Before then, we didn't have any problems with sharks. Even when I moved far from the ocean in college, I still loved spending time outside. My friends and I liked to drive to the mountains in the northern part of Georgia to go hiking. Here in Lesotho, I don't have to go far for beautiful views or to experience nature.
I have loved learning different languages my whole life. When I was in seventh grade, my family hosted an exchange student, which is an experience in which you have a high schooler from a different country come and live with you in America so they can experience going to school and living in the U.S.A. for a year. Our exchange student was from Spain, and she inspired me to start learning Spanish. I took lots of Spanish classes in middle and high school, and when I finished high school, I took some tests to show that I was fluent in Spanish. Maybe you or some of your friends already know another language from speaking it at home with your family! In Lesotho, the language people speak here is called Sesotho (seh-soo-too), and I have to speak it every day with my host family and my students. I love speaking Sesotho! It is one of my favorite parts of living here because it is such a beautiful language.
When I started college, I knew I wanted to keep learning different languages, so I started studying a language called Arabic. It is a language mainly spoken in the Middle East, but millions of people in the United States speak it, too. Along with Arabic classes, I took classes about different cultures and histories of different people and countries. In the summer of 2022, the summer before my final year of college, I got a job in Jerusalem, Israel.
