Its hard to believe that my time here is almost over. Tomorrow I will have been in Belgium officially for 4 weeks. I have learned so much, seen so much, and gotten very tired:) My brain is on overload, compounded with the learning contract and paper that I am writing plus the presentation I'm working on! We'll be busy to the bitter end! Processing time is much needed however, and these things are the tools for that. It would be a shame to spend four weeks here only to get home and realize I hadn't processed any of it or taken the necessary steps to make sure that I take what I have learned home with me. I'll probably be posting other things from my time along the way... but for now I just have this.
Community Shifting. What is that going to look like? As I was writing my learning contract today, this was one of my topics. What does it look like to "leave and cleave" if you will from my current culture to my new culture. I will be leaving a place where there is an occasional snowfall to a place where 80 degrees feels like the dead of winter! I will be leaving English to go to a place where I'm not allowed to puff air out of my mouth when I say p,t, and k. But more than that, I am leaving people that I love dearly to go to a new country full of people that I don't know. Scratch that, two new countries full of people I don't know. It starts in Costa Rica. How do I not waste my time there? I don't want to depend on my home community, I want to be lonely enough to get out of my house and find people in my new culture. Oh the blessing and curse of skype/facebook/email... oh how I love and hate you. :) Seriously though, it's a challenge with communication options galore at our fingertips to leave our community behind in a healthy way to invest where we are. I've seen that in myself this month... the tendency to check email all the time to see if I've heard from home, to try to respond to emails immediately so people will know that I love them, etc. It's hard. I'm working on thinking through what that balance will need to be.
Let me just end by saying... what a blessing to even have to worry about this. I have been given the gift of a loving family, friends, church, and extended community. I have people to miss and that is a blessing. :) I'm thankful for you all!!!
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