When I started Where in the World?, the COVID lockdown prevented me from accessing photos in storage that would have illustrated my posts. Now the lockdown has eased somewhat, and I can get to those albums. In the meantime, many of you have sent feedback sharing your own overseas experiences and/or support for these excerpts …

Let’s start with an excerpt from my first journal, about a girl from small-town West Virginia who almost bit off more than she could chew. During my Junior year at West Virginia University, I felt a strong need to do something useful. A psych-soc major, I wanted real experience, not more lectures. And I wanted the challenge of trying this somewhere else in the world. I was president of the student YWCA at the time and asked the director, Harriet Shetler, to help me identify some summer programs with those opportunities. She came up with …