One Down!

Our first week of classes is over and tomorrow is a free day.  Sleeping late sounds good and maybe a trip to Walmart or a mall for my Saturday agenda.  It has been an incredible week of making many new friends and gaining some vital information.  Today was probably the highlight.  For two hours we had our own personal spiritual retreat.  I thought this would be a very difficult thing to do but once I got started it was such a blessing.  You should try it sometime!  Start off just being quiet.  Then spend some time in gratitude, praise, and worship.  Read and meditate on some Scripture and see what God is saying to you.  I challenge you to do this on your own and see if you aren't blessed by the experience.  Today ended with our 1-mile run.  They want us to stay physically fit while we are here so they are encouraging exercise.  Our run today was to give us a baseline time.  We will do this again at the end and see if we can improve our time.  I confess that I basically walked the whole time but I completed it in 16 minutes and 43 seconds.  My goal was to walk it under 20 minutes so I'm a little proud of myself for accomplishing my goal.

Made it!

I arrived in Richmond on Monday around 3:00 and found my assigned quad.  It turns out that the three families sharing the quad with me were all at Phoenix so I feel like we are old friends already.  There are 9 children so it will be quite lively around our house.  Yesterday and today have been spent finding our way around and taking care of paperwork.  There are three books that I'm assigned to read.  This morning I finished one of them because it was short and easy to read.  The other two will take a little longer to finish. Walmart is close by so I have already made a Walmart run to get some things I forgot or found out that I needed.  We will start classes tomorrow so I'm enjoying the down time while I can.

Getting Started

Let me begin my blog by explaining its title.  The word “old” does not necessarily refer to age (though I have attained the senior discount status).  The “old” Sherrill has been living on a farm since 1979, married to a farmer and raising three children.  I learned to do many things during those years: pick vegetables to can and freeze, eat boiled peanuts, haul peanut trailers.  In 2006 the “old” Sherrill’s husband was killed in a truck wreck.  The past five years have been a process of learning how to live without my best friend and soul mate.  The time has now come to live again.  In just a few days I will begin a new adventure that will last for the next two years.  The first two months will be spent in training in Richmond, Virginia.  In early October I’ll be leaving to spend the remainder of my two years in Senegal, West Africa.  I will attempt to chronicle my adventures in this blog.  I don’t claim to be a great writer but I will do my best to keep all who are interested up to date with everything I experience over the next two years.