Who I am

Short version:

I’m twenty-five, have a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and come from a tourist town on the shore of Lake Michigan. I lived and worked in Romania with the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC) until November 2008. Now I’m hanging out in my sister and brother-in-law’s basement in New Hampshire.  But my story is a whole lot longer than that.

Longer version:

My parents didn’t know they were having twins until a week before my brother and I were born, so they had to buy a new car. I grew up in a big house with a sister and three brothers, my parents, a bunch of cats, a dog, and a whole variety of different animals at different times.

I was home-schooled, lived with a science lab in the basement, no television, and thousands of books, but managed to be a well-adjusted social being in spite of all that.

I became a Christian around age seven mostly because I wanted to go to heaven if I died. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, after a series of tragic accidents in my town resulted in me hating God, that I realized that faith isn’t so focused on me. At that point I realized that God was calling me to him, and that a relationship doesn’t happen where there is only hate and mistrust from one side.

During college I worked as a camp counselor to inner city kids from North Philly, an English teacher to high school students in Eastern Europe, and in a glamour shop for dogs catering to people who didn’t think twice about paying hundreds of dollars for doggie bikinis, purfume, and carriers. I also spent a semester ’studying’ in Hungary (read: every weekend friends and I used our food allowance to travel all over Eastern and Central Europe). This interesting combination of experiences led to a few things: I began to study sociology and loved it, I never wanted to be rich, and I wanted to serve God however or wherever he might lead me.

I wasn’t too happy at first when he led me to Arkansas. After I had graduated from college, I had packed everything that would fit into my 1990 Lincoln Town Car and went back to work at camp in Pennsylvania. At the end of the summer, my car was dead, and God was loudly hinting that I should go to Arkansas to work for City Year (an AmeriCorps program). I wasn’t too happy about it but I went anyway.

After two months of sleeping on random floors and couches, having my car (a Saturn this time) die repeatedly and then be broken into, I finally had a roommate and an apartment. The roommate was great! The apartment wasn’t so great . . . but I survived. I spent the year as a literacy intervention tutor in one of Little Rock’s inner city elementary schools as well as co-starting a community involvement program for junior high students. At the end of my term in June, 2006, I sadly bid farewell to Arkansas and all of my friends there.

God was leading me to Romania, where I had dreamed of living since I was about thirteen. I received an internship through the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC) to learn and become involved in holistic Christian community development. I was there from September, 2006, until November, 2008. I lived in an old communist bloc apartment – like the majority of Romanians in Bucharest – rode public transportation, went to the market regularly, and volunteered with a crisis pregnancy center and a maternal center.

Now I’m living in my sister and brother-in-law’s basement in New Hampshire, acting as pseudo nanny to my almost-two-year-old nephew and newborn (March 5, 2009!) niece.  I play in a ragtag community orchestra, knit socks, am trying to find some friends who like climbing mountains, and drive a car that has a check-engine light that keeps coming on.

I have become passionate in becoming a follower of Jesus and not just a “Christian,” holistic Christian community development, justice, peace, love, human trafficking, living in inner cities, Romania, Romanian, Romanians, and mountain climbing, among other things.