Bună, mă numesc Sammy!
This is the first time I’ll be heading out of the country on a GO team trip, and It’s only a few days away! Ahhhh! I’ve been a part of the Blackhawk high school community in both the Middleton and Fitchburg home groups, and last year got involved volunteering with servant team. I’ve followed along on this blog for a couple years now as the teams would head out, and am glad to finally be able to come along and be a small part of what’s happening there. I’m looking forward to everything God and our partners at Open Roads will have to teach us, and to spending time learning and living with such an amazing group of people. Now since we’re supposed to introduce ourselves, here are some more personal details:

I’m a recent graduate from my high school, graduating class of one. In case you couldn’t guess, I’ve been homeschooling up until now. My favorite things to study are math, science, and languages. I currently speak Spanish and some Portuguese. I’m hoping to pick up some Romanian while we’re overseas, but I’ve heard it can be pretty tough.

I also love playing soccer and futsal, which is the form of indoor soccer played all around the world. When I’m not out on the field or court, you can usually find me hanging around the nearest instrument. Guitar, piano and cajon are my favorites, and if I don’t have access to those I’m usually singing or beatboxing (read: making annoying noises with my mouth).

After all this is over (two days after we get back, actually), I’ll be heading out to Pasadena,
California to study at Caltech. I’m planning on studying physics or astrophysics while I’m there, and I’ll also be playing D3 soccer.

If you’ve gotten this far through my intro post, thank you! Here’s your secret message (don’t forget your decoder ring!):

B E S U R E T O D R I N K Y O U R O V A L T I N E

Ahhh *sips hot chocolate*. Now that we’ve had our little bit of Christmas in July, back to the final paragraph of so of this post.

As far as prayer requests, I know this trip usually ends up with several members of the team getting sick. It’s my hope (and I’m sure most of the others would echo this) that when we do get sick we can bounce back as quickly as possible. For a second request I’m going to go with something Jesse already mentioned: Keeping our thoughts on where we are and what we’re doing is sure to be hard at times with college coming so soon after the trip, but it’ll be very important that we keep focus and stay present with the campers and others. If you could keep these things in your thoughts and prayers it would very much appreciated. That’s all for now, hope you’ll be keeping up with us as we go!