Mariah performing “Say It Again” at The Hotel Cafe on 2/22/12 -

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It was an honor to work on this project with this unbelievable team of ridiculously talented people. If you opt to buy the digital version on iTunes, here are all the packaging graphics that you’re missing out on *wink* –  I’ve also updated my design portfolio with the packaging from this project as well as a few others!

January – at 12:00am I was cheering and screaming along with roughly a million people in central London for the fireworks off the London Eye on the River Thames, ringing in the new year with all of London and my friend Lauren-Michelle 3 days into my month-long stay in London that felt more like I had moved there. During that month I learned to rely on public transportation and walking more than I ever have in my life. I found an amazing church family at Hillsong London and met a couple amazing people there that I am still friends with. I rented a car and drove “on the wrong side” all the way to the Peak District for a day. I took the Chunnel to Paris and spend 2 days wandering around the city. I was away from home and away from America for the longest time I’ve ever been.

April – My sister and I visited New York City for a few days for our birthday and I wandered around the city while she saw broadway shows. I saw one with her – How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying – and we stage doored after and met Daniel Radcliffe AKA Harry Potter. At one point during our trip we got caught in the middle of central park in a downpour with only one tiny umbrella. So. Much. Fun.

June – Flew a plane. For real. Sat in the pilots seat, and controlled the plane for takeoff, flight & landing. The instructor was only helping at the co-pilot controls for takeoff & landing. We flew out and around Catalina island in one of the busiest airspaces in the world. I even talked to air traffic control!

July – Got a wetsuit and surfed the freezing cold Malibu waters. Flew to FL to spend the rest of summer with my family and went to the final space shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center, which was also my first time seeing a launch that close.

August – Went on my first mission trip to Africa, something I had felt called to do since I was 14. It couldn’t have been a more incredible experience. Saw the opening of the first clean water well in the village, and helped the villagers fill up their jerry cans.

September - Had the unbelievable experience of working as a PA on my favorite TV show, Castle, for the episode “Cops & Robbers”… my first real Hollywood job! Also got to work on a music video that month… super cool.

October – My step-sister Rochelle got married to the man of her dreams, Mr. Robby Dye in a beautiful ceremony on a lake near Disney World, it was amazing! I also started volunteering with a group called “RedEye” going down to the projects every Saturday to play with and mentor kids in one of the most impoverished areas in the country. It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done and I hope to keep doing it for many years!

November – Went to a lot of Hollywood screenings and partys including two that were attended by Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio himself… livin’ it up!

December – Organized the location and operations for the Help-Portrait LA: Imperial Courts event on the 10th – one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life since I was so way out of my comfort zone in everything I had to do to make this event happen, but it went amazing and we gave over 100 families and individuals free portraits in time for Christmas!!

This is Part I of what will probably be 3 or 4 blog posts about this trip because there are so many stories and photos and videos to share I’m not even sure how many posts I’ll need to cover it all. In this post I’m just going to cover the “getting there” since that was a full 1/3 of the 9 day trip. Stay tuned for the next posts though because that’s where the images and videos from the village we visited will be.

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At 3pm EST on August 9, 2011 I took off from Orlando, FL and flew to Atlanta, GA for my connecting flight across the Atlantic to Africa. At this time I had no idea it would be a three day journey to get to our destination – a remote village in northern Togo called Gbentchal (pronounced Ben-jal). Oh and don’t bother looking it up on Google Maps – it’s not there.

In Atlanta I joined up with the rest of the Conduit Mission team for our trans-atlantic and cross-continental journey. We arrived in Accra, Ghana around 10am local time the following day, and I don’t think any of us slept more than a few minutes on the plane. We were greeted upon our arrival by the team on the ground there – Mentor Leaders founder David Whetstone and his amazing staff of local guys he’s hired to help with various facets of the mission. They are in charge of a wide range of tasks such as cooking, helping with bags and supplies, translating for us, helping with the feeding and medicine programs, and more.

We all quickly piled into a large passenger van for the first jaunt of our trip to the border of Ghana and Togo. The drive wasn’t too bad – about 4 hours. What was kind of daunting about it was that it was during this ride that we learned just how much farther we had to go – and that this was the easy part of the journey. I also learned a new phrase – T.I.A. – “This Is Africa” – used in a similar way as “when in Rome” or “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”.

The border crossing at the Ghana/Togo border was quite an experience. Thankfully it was nothing new to me, as I had done a similar on-foot crossing in Tijuana years before. At a few of the checkpoints the border agents were actually very nice. The worst part was merchants on the Togo side crowding around us trying to get us to pay them to carry our bags and selling things. We got through it fine though, and piled our bags in a truck while we all rode on motorcycle taxis to our hotel in Lome. It was a 1/2 hour ride on some pretty sketchy streets, but we finally made it to our hotel, La Savoie, right as the sun was starting to set. Probably the best part about being the only girl traveling with a group of guys is that you get your own hotel rooms and tents while everyone else has to share

We had dinner that night on the roof of the hotel, which caused me crazy deja vu, because the hotel was eerily similar to the hotel I stayed at in Haiti with two of the same people on our mission trip a year before. It’s quite odd how similar south Togo is to Haiti. The climate, the infrastructure, the people, the language… almost exactly the same. That night we had rice with sauce and fried plantains for dinner, which could not have made me happier as I absolutely love plantains and they are so rare in the states.

The following morning we were up bright and early at 4am for our bus ride through Togo to Dapaong, a city as far north as you can go in Togo. If you’re not familiar with the geography (you’ve probably never even heard of Togo, am I right?) it’s a long, skinny country in mid-west Africa that extends from the coast upwards towards the Sahara Dessert and Burkina Faso. We were traveling from one end all the way to the other, on what I call the postal bus. It was a big, nice bus (at one point in it’s life) but it had been well used. From what I gathered, the mail was delivered via this bus, since every “bus stop” was also a post office, and the mailman sat in front of the bus with his mail. It was also his job to keep the bus door strapped shut, which he occasionally didn’t do a very good job of, since I was sitting right behind him and got blasted with dirt and dust and debris from the road a few times. But I am thankful for him nonetheless, because that did not look like an easy or pleasant task.

A lot of the countryside in Togo was absolutely breathtaking. No power lines, no billboards – just wild nature.

We finally arrived in Dapaong after 13 hours just after the sun had set, and stayed overnight at a Christian mission there. It had running water and a toilet AND shower, which was epic.

In the morning we set off on the last leg of our journey, to the village of Gbentchal. At times during the 3 hour drive we weren’t even on roads anymore, but what be more adequately described by the word trail. Luckily there hadn’t been much rain recently, or I’m told the roads would have been practically impassible.

Well, that’s it for Part I. In Part II I’ll have lots of pics and videos of all the awesome stuff Mentor Leaders and Conduit Mission are doing in the village of Gbentchal. Stay tuned!

The City of Angels is many things, but I can tell you what it’s not – it’s not like the movies. Except for the palm tree lined boulevards. Up until March last year I had never visited LA – and now I’ve lived here the better part of a year. The biggest misconceptions I had about LA is that it had a warm/hot climate. It really doesn’t. In the shade it’s always cool. And the beach/ocean is always cold, even during summer. Another misconception is that it was more big-city like. Technically speaking, 10 million people is a huge city. But driving around the surface streets in LA it doesn’t feel BIG at all. It stretches on forever and ever in every direction, but almost every corner of LA has almost a small city or big town feel. It never feels overwhelmingly big unless you are driving or flying across the entire expanse. It’s compartmentalized very nicely, with dozens of great neighborhoods that are like their own little bubble.

For Christa’s photoshoot we kept it really fun and chill. All the locations were in and around Venice Beach, one of my favorite spots in LA.

Here are a few of my favorite shots…

And here is a screenshot of the website I designed & built for her, using wordpress as a CMS: