Whoa - first blog ever!

Alright, here goes nothing.

I will start off by just explaining that I titled my blog address "Jenny's new dawn" for a couple of reasons: for one, all the obvious ones like "jenny shaw" were taken, and two, for me this year on the road with Youth Encounter's team New Dawn is truly a new beginning for me. After spending all of my 25 years with a definitive plan for my life (school, college, accounting degree, accounting job, etc), with very little spontaneity involved, I finally quit my job at Deloitte and have embarked on a year traveling the country and the world with just a backpack full of clothes, my guitar, and 4 people I didn't start out knowing.

This is my "new dawn" if you will, and at the end of this year, I have no idea what comes next, for the first time in my life. It is a scary and really exciting time for me - I love being on the road, (we travel around in a 15 passenger tan van), and my team is amazing. They truly are starting to feel like a family, which is an incredible gift, and we enjoy one another a whole lot. After spending a month in training in Minnesota, we have been on the road for about 7 weeks, and I love seeing so much of this country - since we left Minneapolis, we have been to at least 15 states, and each place has such a different and unique feel. If there are so many cultural differences here in the U.S., between places like Long Island, NY and Savannah, GA, how different will Taiwan or the Philippines feel when we are there come January?

A shadow of an answer to that very question came this weekend, as Carly and I spent our day off with a woman (Susie, or Lin Ying) who is from Taiwan and her husband (Jerry) who served as a missionary there for 22 years. We learned some Mandarin Chinese from them while we were here, and even received Chinese names (mine spelled phoenetically is Shao Zhen Ni, derived from "Shaw Jenny" because your family name is more important than your individual name in China, and meaning Precious young lady). After learning only about 25 characters and pronunciations, my brain already feels as though it is on overload - it is a good reminder that immersing ourselves in a different culture will likely be exhausting but if its as much fun as tonight was, we are in for the experience of a lifetime.