Christmas with Candy

Seven other volunteers and I spent Christmas in Nepalgunj at a sweet little hotel called Traveller’s Village. For the past several weeks, Candy, its loquacious and amusing owner, had been pulling together ingredients for a Christmas feast. She didn't disappoint. We dined on roast chicken, stuffing and gravy, green beans with almonds, mashed potatoes, orange juice sweet potatoes, baked macaroni and cheese, warm bread and butter, and, to top it all off, hot apple pie a la mode. All throughout our eating and chatting, Candy shouted orders at her kitchen staff to refill the serving plates and at us to eat more off of ours. As expected, in the end we fell into contented food comas. If you ever happen to be in Nepalgunj and find yourself pining for some good American home cooking, Candy is your girl.

The other festivities included gift giving, spirits, singing, games, and relaxing, but all were far from conventional. We exchanged presents white elephant-style, with gifts including pickled mangos, freeze-dried scrambled eggs, and a baby doll. With no eggnog to be had for several thousand miles, we resorted to sweet wine and apple vodka-Sprite cocktails for Christmas cheer. A hilarious, five-hour game of Trivial Pursuit (1980s version) was sped to an early conclusion by just asking each other questions until one answered correctly. Holiday music was abundant, but for me the more memorable moments were the intense Eminem rap battles and passionate John Mayer sing-alongs. We ended the evening by kicking back and trading off giving massages. Even though there was no snow, stockings, tree, gingerbread, Santa, or any of the many other things that make up my typical Christmas back in the states, our celebration was one not soon to be forgotten.

The Lion King was on!

Plus, on the ride back to Dang, we saw an elephant!

A belated happy Hanukah, merry Christmas, and happy New Year to you all!

Sick

After three and a half months of feeling invincible to the smoke, dust, food, water, and other things that have plagued the health of other volunteers, my time for illness has come. It started with some chills and weakness, followed by a stomachache, extreme gas, and some runs. Normally I’d be a bit more self-conscious about sharing that information, but everybody here seems to know, so why shouldn’t you.

It’s hard to say exactly where it came from—it could have been the flies that hang around my toothbrush, or the strange preserved radish dish I keep getting served, or that every day I see countless sick patients in the health center, or that for the last few days I’d been handling manure right before eating breakfast with my hands (don’t worry, I wash them very well with soap). My Nepali family and friends have their own theories: that I got it from doing work in the chilly mornings; that I carried too heavy a load of laundry; or that I bathed in the stream.

Nepalis have an interesting understanding of health: certain foods and drinks are considered hot and should not be consumed when one is feeling very hot; the same goes for the cold. Often these beliefs coincide with biomedicine. My family members have encouraged me to drink hot water, not to eat spicy or sour foods, to keep warm, and to get lots of rest—all advice any American would agree with. Other times there’s a serious disconnect. It’s hard to explain to those with a different mindset of disease (let alone in another language) why tea and milk are not good for an upset stomach, or why taking medicine to stop diarrhea is not a recommended treatment.

Thankfully, all Peace Corps Volunteers are equipped with a well-stocked medical kit, so I’m free to self-medicate—but only much as my concerned family lets me. As a result, I’m currently treating this bug with pepto bismol, antacid, and a pouch of medicinal herbs tied to my stomach.

Food Security for Dummies

Having spoken with some others in my group, I consider myself very lucky to be as busy as I’ve been. While my counterpart (a staff nurse) has little time for the sort of community outreach my job is supposed to entail, I’ve become friendly with a number of people very active in the community, including teachers, community health workers, doctors, and farmers. When I don’t have anywhere else to go, I always have my office, where I can shadow the doctors, talk with patients, and just hang out. But there’s still a lot of down time.

One day I was bored and decided I should start my own kitchen garden. This sounds very quaint, but making your home garden the Peace Corps way takes something like a hundred (wo)man-hours of labor. Feel free to skip the next section if homestead food production doesn’t tickle your fancy.

How to Make Your Own Kitchen Garden (And Other Time-Consuming Projects for the Home)

First you need compost, which requires an entire cubic meter of green and dead leaves (note: leaf piles, and even rakes, are not a thing here), so this means going to the forest to gather ten sacks of leaves. Break all those leaves up into little pieces to aid in the decomposition process. Then you need twenty liters of manure—in contrast, this is rather easy to come by. After mixing up the green leaves, dead leaves, manure, and 40 liters of water and assembling the mess into a giant leaf cube, you can let it sit for a few weeks.

Now you need seeds! A 45-minute, very very cramped bus ride takes you to the nearest city. You find most of your seeds without a hitch, but can’t seem to locate potato seeds anywhere (note: you’ve been parading around like you know a lot about agriculture, but really you’re a health volunteer. You don’t yet know that potato seeds are really just potatoes that have sprouted). Eventually a young man takes pity on you and brings you to a potato salesman, who sells you five kilos of potatoes when really you only need two. You take another cramped bus back to your home.

You could plant those seeds now, but a lot of them won’t sprout or go well if you don’t develop them in a nursery first. You clear a small area and to fill your polybags with soil and compost, placing two seeds in each. Then you construct a mini green house out of bamboo and plastic tarp. Water daily and protect from the elements, and you’ll have some sprouts growing within a few weeks.

Back to the garden. After clearing a 5x5 meter area, you have to build berms (embankments) all around to slow the water and dig swales (channels) on all sides for rainwater collection, with holes at the corners. Ideally you should plant some perennials in the berms (to prevent erosion and provide medicinal or additional edible plants), but you haven’t been able to locate any aloe, sweet potato, or papaya saplings thus far. To keep the chickens out, you construct a sort of fence out of sticks.

Now that you’ve protected your garden, you can dig your bed for planting. After you dig your bed, dig it again—this time twice as deep, so your plants can really stretch their roots. Add your compost, throw in some ash and charcoal, and fill it up. Do all this again for the second and third beds.

Finally, you can plant. Instead of going in a line, you do this in a triangular manner (to maximize space) and, taking advantage of the mutualistic relationships between different certain crops, plant two or three crops per bed. For example: corn (a stalk and heavy feeder), potatoes (a root and a light feeder), and soybeans (a climber and a heavy giver). The nutritional and space requirements of these plants allow for close spacing without depleting the soil.

Congratulations! You’ve just completed the ultimate kitchen garden, with all the boons organic fertilizer, nursery development, and permaculture have to offer. You’re where I hope to be in a month.

Compost pile (a bit smaller than it should be, but I got lazy)

The beginnings of a permagarden

If the above reads like a complaint, I can assure you that I wouldn’t be doing this if I weren’t enjoying it, and if it weren’t useful. Initially, I had intended to wait a little while before developing a garden at home. A conversation with the agricultural veterinarian, however, accelerated my plans. “You want to teach people new agricultural techniques, like a kitchen garden?” he said (in Nepali). “Then you should build a kitchen garden at your house! And then everyone from the community will see your garden, and see your results, and will want you to teach them how to do the same thing in their homes.” I almost hugged him.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to be successful at this job. Our food security project has a clear framework and we’ve received all sorts of language, cultural, and technical training to aid us in promoting changes in behavior that will improve agriculture and health. But in practice, as an outsider who barely speaks the language, who knows next to nothing about the community, things are a lot hazier.

There are a lot of ways I could try to be of assistance. One is to look at the problems in the community, devise a solution, and convince people it will work. Sometimes this is tempting, and in certain cases it might even work, but this not what Peace Corps wants us doing.

Another is to meet people, question them about their problems, and ask how I can help. When I did this at a farmer meeting, the farmers told me that their biggest problem was soil quality, and that they really want to start using more organic fertilizer. So I’m doing a compost training with them next month, which I’m really excited and nervous about. But this method also has its downsides. Often, when I ask how I can help, people say I should teach them English. When I ask why they want to learn English, they often don’t have a real reason.

I've found that a third and often more fun way is to do things that get people’s attention and make them wonder. This is what the agrovet was getting at. As another example, my first week here I started “tea” composting. Essentially, this entails filling a drum with kitchen scraps and manure (with small holes for aeration and a larger one for drainage), adding some water, and waiting a few weeks as your concoction decomposes. Then, every other day you add a liter of water and collect the “tea”, which after being diluted makes a nutritious snack for the plants. My family had previously been discarding kitchen scraps around the garden, which was an eyesore and seemed like a waste. They thought it more than a little strange when I brought home a brand new drum and proceeded to poke a bunch of holes in it, but after I explained the method to the madness, they jumped on board. Now my host mom dumps all her kitchen scraps in the bin.

Word about my odd behavior has also been getting around the community. People sometimes come to my house just to look at the compost tea drum and uncompleted permagarden. Doing things that Nepalis find odd makes for both a great icebreaker and a teaching opportunity (e.g. Nepali man: what the heck are you doing with that thing? Me: it’s a composting technique that will improve the soil quality and increase agricultural production). Yeah, conversations like that are how I get my kicks these days.

The hardest question people ask me (and which I get on a daily basis) is what I’m doing here. I usually say that I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer working on a food security project, and that my job is to give agricultural and health technical assistance. That job description is so vague, but it is rightfully so. The truth is I really don’t know what I should be doing here, at least not yet. I don’t know if a hand-washing lesson will be redundant for these children; if a beekeeping training will be relevant to these farmers; if an HIV/AIDS program will be over the heads of these mothers.

So for the moment, I’m a trainee again, and I feel like a dummy. I’m learning countless new things every day: how to ride the public bus; in which season the mangoes ripen; who has an alcohol problem; who are the most respected members in the community; what services exist for victims of domestic violence; and, most importantly, which shop has the best tea.

What Next?

During our first three months at site, we’re encouraged to focus on integrating into the community and on beginning to identify potential problems, resources, and solutions—in other words, to gain an understanding of our community and our place in it. In practice, this means attending local meetings, visiting important community institutions and events, and just making our existence and intentions known.

We arrived at our sites on Friday afternoon, so Saturday was a day off. I spent the day studying Nepali, doing laundry, wandering around the community, and becoming better acquainted with my family. The next morning, after breakfast, I walked to the health center for my first day of work. Following a brief introduction to the staff, I mostly sat around studying Nepali. My only real “work” that day was to help determine if the center’s HIV/AIDS blood test was suitable for a first detection—a task for which I am definitely unqualified, but, being best able to understand the English directions, fell to me.

The health center, which is between a hospital and a health post in terms of size and services, serves a number of communities in the area. About twenty people are on staff, including medical assistants, nurses, a counselor, a midwife, a medical student, a lab technician, and a gardener. It offers a free clinic, outpatient services, an emergency department, family planning, HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, psychological assessment and counseling, prenatal and antenatal care, a pharmacy, and basic laboratory testing. But some things are definitely in need of improvement. The center doesn’t have enough storage space for its equipment. The autoclave and x-ray machine are currently broken, and there is no running water at the moment. They also want to expand their programming and outreach.

In the afternoon, I went with a medical assistant to the farmer’s market, not realizing that today was the inaugural ceremony. A large crowd gathered around a tent as the master of ceremonies called representatives from farmers groups, NGOs, and the local government up to sit near the guests of honor. When the medical assistant was called, he pulled me up with him. After a few speeches, tikaa, some songs and dance, and more speeches, the MC invited me to say a few words. I’d been warned that this sort of thing might happen from time to time, but on my first day? I was pretty unprepared, but seeing it as a great opportunity to tell the community of my presence, consented. Before around 500 people, as well as a news camera, I introduced myself and explained the sort of work I hope to do (all in Nepali). At least I hope that’s what I said—I immediately blacked the whole thing out. My coworkers assure me that it was pretty good for my first time.

The rest of my first week, I met with a WHO representative, the local agricultural veterinarian, a women’s counselor, the police, the postman, and several teachers; visited the hospital’s vegetable garden, an agricultural NGO, a farmer’s cooperative, the local public and boarding schools, and the police station; made two maps with the community; and began composting at my home. Still, I have considerably more free time than I did during training. Here’s what my new schedule looks like:

6:30  Wake up, eat roti with hot milk

6:30-10:00  Exercise, study Nepali, spend time with family, make plan for da

10:00-10:15  Eat breakfast and leave for office

10:30-3:00  Spend time in health center, visit someone or someone related to my work, or just wander around3:30-6:30  Play volleyball, write up notes from day, eat snacks and spend time with my family, call friends

6:30-6:45  Eat dinner

6:45-8:00  Watch Hindi soaps with the family, and when that gets old go to my room and read or watch a movie

10:00  Sleep

Planning on buying an internet modem soon so I can stay in touch a little better and keep this update. Til then, Namaste.

Dang! This Is Great

Dang (which is actually pronounced “dong”) lies toward the south of the second most western region of Nepal. In stark contrast to the endless hills of our PST site, my new community sits in a very flat valley between two mountain ranges. The climate is temperate at the moment, but it apparently gets very hot in the summer. I live with my host mother (her husband died from lung cancer) and an older, unmarried sister. I have four other sisters (two of whom live in America) and an older brother (whose family lives nearby). The health center’s ambulance driver lives immediately next door with his wife and two sons. There are also a number of young women who help with the housework. My new family was hesitant to talk to me the first few days, but after teaching each other some Nepali and English, watching TV, singing Nepali and English songs, and just joking around, they’re warming up to me.

I live in a large, high ceilinged room on the ground floor. The room has a large bed, shelves, wall hooks, and carpeting. The kitchen is in a separate building next to the house; my family cooks with gas (as opposed to the wood stove) and eats meals at a table (instead of on the floor). Several small gardens surround the house, as well as a number of rice/wheat paddies in the backyard. There are mango, guava, and lemon trees abounding, with gourd and pumpkin vines weaving their way through their branches. Our family has a number of goats, chickens, cows, and water buffalo, as well as a kitten. We fetch our water from a well in the backyard, or from a stream a mere stone’s throw away. In terms of amenities, it’s definitely an upgrade from my last home.

The location of my new house couldn’t be better. Just down the road is a large community of Tharus, a disadvantaged ethnic group with it’s own distinct language and culture. Two schools (one private, one public) are within a half hour on foot. The primary health center is just a five-minute walk from my home (many other volunteers are several kilometers from their offices). There are a number of small shops a short distance away, and just beyond the health center is a farmer’s market (haatbazaar). A half hour bus ride brings me to Tulsipur, the largest city in Dang.

Mahj-Gone

Our departure from Mahjgaun, where we lived, learned, and loved for nearly three months, was a sad moment for all. On our final afternoon, our cluster went for tea and snacks at each of our houses. My host mother had left for her maiti (parents’ house) that morning, and we were both in tears as she got in the bus. My sister and grandmother were the next victims, crying the next morning as they gave me tikaa and maalaas (garlands). Like many cultures, gifts are an important expression of gratitude in Nepal. I had given my family a new kettle, an herbal tea mix, a photo album, and handwarmers from the states. My mother gave me a scarf (she always worries about me being cold), and my sister gave me her necklace. My host father, who had stayed up the entire previous night sitting vigil in honor of his dead father, choked back tears as he led me up the hill, making me promise that I would call and come again. My language teacher’s family also gave me maalaa and a gift: a leather-bound journal with a ridiculous gel pen. All three of them, as well as my language teacher, wept as our cluster headed up the road to Chautara. For full disclosure, I should mention that I was crying for all these goodbyes.

It took us two days to get to Nepalgunj—thankfully, we had a very nice bus with plenty of legroom. The third biggest city in Nepal, Nepalgunj lies just a few kilometers from the Indian border. The Lonely Planet guidebook describes it as a “gritty border town” that “many travelers consider a necessary evil on the way to better things.” While our first impressions were mixed, Nepal 200 is now pretty content with Nepal-“grunge” being our meet-up spot.

The next morning we met our counterparts, all of whom are government employees working in either the agriculture or health sector. Each volunteer lives in his/her own Village Development Community (VDC), which is comparable to a small county. For example, I live in the district of Dang (out of 75 districts in Nepal), in the VDC of Shreegaun (out of 39 VDCs in Dang), and in ward 2 (of 9 wards in Shreegaun). My counterpart was supposed to be a medical officer, but the primary health center in Shreegaun currently lacks a doctor, so I’m working with the staff nurse for the now.

Many of the counterpart conference’s sessions were review for us, but must have been very useful for our counterparts, who previously knew little about Peace Corps, our project’s framework, or working with American grassroots organizers. The conference spanned two full days from 8-5, and definitely wore on everyone’s patience. One volunteer’s counterpart up and left during the second day—the volunteer was quickly reassigned to another counterpart in another VDC.

The evening of the second day, a few of us decided to go to Candy’s, a favorite hotel and restaurant for expats and development workers. I hopped on a rickshaw with two others and we wound our way through the hectic streets of Nepalgunj. On the way we passed a rickshaw carrying three Nepali transvestites. Traveling pretty far into the outskirts of the city, we finally spotted a dimly lit sign for the restaurant. Our group took up most of the tables in the quaint upstairs room. After a long wait, we dined on salad, bacon cheeseburgers, French fries, real ketchup, and carrot cake—the first truly American food we’d had in three months. Afterwards, we met Candy herself. A Minnesotan expat who had married a Nepali, she’s lived in Nepal for almost three decades. Given her delicious food and Midwestern hospitality, we’re set on spending Christmas there.

At 6:30 the next morning, we said our sleepy and teary goodbyes to one another. Many of us have become very close friends over the past three months, some seeing each other every day in our clusters. The next time Nepal 200 will be together as a group is at our In-Service Training in mid-February. Then three other volunteers and I loaded all our belongings onto a public bus and set out for our new home, Dang, with our counterparts.

Culmination, Appreciation, Anticipation

Everyone passed the Language Proficiency Exam (some with flying colors), so all 24 members of Nepal 200 were sworn in together. At 6am on Sunday, November 24, we headed for Chautara to board the bus to Kabre. On our walk, we spotted a few rhesus macaques in the trees above, and then more than a dozen moving through the empty rice patties. A two-hour drive brought us to our retreat, a very peaceful place between Chautara and Kathmandu. The following morning, we assembled for our Swearing-In Ceremony. Most of us donned the traditional dress of Nepal: the males in daura surwals; the females in saris. One member of each host family was invited, along with representatives from USAID, Save the Children, and other organizations working on food security in Nepal. A few of us (including me) sang a traditional Nepali folk song, and two volunteers gave a speech entirely in Nepali. The guests of honor, Peace Corps Nepal Country Director Andrea Wojnar-Diagne, former Nepal PCV Mike McGill, and United States Amassador Peter Bodde, spoke a few words of encouragement to prepare us for service. After uttering an oath, we officially became volunteers. Following countless photos with friends, family, and staff, we ate what I considered to be a pretty good lunch but that many Nepalis later dismissed as not very tasty. The guests and staff gradually departed, leaving a sole staff member and the 24 of us behind. I think I needn’t go into detail about the rest.

Thursday, November 28 was another special day. In America, you all celebrated Thanksgiving, and some of you observed the first night of Hanukah. Since we only have two half-Jews in our whole group, the newly minted volunteers of Nepal 200 forwent the latter but endeavored to pull off our own Thanksgiving feast. In the morning, our cluster joined with another to cook a continental American breakfast, complete with French toast, eggs, hash browns, applesauce, and fruit salad. We also managed to scrape together some honey, jam, peanut butter, and maple syrup. Everything tasted amazing.

While we were devouring our breakfast, a number of other volunteers were already at the training center preparing the midday meal. A little over an hour before our scheduled eating time, I arrived to find friends running around setting tables, cooking various dishes, arranging platters, and washing dishes. One by one, soda, devilled eggs, hummus, naan, cornbread, stuffing, mashed potatoes, persimmon sauce (our substitute for cranberries), and green bean casserole made their way to the table. One of the clusters had made place cards each with a unique spirit animal for each volunteer, so while we waited around for the chickens (there are no turkeys in Nepal, and few Nepalis even know what a turkey is) to arrive from a nearby hotel, we attempted to guess the corresponding human identities of animals such as the grouper, ostrich, and beaver. I was ascribed the beagle, for being “all-American”, “excitable”, and someone everyone’s mom would like. At last the chickens arrived and the banquet began. For the second time in the day, I marveled at our ability to cook delicious American food in a foreign setting, with such limited ingredients and facilities. The dessert of apple cinnamon momos, sweet potato pie, and puppy chow was equally tasty. At the end of the feast, our cluster passed around an envelope requesting that everyone contribute to fund the installation of an improved cookstove at the old folks home we visited for our LCF’s birthday. We raised more than enough.

The entire village of Mahjgaun also celebrated and feasted on Thanksgiving, but not because of the holiday—we had a wedding! On my way home on Thanksgiving eve I chanced upon a huge crowd eating and chatting at a neighbor’s house. I was quickly ushered into the food line and a plate was shoved in my hands. Hundreds came to enjoy the food and offer pujaa to the bride, a nineteen-year old girl from the community. The next day, after our American breakfast, a few of us headed down the hill to watch the wedding itself. In the courtyard between two houses, a space of a few square meters had been roped off, with raw rice, sel roti, and various other offerings in the center. Throughout much of the ceremony, an old man I’d never met put his arm around me, making me promise that I would invite him to my wedding and instructing me to dance at the least appropriate times. The groom arrived by bus, preceded by a marching band playing a triumphant but discordant and overlong ballad. The groom, an unsmiling youth in a suit and topi who can’t have been much older than me, made his way through the throng to a plastic lawn chair in the courtyard. Soon the bride appeared decked out in a red sari, jeweled veil, and ornamented grass necklace. She circled the courtyard and arrived beside the groom, whom she circled three times, all the while pouring water onto the ground from a golden pitcher. Then the groom rose from his chair and accepted the grass necklace from her. In return, he lifted her veil and placed a necklace on her. The two exchanged rings and then stood for a long while as a few women distributed red colored rice to the onlookers. At last, everyone threw the rice at them. The ceremony over, the bride returned to the house and the groom retook his seat to receive offerings from various relatives. I left at this point in order to go to the Thanksgiving feast.

I was a bit surprised at the brevity, informality, and disorder of the ceremony, especially given the importance of weddings in Nepal. Weddings are among the most significant life events for Nepalis, along with birth, coming of age, and death. Parents once prearranged all weddings, but “love marriages” (which involve parental consent) and elopements (which don’t) are becoming increasingly popular. People typically marry from within the same caste; otherwise, their children are demoted to the lower-status caste. Because the bride’s family must pay a dowry, daughters are sometimes viewed as a financial burden. Girls may also be seen as temporary family members, typically moving into their in-laws house or village after marrying. In some castes, women must have their nose pierced, and men their ears pierced, before marrying. In the past, if a wife did not provide a son within the first ten years of a marriage, the man could legally take a second wife.

Marriage is often a hot topic with the locals—in the past 3 days alone I have been asked more than ten times if I am married and if I will marry a Nepali woman. I’m still looking for a good response to this question: usually I just say “maybe, we’ll see” or “I’m waiting to meet a good woman,” but these often prolong the conversation. Other times I lie and say I have several wives. Sometimes this actually works pretty well.

The following day, in the spirit of cultural sharing and thanks giving, we were asked to cook a meal for our homestay families. After eating breakfast, I headed into Chautara with my host father to buy ingredients (very kindly paid for by the Peace Corps). On my evening menu was rice, beans, roti, western scrambled eggs, and chicken fajitas—a sort of amalgam of American, Mexican, and Nepali foods. To give you some sense of the price of food in Nepal, know that I bought all of the following for under $10 total: a half kilo of garlic; a kilo of onions; a kilo of tomatoes; a half kilo of mushrooms; two green bell peppers; a half kilo of beans; an eighth kilo of hot green peppers; an eighth kilo of hot red peppers; a bundle of cilantro; a kilo of flour; a liter of soybean oil; ten eggs; and a half kilo of chicken. I spent the next two and a half hours cooking with my host father and sister, trying to explain my idea for the meal. Gratefully, they were open to my plan—Nepalis can be pretty inflexible when it comes to food (even my family cooked daal bhaat just in case dinner turned out the be a disaster). But it didn’t, largely thanks to their help.

With only two days remaining of Pre-Service Training, a mixture of thoughts and emotions has been swirling in my head. Reflecting back on the past three months, I am amazed at how much I have absorbed. I now speak the language well enough to follow and participate in most basic conversations with Nepalis. I have a decent understanding of the culture; customs that once felt strange have become habit. I’ve learned a variety of tools for improving food security, from permagardening to vegetable preservation to building improved cookstoves. I’ve collaborated with Nepalis and other volunteers in organizing and holding several trainings.

At the same time, this is just the beginning. We arrived in Nepal as strangers, with different past experiences, attitudes, motivations, and skills. We were all in our own boats. Peace Corps tied us together and dropped us in the ocean, giving us the illusion of one large, shared journey, with many of the same experiences. We lost three along the way, but each was a reminder that we are in this together. But now the ropes are about to be cut, and we will once again be alone in the sea, searching for solid ground to build upon.

Sorry for the drawn-out metaphor—but a few friends here agree that it pretty accurately describes this experience. The days ahead will bring a new family, community, coworker, office, and job. There is everything to look forward to.