For the past 6 years, we have had the honor of photographing these two and their AMAZING love! It started when Jen was a bridesmaid in Allison and Tom’s wedding! Then we captured one of my most favorite moments of all time… Kevin’s proposal to Jen at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC! Their engagement session in Old Town Alexandria, their wedding in Georgetown and now their Anniversary session at Longwood Gardens have all brought smiles to our faces!
Jen and Kevin are inspiring! They are always adventuring and always finding ways to have fun together! As we have traveled throughout the U.S. this year, we knew that if we received a recommendation from Jen and Kevin, we had to check it out! They go and do and enjoy the everyday moments of life! That is what we love about them!
Seeing Jen and Kevin and having the opportunity to photograph their love fills our hearts with joy! We are so grateful for couples like Jen and Kevin in our lives who remind us how very special love really is!
A few years ago (it is crazy to think that was a few years ago now) we met Colleen and Aaron at Colleen’s brother’s wedding we were photographing in Punta Cana! We fell in love with them then and secretly couldn’t wait to hear the news that they were getting married! Their joy made such an impact on us!
When we received their email and heard the news that it was official and Colleen and Aaron are getting married… we definitely celebrated right along with them!!! It is so much fun to see two happy hearts starting the next adventure in their lives together! And what a treat to be able to photograph their joy!
AND their sweet dog, Barkley! Ohh my goodness! Between Kristin and Danny’s AMAZING bulldogs and Barkley… those Albrechts sure do know how to pick the cutest dogs ever to bring into their lives! So much fun!
Colleen and Aaron- we are so incredibly excited to be able to capture your love and this amazing time in your lives! Cheers to you!
This post is so full of LOVE! WOW! We are so incredibly blessed to have couples in our lives who are so willing to share their love and trust us to document this AMAZING time in their lives! We are so grateful for all of our AMAZING couples who have made this year extra special for us! (Both our Liz and Ryan couples and our Amazing Life Together couples!) What a year!As a small gesture of our thanks for all of our AMAZING couples and the support of all of you, we are having a special print sale! Now through Cyber Monday receive 20% off all prints ordered from our couple’s photo galleries! This is for our couples AND all of their family and friends too!!! You all mean so much to us!
Spread the word! We hope this provides an awesome opportunity for you to take some time to relive the AMAZING memories of these special moments! We are so beyond grateful for you! Thank you for touching our lives in a special way with your love and support!
So many emotions! I thought 1 year would have given us enough time to fully process and comprehend our experience in Malawi, Africa helping to build a school with BuildOn. However, after taking some time to reflect and look through these photos again, it is clear our time in this small community in rural Africa has had a life changing impact that we will always still be processing! That is the beauty of life changing experiences right?
As I mentioned yesterday, our friend Laura asked us to join her and a group of her family and friends to help build a school in Malawi! For over a year, we had been fundraising and preparing for this adventure. However, nothing truly can prepare you for an experience like this.
We met up with the rest of the group at the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa and then Lilongwe, Malawi. We were greeted by the local BuildOn staff and as soon as I tried to remember how to properly greet them in Chichewa (their local language), I knew I was in trouble! I am not good at learning other languages! It was a rough start! ;) We made our way to Kasungu, a small city on the way Jonasi, our village where we would be buildin. We stayed there for a night to “ease” our way into “life in the village.” Ohh goodness. This was the beginning of “out of our comfort zone.”
On our way to the village the next day, we made a stop at a school that was recently built by BuildOn. Wow. What an incredible glimpse into the lives of the students and the teachers in rural Malawi. We sat in on 3 different classes, one of which was an adult education class! As I look back on these photos, I am once again blown away by a few things:
1. Most of the children do not have shoes.
2. The children either sit on the floor or share a desk with at least 3 other kids!
3. The adults were learning how to write their names. Even though we witnessed this first hand, I still have a hard time comprehending this!
When we arrived to our village, we were greeted in a way we will never forget! The joy I felt in this exact moment is a joy I hope to relive every single day of my life! In fact, I hope we can bring this joy to people around us every single day! Wow! What a gift that has impacted us in big ways!
While we were in the local village, we stayed with a host family. These beautiful families opened up their homes. Our host family did not speak any English and we did not speak any Chichewa! What a crazy adventure.
The homes were about 300 square feet at the largest. Our home had a “couch” inside with dirt floors. However, most of the homes did not have any furniture. As guests, our host family asked us to sit on the couch while they sat on the floor while eating dinner.
The “bathroom” was outside. There was a bathing hut and a latrine. The latrine is a hole in the ground where you do your business. (We brought our own toilet paper.) The bathing area was a bucket of water (our family was so kind, they even warmed our water for us!). It was usually dark when it was time to bathe, so that often meant we were dodging scary looking bugs and unknown creatures (like frogs) that thought it would be fun to jump around and scare us while we try to get clean!
The water is another thing that is just so hard to comprehend! I saw people drink water out of these dirty buckets that were full of water from the river.The same water that is found here:
Our village had two water pumps close to town. (About a 10 minute walk). (And yes, these kiddos are about 5-10 years old and carry buckets on their heads heavier then I could lift myself. We would pump water, then filter the water using a special filter, and then add bleach to make sure we took care of all of the bacteria! As you can imagine, the water did not taste good. In fact, it tasted even worse once it warmed up with the sun! ☹ But we were drinking filtered water from the pump. Our families often drank unfiltered water from the river. ☹
In Malawi, the main food that they eat is called Nshima [seema]. Nshima is basically a blob of corn flour. It doesn’t have much taste, but the texture is… well, let’s just say it has a texture. ☹ The best way I can describe the consistency is raw biscuit dough. I did not like Nshima. In fact, by the end of our Trek, I was not sure I would have been able to eat any more of it! Our host family eats Nshima for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, they actually don’t really eat breakfast and lunch. A typical dinner consists of Nshima and cooked pumpkin leaves. Rice is a special treat for them that they rarely eat, and they typically only eat meat on special holidays or if they are celebrating something special!
Our family asked us what we typically ate… and when we said pizza, they looked at us like we are crazy! This is so hard to comprehend when we have so many options available to us all of the time, but they literally only eat Nshima and fruits and vegetables that they grow. Every time I thought I was going to gag over the Nshima, I had a gut check. We are beyond blessed not only to have enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily, but we have so many options we could eat something different every single day of the year! THAT is truly the crazy thing!
Cooking Nshima is an art! These women are truly remarkable.
Helping to build the school in our village was one of the most AMAZING things we have ever been a part of. Seeing an entire community (both men and women) come together to do hard physical labor for long hours each day was absolutely incredible. The strength in the men and women was awe-inspiring. I will never forget struggling to try to carry 3 bricks on my head while the other women carried at least 4 or 5 bricks, balancing them on their head and in their hands, while carrying a baby on their back. They define strength to me.
Working on the school and doing physical labor was life giving! It fired me up to be able to put my hands to work. Having so many hands work together on a common project was incredible. At one point, Laura turned to me and said, “Ahh. I missed service Liz.” Laura and I’s friendship grew while fundraising and building homes together for Habitat for Humanity in college. Laura knows my passion for working hard for others and apparently that side of me came out again in Africa, and I am so grateful! I missed “service Liz” too!
It is so eye-opening to me that it has only been 12 months since our time in Africa, but we so quickly fall back into our crazy little sheltered world that we live in and so “easily” forget the reality of these families lives! :(
1. They do not have access to clean drinking water.
2. They do not own shoes.
3. They do not have electricity.
4. After 2nd grade, they might have to walk miles to school because they do not have a school building for the older grades. Or, they might not have access to school at all.
5. They eat the same “corn-based starch” food every day of their lives. (Eating rice and meat is a huge treat to them!)
6. They have about 1 outfit per person and zero “things.”
7. They do not have running water and they do not have toilet paper.
8. They make their own tools. They make their own bricks. They make their own concrete. (No machines. No trucks. No bulldozers or backhoes.)
This is still mind blowing to me. After working on the school for 4 days, I still somehow expected the concrete truck to come rolling up and pour the concrete! That never happened. This is their reality.
For all of these things they “do not have,” they certainly do have a ton of JOY. Smiles and laughter are more present than anywhere else we have ever been. They know how to have fun with rocks, dirt, and a handmade ball made out of trash they found on the ground. They dance and sing at every opportunity they have. Community living is so visible. They see the people they want to see regularly because they don’t have a daily planner that is filled to the max with business. They just show up in people’s lives. They do laundry together, garden together, and fill their water buckets together. For all of the things we would say they do not have, they would have just as many life lessons and more to fill our hearts with joy!
I am so grateful we are reflecting on this with Thanksgiving just a few days away. We are so thankful for the opportunity to travel to Malawi and have the Jonasi Community welcome us with such open arms. It is amazing how often we go into something hoping to touch the lives of others, when in fact it is our lives that are touched! We have forever been blessed by the Jonasi Community in Malawi and we can only pray that their new school forever blesses them!
This Thanksgiving, as we eat our big meals complete with turkey and about 20 sides to choose from, we hope you will join us in being extra grateful for those things we often take for granted… you know, those 20 sides to choose from, clean drinking water, education, shoes, running water, and a toilet to flush. We are certainly grateful!
Last year at this time, we had handed the keys to our home off to our renters in Baltimore and made our way to Central PA with a moving truck full of our most meaningful personal possessions! We were nervous, excited, scared, hopeful, grateful, uneasy, confident, and eager all at the same time. We unloaded the moving truck into my childhood bedroom and waited incredibly impatiently for the RV to arrive for pickup in NY! Of course, the “perfect plan” was not a reality and after days and days of crazy stress… we finally accepted the fact that the RV would not be ready for pick up until after we returned from Africa. We turned our focus to Thanksgiving with our families and trying to convince them that despite what the press was telling them, we were not in danger of contracting Ebola! (Yes, although we were going to be thousands of miles from the Ebola cases in Africa… this was actually a really REALLY hard thing for our families and friends to understand!)
Growing up, neither one of us traveled much. Our families took road trips for vacations. We camped more than we stayed in hotels. However, somewhere along the way of growing up and becoming individuals, both Ryan and I developed a craving to see the world! We are curious about the world around us and want to experience the unique cultures that make this world so AMAZING!
Over two years ago, our friend Laura sent an email to her family and friends asking us if we would want to be a part of something near and dear to her heart! She was a Trek Coordinator for BuildOn, an organization that builds schools in developing countries and she wanted to lead a Trek with her family and friends! At the time, going to Africa was something we were excited about, but it was something we thought we would do after we explored other parts of the world… like Europe! Africa was on our dream travel list… but it was definitely not “next” on the list! ;) However, when one of your best friends shares her passion about something super dear to her heart and provides an opportunity to serve a community in a developing country together… it is a no brainer! We were in from the very beginning!
So, for over a year, a group of 10-15 people gathered together through monthly Google Hangout Meetings! Individually fundraising, together we raised over $30,000… enough to build a school in Malawi! December 1, 2014… we were on our way to Africa!
Ryan and I started our trip with a few days in Cape Town, South Africa before meeting up with the rest of the group! We had absolutely NO IDEA what to expect! And honestly, we were so busy getting our home ready to rent, packing our belongings, having a garage sale, buying an RV, moving our belongings, fundraising, planning for the Amazing Marriage Adventure (our year of living in an RV), filing our 501c3 paperwork for Amazing Life Together, and running our Liz and Ryan photography business that we didn’t really have a moment to think! We had absolutely NO IDEA how special and how beautiful Africa really is!
Over the next few days, we are going to share more from our trip to Africa. As we wrap up the most Adventurous year of our lives so far, it only seems appropriate to take some time to truly reflect on the experience that started the adventure! Reliving these photos brings back every single one of the emotions I listed above… and even more! We are grateful, humbled, joy-filled, passionate, open-eyed, and awe-inspired! This world is truly a beautiful place!
First stop… Cape Town, South Africa
After exploring a little in the afternoon, we decided to take a nap. When we woke up, it was about 9:30 p.m. and the only food option open was McDonalds! :( Our first meal in Africa was McDonalds. :(
The fresh Breakfasts in Africa is something we miss BIG TIME! Especially because this was our view each morning!
We accidentally found ourselves on a Toll Road. We paid about $3.00 to drive this most gorgeous drive we have ever seen! Chapman’s Peak Drive! Best road to get lost on ever!Pure HAPPINESS!Sunrise in Kalk Bay, Cape Town.
Muizenberg Beach, Cape Town is the most colorful magical place in the world! These are just little surfer shacks, but the colors have a way of making a dreamy beautiful beach even more AMAZING!Boulder Beach, South Africa.
Wine Tasting in Cape Town.We dream of owning a space like this where people can gather and hang out on comfy blankets and pillows in the grass with AMAZING food and drink! So incredible! We drove out to the Wine region… Stellenbosch for an evening! First stop- the laundromat! ;)
That evening we went to dinner in town. In the middle of dinner, the waiter came over to tell us that the power was expected to go out at 8:00 p.m. They were having a blackout to conserve power in the area! They told us not to worry, they would bring us candles! ;) It was the most delightful and eye-opening candlelit dinner we have ever experienced! So tasty too! ;)On our last day back in Cape Town, we went to Neighbour Goods Market! It was such an incredible Food & Craft Market with the largest international food selection! It was a blast and is definitely a must do if you find yourself in Cape Town!That evening, we went on a full-moonlit hike at Lion’s Head! AMAZING! We read a few reviews online and many said it was an easy hike! After about 10 feet straight up, we realized we are quite out of shape! ;) We actually were late arriving because the GPS went to the wrong location! Once we actually found the correct place, we joined hundreds of other people who hiked it up as quickly as possible to make sure we made it for the sun setting and the moon rising! It was absolutely incredible and unlike anything else we have ever seen/done before! So incredible!South Africa blew away every expectation we had for Africa! We honestly had no idea what to expect… in fact, we expected everything to be like the Shanty Town in the bottom left picture! (There are a few Shanty Towns in the area, but throughout our few days in Cape Town, we only saw 1 or 2!) We had absolutely no idea how incredibly beautiful South Africa really is! It is gorgeous and we would definitely go back again! Next stop… Malawi!
Spread the word! We hope this provides an awesome opportunity for you to take some time to relive the AMAZING memories of these special moments! We are so beyond grateful for you! Thank you for touching our lives in a special way with your love and support!
The “bathroom” was outside. There was a bathing hut and a latrine. The latrine is a hole in the ground where you do your business. (We brought our own toilet paper.) The bathing area was a bucket of water (our family was so kind, they even warmed our water for us!). It was usually dark when it was time to bathe, so that often meant we were dodging scary looking bugs and unknown creatures (like frogs) that thought it would be fun to jump around and scare us while we try to get clean!
The same water that is found here:
