From the Desk of Cara at A.C.C.

Yes, I'm writing from A.C.C. It's been a slow day today so, yea-ya!!

So, today is my last day at work. Am I excited? You betcha! But it's kind of a bitter sweet leaving. I'm not much of an "office" person, nor do I like to talk on the phone all day. My throat gets tired of talking. And why do you have to dress up at a call center? You're just talking on the phone!

But this also marks the very nearness of my time in New Zealand ending.

I don't wanna go back to America. I miss it terribly, but there's so much I'm involved with in New Zealand, and so many new friends that I've really connected with, and such an awesome church that I am so involved in, and it's so beautiful and sunny and green and yeah. But I miss my friends at home. And I miss my family. And I miss people from my church at home. And I miss lots of things. But it's going to be so different when I go home. Living in another country always means that you'll go through some kind of culture shock when you return home. Not looking forward to that.

These past few weeks we've really been hanging out with people constantly and it just makes it harder to go. And some people I'm going to really miss...not sure how I will cope..some very dear friends that I won't be seeing anymore. Can I convince everyone to get video skype?


When I go home, my plan is to save up for coming back to New Zealand in January, and I really mean to. But I have bills at home to pay, debts to pay off, an art career to fully begin. And life without New Zealand is no life at all, right.

I'm not looking forward to being bombarded with questions about how my experience was in New Zealand. How can I sum it up? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was amazing! God has grown me soooooo much. Will I seem different to others at home?

Because of the whole culture shock thing, I probably won't see most people until June. It'll give me some time to re-adjust to America. The first two weeks of May we'll be staying in South Carolina and visiting my brother and sister-in-law and my little nephew whom I haven't seen yet. After that we'll go back to Cleveland and meet up with some friends from New Zealand that have been travelling in a RV around America. Fun times. Then, I'll be over my shock and jet lag and can talk to everyone more normal-like.


Tiana and I moved all of our furniture out of our flat last night! We have such amazing friends who are so willing. We had to drop stuff off at three different houses and we began at 8:15pm, so it was fun. But it took us till about 10:30pm so that's not so bad. Our Life group leaders are going to throw a Goodbye Barbecue for us May 1st, so I guess we're staying until May 3rd. Haha I'll take it! It's so sad how empty our flat is, but it's funny because we didn't have a ton of stuff. Today after work, we're going to take the bus down to the Korean restaurant and have an early dinner (cause last night we didn't plan dinner and ended up having canned cream rice) and then we're going to go to the Warehouse and get a few cleaning materials, and go home and get to it. Hopefully we can clean most of the flat today and only have a little bit of the bathroom to worry about tomorrow.

Tomorrow marks the first day of the V8 races. I'm so excited. Me and Tiana have tickets!!! We got them discounted too. I'm not a huge fan of car races, but I saw the movie Cars, and I know they go fast. I played the video games. I'm heaps excited!!!! They built the whole racecourse circuit right near where we live. Our church is on the inside of the track, so we're serving the community and running a cafe. Today was the big Powhiti (Welcome) with the Maori King and there was some cancellations of the caterers last night so I know people at church were a little stressed. How do you cancel on the Maori King? This is like huge! The prime minister is supposed to be there too as well, to usher in the first of many V8 races in Hamilton for the years to come. NZ is definitely different from America. I'm so excited to help on Sat and Sun and just be real servants. God has opened up a tremendous opportunity!