you wanna ;)

OK, so the real reason for this post is to give you some information about our soon to be new home and jobs. I am sure you are wondering where is Guyana? Well, I am glad you asked. On the right-hand side of this post is a map that shows you the location of Guyana. Guyana is a tropical country on the northern shoulder of South America. It is bordered by Venezuela, Brazil, Suriname, and the Atlantic Ocean and has a population of approximately 760,000, largely confined to a narrow coastal strip. It is the combined size of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Guyana is the poorest country in South America, and is mainly composed of people of African and East Indian descent, and people of Portuguese, Chinese, Amerindian, and mixed descent. Luckily, the language they speak is English, however they speak an English-based Creole and in some parts of the country they speak a Portuguese-based Creole due to their close proximity to Brazil.

So...what are we doing, exactly? Well, we don't know for sure, but the Peace Corps has given us some good ideas and direction of what our main responsibilities will be. As a “Community Health Educator,” I will be working alongside locally trained community health workers to help provide basic health education in rural and/or urban communities, public health services, and assist government health care workers and NGO’s to design, develop, and implement a program response to the HIV/AIDS situation in Guyana. Guyana has the highest HIV rate in the western hemisphere, second only to Haiti.

Nate will be working as a “Community Education Promoter” and his primary goals will be to improve the skills of school-aged populations in reading, literacy and life skills, train teachers in creative approaches and strengthen community alliances through parent-teacher collaborations. Pretty much the same thing he does now in Alachua County. So that worked out nicely. As you can see from our descriptions these are very broad goals and will encompass a variety of tasks that will more than likely change on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Now that we have an idea of what we will be doing and when we will be leaving, we are working on trying to get all of our "ducks in row" (a.k.a. sell all of our stuff) before we begin the next two months of spending time with family and friends. So if you want to see us, here is our timeline. We are in Gainesville until the glorious day of Dec. 19th, my BD, and then will be traveling to Melbourne Fl, to spend a week with Nate's parents. On Dec. 27th we fly to Puerto Rico where we will stay with my parents until we leave for our "staging event," on Feb. 15th. Flights to Puerto Rico are cheap and you have a place to stay if you come. So book now!

Well, I hope you have enjoyed my first-ever post. I cannot express how excited I am to be starting the experience of a life-time with Nate by my side (he's pretty cool). I am scared and really nervous, but I think that's normal.

This weekend we will begin our packing extravaganza and try to consolidate our lives in 8 boxes and 4 suitcases....

Till next time.