17% gone!

I just looked at the calendar and realized I have been gone from home for 3 weeks as of today! I will be gone a total of 18 weeks for the whole trip, so my total time abroad is already one-sixth gone! Wow.

I already feel very comfortable with my host family and we have enjoyed many laughs together. My host Oma (German word for Grandma I recently learned) is a really incredible person I learned. I respect her immensely and am really at awe of her and beyond her amazing life story that she told me last night, her day to day routine. She is in a wheelchair and has been for 20 years due to multiple sclerosis she told me. She is also blind in one eye and was born that way. She was a single mother from the time her son was 2 years old. She told me she used to play basketball and do dance performance in her wheelchair! I really didn't know how to respond when she told me all of this except, "Wow!" I am so inspired by her and look at her as a daily reminder to be strong and unafraid when I am anxious to leave the house because I am young and alone in a foreign country. We ended our conversation last night after she told me all of this by doing wheelies in her wheelchair! Still, all I can say is, "Wow!"

I also have the absolute cutest little kids living with me in my host family. Despite our language barrier, we communicate through smiles and laughter. Interacting with these little kids is a good reminder that it is easy to create friendship with anyone with enough smiles and perhaps gifts (I brought home packages of Haribo gummies for all 3 of the kids).

I have so much to say and I foresee much more laughter and many more smiles to share later!