If you don't know, I will be leaving Wednesday, August 10th for Iraq. I will be there until Halloween. I will be working with Christian Peacemaker Teams(CPT). The basic jist of CPT is violence reduction work. CPT Iraq specifically "works toward accompanying displaced persons home by living in conflicted border regions and documenting human rights violations against civilian populations." The quote is from CPT's website, http://www.cpt.org/. You can check out CPT Iraq's page here. This blog will hopefully be a way I can keep in touch with people and let people know what I'm doing.

Alot has been on my mind the past couple weeks as you can imagine. In addition to excitement, anticipation, etc, I have been stressed some about traveling by myself and fundraising but thankfully those feelings are gone, for now at least. It's finally hitting me how much I'm going to miss folks while I'm gone. I know eleven weeks isn't very long in the grand scheme of things but it's close to being the longest I've been outside of Oklahoma. As I type this though, I start feeling ridiculous that my biggest problem currently is missing my family/friends because I will be away for eleven weeks which is largely based on the privilege I recieve, not earn, due to the social location I find myself in i.e.: white, heterosexual male with a US passport. I would like to go into this deeper at some point but this post was supposed to be brief so I'm going to stop now. Feel free to comment or email me if you want.

Much love, Stefan