9006.2 miles from New Jersey

Tomorrow is the day I FINALLY depart for New Zealand on the Creation Care Study program! It will take me approximately 26 hours of total travel... get this - I leave on the 22nd @ 6:30pm, and arrive on the 24th @ 1:30pm. Crossing the international date line is so bizarre.

I first found out about this program during my sophomore year at Wheaton, and have been wanting to go ever since. At moments I'm sad that I'm missing half of my senior year, but I wouldn't trade this for anything, and honestly, the timing couldn't be more perfect. I'm looking forward to a brand new adventure, and excited to see what God has in store for me in the next 4 months.

Creation Care is a program in the Christian College Consortium, so I will be joined by 15-20 other college students from colleges like Messiah, Grove City, Houghton...etc. We will be living in an Old Convent in the rural Kaikoura flats on the east coast of the Southern Island and right by the Seaward Kaikoura mountain range which rises to about 8530 ft high (plenty of hiking opportunities!) The program will help me finish up my biology major, as I will be taking Ecology classes, as well as "Sustainable Development" and "God and Nature".
Here's a fun fact - in Maori (one of the native languages),the name Kaikoura means“meal of crayfish”; kai translating to food and koura meaning crayfish. I'm not so much a "koura" lover... (Kai-chicken perhaps?)

A big part of this experience will be unplugging from technology and such. So I'm expecting to update this blog and return emails about once a week. The town center is about a mile away from the convent, and apparently there is a "fleet" of bikes ready for all of us to use.
If you feel like writing snail mail, my address is
Kristen Anderson
c/o the Old Convent
278 Mt. Fyffe Road
Kaikoura 7300
New Zealand

At this point, I'm ready to be there. Enough talking/planning/preparing/packing/imagining...