So I'll be home in two weeks!

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Wow, the end of the semester has arrived rather suddenly. I have the rest of this week, the weekend, and then next week is finals, and then a lot of the people in the program are leaving the next day (April 30th) to go back to their respective homes, although a fair amount are staying varying lengths of time like Anna and I to do some more traveling. But anyway the point is that two weeks from today I will be back in my house in the states for summer vacation, and I'm having a hard time believing that A) I've spent four months here, B) I'm going back to Dayton, Ohio to spend the summer (can anyone say anti-climactic?) and C) I'll be going back to USC in the fall...it's all so bizarre. And speaking of bizarre, that's a fairly good word to describe my past weekend (just kidding, my weekend was pretty good, I just didn't have a better way to transition to talking about my volunteer experience):

So sometime last week I got an email from the USAC program directors that we were invited to accompany other UNAB students (the school I 'attend') to the region Ñuble in Chile to help build shelters for people who lost their homes in the earthquake during this past weekend. At the time I received it I wasn't planning on going for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I had a research paper due in one of my classes yesterday and I needed the weekend to work on it. But then one of the other students in my class had the excellent idea that we could go try to get the due date changed so we could all go volunteer, and our professor kindly agreed to change the date to tomorrow instead of yesterday, so I decided to go. This all took place on Thursday afternoon, about 10 hours before the bus for Ñuble was supposed to leave for the weekend. Yaay last-minute plans! Usually I would say that sarcastically, but it actually ended up working out because the same professor proceeded to tell us that our afternoon class was cancelled (I have a class from 3:50-5:15 Tuesday and Thursdays...what a horrible, horrible time to have a class) so we all raced out before she could change her mind, and Anna and I and one of our other friends went souvenier shopping (that's right, I got yall presents. get excited) and packed, and then went to campus so we could

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