Hello, World!

As I make my first venture out into the world of blogging, I keep picturing one of my desk drawers back home, in which I have a stack of diaries given to me when I was little—the kind that, rather excitingly, had lock and key to safeguard all those deep secrets—and I distinctly remember the excitement of receiving one for a birthday or Christmas gift, the thrill of thinking ahead to all the secrets and stories I would have to fill its pages. But if you were to break open that rather dinky lock, you would find a common pattern in all of them: a few entries using up the first couple of pages, and then...nothing. I have never been good at journaling regularly, which is rather intimidating knowledge going into writing a blog.

Thank goodness for email, because often when I've wanted to remember something from years past, I go back into emails from that time and see what I wrote other people. When I studied in England, I realized that the mass emails I sent out were as much for my own benefit as they were for anyone else's. Not only did they help clarify my thoughts and experiences and joys and frustrations, but they provided something akin to a journal for me to return to later. Writing to other people has always been easier for me to keep up with than writing to myself, if for no other reason than that there's other people out there to keep me accountable!

So I was kind of glad when HOPE International, where I'll be interning this summer, recommended blogging to all its interns. For this summer, I'll be writing about my experiences at HOPE, and we'll see what happens after that. I'll write more about HOPE and my internship in later posts...I have training later this week, so there will be much to report. But for now, I just wanted to say hello, and thanks for reading:)