Very little time

Sorry it's been almost a month since my last post. I have had very little time to blog since i've been back at school. Our interior design workload is back in full gear and i'm slowly getting back into the hang of things. Last semester was pretty easy with no studio courses. My weeks consisted of going to class, working on a few minor projects here and there, and enjoying time with friends. This semester however is the exact opposite. I'm in two studio courses and they are taking up the majority of my time. Don't get me wrong, i'm loving this semester (especially my residential class), I just have to get better at time management. So since i'm using this blog post as a procrastination method to the large project currently resting in front of me, I will quickly recap the happenings of my life over the last month and then get back to work.

The beginning of my year was kicked off with our Mission trip to Ethiopia. It was by far one of the most challenging trips i've ever taken, both physically and emotionally, but it was also one of the most rewarding. Our team got to work in 3 feeding clinics, a medical clinic, a school, and visit lots of different places over the course of our week. We spent time in Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, and Harar. Our days in Ethiopia were filled with hard work, laughter, a few tears, compassion, and the occasional traffic scare. Since I don't have time to recap my entire trip, nor can I due to safety concerns of those we worked with, I'll just share with you a couple of my favorite moments from the trip.

• The funniest moment was our little dance break in the middle of an Ethiopian mall. Trey, who was a little delirious at the time, started dancing first and then Jamison and Chris joined in as well. (Video can be seen here)
• The hardest moment of our trip was when a mother, at one of the feedings, came up to me asking for a can of milk for her child. Her son was two years old and severely malnourished. His skin was literally hanging off of his bones. His chest looked caved in. One of the workers gave her milk and then let her come with us to the clinic that afternoon. My heart has never broken so much. To think we live in this world where we take food for granted every day, and all this little boy needed to survive was proper nutrition. The ladies at the clinic said he had a 1% chance of living, but i'm still praying I will get an email in a few months that he is alive and doing well.
• The most rewarding part of our trip was to see how excited the M's got about the meals we are going to send. We had previously been told that the meals may not get a good response. But to hear how excited they were for them, and all the ways they could use them was truly amazing. After we ran the numbers, I believe we figured out that by sending 250,000 meals, each of the 4 or 5 teams can feed 200 people 5 days a week for an entire year! Isn't that amazing!!!

Once I got back from Ethiopia, I had to come straight back to school. I had missed the first week of class, so I had some catching up to do.

Since being back at school, I have dropped Astronomy (WAAYY to hard and time consuming to take on with design work), I have designed a master suite (now working on a kitchen), i've caught up with everyone here at school, and not had to stay in norton past 2am yet!

This weekend Cassie came to visit- so it was definitely nice getting to hang out and catch up with her!

This coming week is pretty packed with a project due, 2 tests, a design tradeshow, and a trip to the circus.

Well I think that about covers it- back to my project! Hopefully i'll be able to update again soon!