#BloggingAbroad: Why?

Are you surprised to hear from me again so soon?! Get ready for even more, because I've decided to participate in the Blogging Abroad Blog Challenge! They're sending me two prompts per week, so I'll get to share more about Moldova and you'll get to learn more! Since 2016 is the year I move back to the US, it'll be fun to do a few weeks of posts about my life here before things get really crazy and I start potentially slacking (what?! like I would do that!). 
Our first prompt is: Why? Essentially, why am I here? This tends to come up a lot, and I tend to not usually have a very good answer. It feels like it's as big a question as: Why are we here? On this earth, even. I'll give something vague and just rely on the fact that Romanian is not my first language - oh, I don't know how to explain. 

Wearing traditional Moldovan clothing

A lot of things went into my decision to join the Peace Corps. I recently graduated from college in 2013, and had decided that academic year that I wanted to join (so that at our commencement, I got a shoutout from the president - when she was talking about our future plans, she mentioned that one of us was waiting for a Peace Corps assignment - oh hey, that's me!). 
One of my closest friends at home is very passionate about seemingly everything. He's always going to do something amazing, and he always tells me about it and I'm always excited for him. Some of these things, he really does, and some of them he just talks about. One of the latter was Peace Corps, but the summer before our senior year of college, he was really into the idea. I was not, but I listened to him talk to an RPCV that we had just met, and I decided I should figure out if I could be into it, too. Turns out I was, so I applied, and the October after I graduated, I got my invitation to Moldova. And that friend has supported me this whole time - I think of him as the reason I'm here.

That's us when I went home for a visit!

Though I guess it's more complicated than that, exactly. He didn't tell me to do it or even really suggest it to me. I just love watching him get excited about things and this was something that I could get a little excited about, too. I'm not saying I wanted to save the world, and I don't think I'm going to be in line for sainthood anytime soon or anything, but after I graduated (and before), I didn't know what to do. Or what I wanted to do. And if you don't know what you want to do, unless you won the lottery or have a lot of rich ancestors or something, you can't just do nothing. So I thought it'd be a better use of my time to see if I could help someone else. If it could be in another country and I could learn a new language, experience a new culture, and meet a bunch of cool, new people.. Even better. That seemed a lot more legitimate than adopting a cat and living in my mother's basement. (But let's at least consider the cat thing, right?) 
I've been in Moldova for 19 months, and most days I love it here. So I'm excited to join this blogging challenge to share a little bit of my life here with everyone! 

Making wine with my mayor and his brother!