It's Happening!

Monday, December 12th we packed up everything that would fit in one car and started our journey back to the East coast for the holidays.  It was definitely hard to leave our family and friends in Utah but we are looking forward to spending the holidays with our Connecticut family & friends.  2,557 miles, 15 states and 5 days later we finally made it! (Thanks to our awesome cousins in Denver & DC for hosting us!)

We also finally received our placements!  After our orientation in Bogota we will relocate to Santa Ana on Isla Baru for our teaching positions.  It is a small town with a population of about 5,000 people and is about thirty kilometers outside of the colonial city of Cartagena de Indias.  Santa Ana is also the oldest WorldTeach placement site, and where the WT Colombia program began. We are very happy to finally have this placement and we are excited to learn more about our new home!

We Have a Departure Date!

We are excited to share our latest update! We have an official departure date of Wednesday, January 4th! We will travel with other WorldTeach Colombia volunteers from JFK to Bogotá, where we will stay for the first few weeks for orientation. Hopefully our next update will include our placement city and school! Thanks again to everyone who has made a donation-- we can't express how helpful you have been, or how grateful we are!

Welcome to our Blog!

First, thank you to all of our friends and family for believing we could do a trip like this. Most of you know we've been trying to do an international service trip for several years now and it is finally becoming a reality!  However, without all of your support and contributions this opportunity would not be possible for us.  So thank you again and again!

We plan to keep everyone updated as frequently as possible through this blog, so we hope you will continue to follow us during our adventure.  Our tentative departure is "early January" but we hope to have further updates between now and then regarding fundraising and our city, housing and school placements.  We're excited and looking forward to having more specific updates!

Thanks again!

 

Donation Info [updated 11/29/2011]:

The cost of our placement, training, air travel, insurance and field support for the year is $5,000.  We are trying to raise the entire volunteer commitment through extra work hours and fundraising. To make a donation, checks should be written out to us and can be sent to:

Micah and Stephanie Smart 

c/o Pat Lanesey

152 Baum Drive

Thomaston, CT 06787