Welcome Kyle and Katie!

2011-2013 Missionaries started their training today in San Antonio. Welcome! This year there are only four entering the program. Kyle Seymour from the Rio Grand Valley in South Texas and Katie Langley from Houston, Texas are coming to Chimbote late August. I hope to meet them in passing in Lima if their visas allow them to enter Peru on schedule. The bios they wrote for the program are below:

Kyle, 22, is a graduate of St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas with degrees in Literature and International Relations. He is a native of the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, where, from a very early age he witnessed the negative effects of socioeconomic inequality. There, he also witnessed how powerful community can be, especially when centered around faith. Kyle has had experience working with organizations which promote social justice, but looks forward to being able to do so from a Catholic perspective. Kyle has come to understand that every person and every place has a unique and important story to be witnessed and to be told. He is grateful for the opportunity to be an Incarnate Word Missionary, to experience a new culture in Peru, to help positively impact a community and to spread the most important story of all, that of the miracle of Jesus Christ.

Katie, 24, is excited and humbled to be serving as a missionary in Chimbote, Peru for IWM. She is originally from Houston, Texas and graduated from Saint Louis University with a Bachelors of Science in Nursing in May 2011. She is looking forward to using her degree to fulfill her vocation of nursing abroad, specifically in a Spanish-speaking country. She loves to learn about different people and cultures, and has attended service/immersion trips in places such as Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, El Salvador, and Belize previous to this journey to Peru. She is very passionate about women's health and maternal nursing, social justice advocacy, politics, liberation theology, traveling, and photography. She is thrilled to be a part of this IWM community in Chimbote and is ready for the joys, challenges, and adventures that these two years will hold!