We met our freshman year of college. I was a Political Science major and my roommate was a Biology major and when we applied for housing, we requested to be in the Business dorms because we did not want to be with people who only studied during college. Ha! As we came to find out they were definitely the wildest dorms on campus. Anyways, Casey started out college as a Business major (he later switched to English with a minor in Spanish) and was on the second floor of the dorms and I was on the third. We managed to not meet all year until the last two weeks of school. I met him in a crosswalk as I was with people who knew him and stopped to say hi. I wouldn’t see him again until the following year when I worked up the courage to talk to him at a party. After that party, he started to show up at my house a lot. He was friends with my roommates so there was that guise but I secretly started getting excited that maybe he could like me. After a trip to Mexico with friends, I thought I had a clue that he did like me. We rode in separate cars on the way home and he called me that night to “make sure I got home ok.” This was right when we had flip phones that could text and he later sent me a text that said, “Goodnight ….” I still have that phone and all those messages.

We spent the rest of our Sophomore year hanging out and deciding on our feelings for each other, but where I really got to know him was on a trip to Peru that summer. It was a small group of us and we went to work with an organization called Young Life Capernaum. The trip changed our lives. We went to help at a camp for children with disabilities and it was a profoundly life changing experience. At the time, Peruvian culture treated people with disabilities as if they were a curse on their family—like being born with a disability was punishment for a wrongdoing in the family. Many of the children we worked with had never experienced many of the things we take for granted and the camp was life changing not only for them but for us as well. Traveling with a person will allow you to know them in a variety of circumstances and the more I saw of him as a person, the more I was falling for him. We spent the later half of the trip traveling to Machu Picchu and the surrounding countryside. On our last day, we were having dinner with a lovely Peruvian family when the whole house started shaking. We were in a 8.0 earthquake. We ran outside and I will never forget the site of concrete rolling as if it were water. Strangely, I don’t remember feeling fear or panic. The house we were at had such a presence of peace and I knew that I was where I was supposed to be at that moment in time so I didn’t feel panicked our afraid for some reason. Our flight was set to leave that night so we hoped in our friend’s VW van and he finangled his way through the streets with rubble and downed buildings and we somehow made it to the airport. When we got to the airport, the ceiling was literally caved in on the building and of course all the systems and phone lines were completely down. Somehow we made it off the runway that night and arrived at LAX the next day.

Alyssa

*This blog is part of a series and Part 2 will be released next week.