New Kids on the Block!

When school ended in the beginning of May, I left Blacksburg and began my summer adventures. I left my townhouse, of which I was the only inhabitant; I left the rest of my team, which included eight adults and three children; and I left the Radford campus, where I had just finished my first year.

Three months later I returned to Blacksburg, and things had gotten a little different. I moved back into my townhouse, along with THREE new roommates; reconnected with my team, which now includes TEN adults, FOUR children and one more child only two weeks away; and back to Radford, where I am starting my second year and have begun to meet a number of freshmen already!

As I have labeled this updated, we have some new kids on the block and it feels so great! School starts today and I am refreshed and ready to meet even more students and begin to be a part of their lives! Please pray for our team as we begin to meet students as well as reconnect with students from last year.


Campus Outreach Virginia 2007
L to R: Collin Setterberg, Doug Rose,
Renee Head, Me, Josh Layfied, Katie
Hobson, Matt, Isaiah, Julia and Toby
Bradner, Andrew, Maria, Tera and Ava
Schwartz. Megan Long not pictured.

We are Virginia Tech by Nikki Giovanni

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

Click here to listen to this talk.