The adventures of Peace Corps Ethiopia volunteer Katrina Johnston have been shared with friends, family and readers worldwide on her blog “27 Months of Sunshine.”

Johnston, a Fredonia High School and State University of New York at Fredonia graduate, began her service in July 2013. At the same time she also launched her first attempt at a blog, katrinainethiopia.wordpress.com.

After two years and many ups and downs in a rural Ethiopian village, Johnston has had many tales to tell and her blog gained a following.

This led to her recently winning a Peace Corps blogging contest. “It’s kind of shocking really. When I first started it was just for me and my family, but I still write exactly what I’m thinking. I don’t really sit down and ‘think this is what everyone wants to hear’ and change the way I’m writing it. I kind of write and whatever comes out, comes out and it kind of helps me to change the way that I think about a situation. … I find the positive in it and it really helps my life,” she explained.

Johnston said a fellow Peace Corps volunteer told her to apply to the Third Annual Blog It Home Contest and she was shocked when she was selected for the top 20 out of 400 blogs entered.

From there, likes and shares on Facebook elevated her into the top eight.

“The amount of support I received from the Fredonia area and all around the world, my relatives that live in Australia, was just amazing. I think I had over 300 shares on Facebook and I had over 1,700 likes on the photo and people were commenting on my blog. Ethiopians found it and I was very nervous because sometimes they can have negative views of foreigners coming to live and work in Ethiopia, like we’re trying to tell them what to do, but some people read all the way through my blog and said, ‘I love what you’re doing, sharing our culture.’ It was just overwhelming and amazing for me to get all this love and support. It’s also surprising. I never thought people would care so much about what I’m doing or what I have to say. So I have been very happy and I have a great opportunity now to improve my writing and keep going with my stories,” Johnston said.

The prize for winning the contest includes a trip to Washington, D.C. in October 2016 to tell her story to elected officials, school groups and at the White House. This is similar to the presentation Johnston gave to the local Rotary chapter while she was home this summer.

She said she finds inspiration from the Ethiopian people, mainly the girls she worked with, but also in being able to share these stories with loved ones back home.

While living in Ethiopia, Johnston was assigned to train teachers in English, exchange culture and improve gender equality. Working with adolescent girls is where Johnston said she found the most joy and is something that has changed her life.

“With my sitemate, who is another Peace Corps volunteer who lives in my town, we had a girls club and we worked with adolescent girls to help improve confidence and leadership skills. … It was basically a time for girls to meet, to get together and even to talk about what is going on in their lives, share their experiences and know they’re not alone,” she explained. “… We also had a couple (Girls Leading Our World) camps. So I would work with other Peace Corps volunteers and bring girls in middle school and high school for a one-week sleepover camp. They would work together, basically like the girls club, but they would do it in one week. … That was probably my most meaningful and powerful work, seeing behavior change in a week because these girls come from rural areas and they’ve never been given the chance to speak freely or get together and speak about these things and so that was really inspiring for me.”

Johnston said she decided to continue her work in Ethiopia for another year.

“I am extending my service. I finished the typical 27 months and then I was given the opportunity to extend,” she said, just before heading back overseas.

On Sunday, Aug. 30 she went back to Ethiopia and will be there until October 2016. “It is going to be a different kind of year. I am going to have more work responsibilities and I am going to be in the capital city (Addis Ababa), so I will have more access to things like water, electricity, an office where I can use the Internet. So it is going to be very different, but very exciting for me,” she said.

She said she is looking forward to her work with Girl Hub Ethiopia, where she will be working on kits that will help create girl clubs in schools, but she will miss her family and friends back home. Johnston added, later, she plans to go to graduate school to study international development or public administration and concentrate or minor in gender and women’s studies.

She is the daughter of Steven and Lisa Johnston of Fredonia. Check out her blog at katrinainethiopoa.wordpress.com.