Far From the Mountain

My best friends, Matt (from high school) and his wife Heather, have done something unassailably cool and brave. They have given up their comfortable middle-class life in Asheville, North Carolina to spend a year working with children at an orphanage in Guatamala. Matt will bring his nursing skills to bear as one of the only medical professionals around and both he and heather will serve as all around caretakers, medical staff, babysitters, bottle washers, Indian braves, and jacks of all trades. On the first post of their new blog, Far From the Mountain which they set up to chronicle the coming year's adventure, and which is now proudly on the dcat blogroll, they lay out their rationale:

My wife and I are certainly not technology people, and creating this blog almost wiped me out. But how else to share about two otherwise normal middle-class folks quitting their jobs, dropping everything and migrating to stranger environs. Our family thinks we're wacky. We may be wacky, but we don't care. This is a love story about not selling our dreams short, about going thousands of miles out of our way to grow and blossom into something more complete, more giving than we can imagine now. Why else would anyone rent their house, sell the only reliable car they have, flipoff desireable jobs in a town, Asheville, N.C., where desireable jobs don't exist, and move in with 150 children in the swelter of the Guatemalan jungle. Yeah, we're wacky.

I encourage you to follow their adventures, to live vicariously through them as they undertake what will surely be a transformative experience, and one that millions of (tens of millions of?) Americans would profoundly envy and wish they had the cajones to do themselves.