Everyman's Harbor

This has been an unprecedented week. I am sitting in my second coffee shop of the week on my fifth day off in a row (yay colds!). Don't worry, I'm not spreading germs by coughing on anyone and I'm going back to work tomorrow. Thankfully, the break has provided extra time to write, especially since I fully intended to struggle posting regularly (which is still a definite possibility). At the beginning, though, it is nice to maintain some momentum. Alright, day one... Flying into Athens and setting my feet on European soil for the first time was surreal. Also, I was very sleep deprived. We arrived in the morning, met up with our group, and rode the subway into the city center. There I was first introduced to salad (a.k.a. Greek salad), and my favorite thing of all time... fresh, wonderful, Greek feta! (Ten days and five pounds later I guess you can say I was a feta expert!) After lunch, we hiked to the top of the Acropolis (the giant, flat-topped hill on which the P...

The way I ended up in Greece for ten days is pretty much a miracle. It began two years earlier in the summer of 2016 when I was visiting my dad in Vietnam.  For several years, my dad had been traveling back and forth to Southeast Asia, having loved that part of the world since the Vietnam War era that dominated his early childhood. By the middle of 2016 he had been living there teaching English for about a year. That summer I was between jobs, so I eagerly took the opportunity to do one of my favorite things (i.e. travel) and see my dad.  It was a full trip. My dad was on break from teaching, so we traveled from almost the top of Vietnam to the bottom and back again, with a slight foray into Cambodia.  The pertinent part to this story though, is a tour we took while on an island in the south. It was a snorkeling excursion. (Aside: snorkeling is totally amazing and you should definitely do it if you ever have the chance!). On the boat with a hundred or mor...

Who would have thought that the better part of a year after my week long trip to Greece to work with refugees, I would still not have published a single public word about it? Yet, here we are. In some ways blogging about it now seems much less pertinent. After all, how well could I possibly remember details from events that happened more than eight months ago. Nevertheless, I truly feel that these stories are worth sharing, not only because of how they impacted me, but because they still illustrate the plight of thousands of individuals in our troubled world. My plan at this point is to recount the events of each of the ten days I was in Greece, and then delve into some of the sweet stories of people I met. For all I know, the posts that follow will be nothing like that, but it can't hurt to have some sort of framework, however malleable. So I invite you to join me in the following stories. I promise they will engage your heart, your compassion and your spirit if you let them...