We rolled our luggage down to the parking lot at 5:30am on Monday morning. The early California morning was grey and cool. We got our passports back, with Russian visas in them. We rode the 45 minutes or so to LAX with Joel, our director, plus one friend joining us for the domestic flight to Chicago on her way to an undisclosed country. We talked about plans and prayer and the way that God moves in them. The reality of the trip hit me like a 2x4 while we were driving on a large bridge, criss-crossing with other freeways, overlooking cityspace that I didn’t know, hurlting towards LAX at 60mph, while others laughed and talked excitedly.
My surge of anxiety subsided (or got shoved down) by the time we arrived at the airport, and relative normalcy returned while we waited in line to check our bags. I think it helped that conversation became more one-on-one, and I had a chance to talk to my director for a bit. Never in my life would I have pictured myself at 23 waiting in line for a trans-Atlantic flight, talking with a m*ss*ons director—_my_ m*ss*ons director, wondering if the pending journey would be for a summer or if the line we had been waiting in would soon become commonplace.
All our bags were under the weight limit, eliciting more than a few ‘woo’s and claps. Joel saw us through security and waved goodbye from the doors. Our team ‘visitor’ (the one going to the undisclosed country) got a message from her teammate saying that her teammate, who had flown out of LAX earlier, had left her passport at her gate. God worked it out that the passport had been found and her teammate was able to pick it up for her and make it back to our gate just in time for our flight.
We left her in Chicago, and continued our journey to Munich. We watched in flight movies and slept. God spoke to me the clearest on this flight in the early morning before most of the rest of the plane had woken up—words of encouragement and reminders of my life with him. From Munich, we flew to St. Petersburg, during which God reminded me of my preparation and his calling. We also first experienced a language barrier, but it was short lived and inconsequential.
We arrived in St. Petersburg. We had landed in Russia! I was there! The language I had been learning was all around me and I was there! The place I had only pictured and held on to with prayer for 2 years was my environment. I was bright-eyed. I felt truly excited then, for the first time in a long while. We went through customs, retrieved our baggage, and met our interpreter for the ride to the camp.
After 11 hours in traffic on poorly maintained roads, we arrived at Camp Yantar at 4am, where the sun was just beginning to rise again (after setting at around 10:30/11pm). I was scared then. The camp was not what I was expecting. The camp was the picture of a Soviet-era camp—cinder block buildings, corrugating steel awnings, old metal playground equipment peeling several different colored layers of paint. The brilliant greenery of Pyoca and Cedar were replaced by sand and pine needles. We were three to a room, with our beds literally right next to each other. The pipes to the facets in both the toilet room and the shower room were exposed. I was grateful for the availability of hot water.
The next several days aren’t very clear in my head, except for lots of information in various levels of English fluency, being shown around everywhere, children flocking to us, saying Hello!, eager to see us foreigners and to demonstrate what little English they knew. The food stressed me out—I didn’t recognize it and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the taste. The textures were foreign and were probably the hardest part about it.
Still whirling from the new environment, we attempted to administer English placement tests. We sorted students and prepared our first lesson—which turned out to be a full hour instead of the half-hour we had been expecting. I managed to pull it off, after panicking for the first 10 minutes of class.
It is now our 10th day here. We have started to form great friendships with some of our students, mostly our guides (a trio of students comes to pick us up for meals and take us back to our cottage…all 20 yards of the walk). Unfortunately, this group of students leaves on Tuesday! We get new students on the 15th. Our intermediary, Yelaina (still unsure which variant of ‘Alaina’ her name is) is also leaving with them. She is our higher up who speaks English. We are apprehensive of our ability to communicate without her here. We have, however, registered our passports in the city and etc. We hope that we can figure out how to obtain toilet paper and water on our own by Tuesday!
We have watched several performances by students, been thrown into several performances, played several games of volleyball, gone many times to the river, ridden over many kilometers of bumpy Russian roads, eaten far too much meat and potatoes, and more. We visited the city of Cherepovets yesterday and had our first overseas shopping experiences and explored an old house museum. We caught a boat to visit a satellite campus of the camp that used to be a monastery and is more rural than here—lush grasses, wooden fences, and outhouses, complete with goats. There we were welcomed with a warmth warmer than the Caribbean sun. We took apart and reassembled a Koloznokov rifle, shot a pellet gun, hiked a trail, and slid down a zipline. But the best part was the kids. They were so cute, so eager to involve us, to share with us their cultures and traditions. They sang us to us as the whole camp walked us out the gate and waved to us from the gates and fences as we departed. They stole a piece of my heart that day.
It’s starting to sink in that this is my life for the next 3 weeks. I’m still processing how I feel about this. It has been hard to not have a schedule, to be ferried everywhere, to not be able to make certain choices, to have conversations that take three times as long as they have to be to make sure that meanings of phrases are understood correctly, to submit myself to team relationships, to be constantly involved with the kids about 10 hours per day with varying levels of English fluency. There are things that I miss that I never thought I’d miss—ice cubes, chips and dip, 2 ply napkins, cold drinks, ice cream, even cooking. I never thought that one of the hardest parts of teaching would be not having a board.
But for all this, this is the right place for me. I never wanted to teach to distribute knowledge. I want to teach to encourage and to build relationships with students—and I get to do that all day. I only teach 1 hour of class. The rest is relationship building, mostly over volleyball and walks to meals. I am awed at the way that 4 Americans and 10 Russians can play a fabulous game of volleyball despite a sometimes huge language barrier. The simple joy of the kids is contagious. We have to hand-wash our clothes and hang them dry, but there’s something kind of soothing about that. Outside the buildings of stone and steel is a lovely pine forest. The river is gorgeous—like Upper Peninsula gorgeous, if you’ve ever been there.
I haven’t had any wonderful moments of clarity here yet, where I sit up and realize that I want to spend my life teaching or pouring into college students in the CIS. I think that those decisions won’t come in moments of clarity, but continuing on in the faith that brought me here. I also know that there are tests to come here still that I have to experience and I can’t say anything about my willingness to sacrifice anything—whether cultural comforts or a ‘normal’ job—until I know what those sacrifices entail. I’m realizing that the invitation to sacrifice isn’t one of obligation, not a mark of ‘hard-coreness,’ but one of discovery. To sacrifice the things we are without here, like television, constant internet access, personal freedoms, and the immediacy of familiar relationships, are invitations to discover HIM as faithful and sufficient in our needs that are revealed in the absence of these things.
It has been a full, different, encriching, exhausting past few weeks such that it feels simultaneously like no time at all has passed and like it’s hard to believe that we still have 3 more weeks of this. Even these 3 pages are just the backbones of my experience; I still have more to process. But for now, I need to go--our escorts are here to take us to eat (again).
Spachonye noche!
