Thursday, August 4, 2011
Aand we're back
I have a lot of updating to do, but for now, I will say that I have safely arrived back home to Michigan. I'm staying at a friend's house while she and her husband are on vacation (and it so happens that my friend's husband is the associate pastor, which means I am staying in the parsonage. Heh.). I will meet with my potential roommate this weekend and hopefully find an apartment with her within the next week. The silence is awkward, since I'm used to music playing at camp for about 10 hours per day, and not having teammates around is odd. But it's nice. I'll be spending the next day or so doing some mental readjustments and some processing. I won't be calling anyone for those long 'How was Russia?!?!" conversations anytime soon, and I'm not posting on facebook yet either. It's going to take some time to readjust. So for now, I'm just letting people know that I'm home and that it was a good experience, though not what I was expecting. I'm going to go get dressed (after sleeping for 12 hours) and go grocery shopping! In my car! o.o
Saturday, July 9, 2011
The Story So Far
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!
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!
Saturday, July 2, 2011
On Being Flexible
This is an amusing story from today, and a shout out to ESI!
Flexibility at its Finest
Today, we went to the beach down the camp road. On the way back, a teammate discovered that she had lost the key to her and her two teammates' room. We were all in our swimsuits and a few of us had other clothes on, but not all (or had gotten them wet at the beach). We had 5 minutes before we had to go perform for the camp (and maybe their parents), which we had found out only earlier that afternoon. We thought we would sing My Sunshine and dance the electric slide (requiring teaching it to half of us).
But our music and our clothes were locked inside. The key was not found. We discovered an unlocked window, which we shoved a teammate through, who retrieved clothes in varying states of cleanliness and the ipod.
We get there, frantically learn the electric slide, to discover that they cannot hook up the ipod. So we have no music. We try to figure out what else we can do. Half of us shoot down the hokey pokey. We figure out that we can play the ipod loudly into the micorphone and decide to go with it *as we are walking down the aisle to perform*. No joke.
We were in various states of dress and cleanliness (but with matching shirts) and we were definetly not all together, but we survived and made (most of) us laugh hysterically when we were done.
Laughter is amazing. I didn't expect this to involve so much of it. More amusing stories and oddities of life in Russia/in a Soviet-era camp to come.
And God is still good. (tbc)
Flexibility at its Finest
Today, we went to the beach down the camp road. On the way back, a teammate discovered that she had lost the key to her and her two teammates' room. We were all in our swimsuits and a few of us had other clothes on, but not all (or had gotten them wet at the beach). We had 5 minutes before we had to go perform for the camp (and maybe their parents), which we had found out only earlier that afternoon. We thought we would sing My Sunshine and dance the electric slide (requiring teaching it to half of us).
But our music and our clothes were locked inside. The key was not found. We discovered an unlocked window, which we shoved a teammate through, who retrieved clothes in varying states of cleanliness and the ipod.
We get there, frantically learn the electric slide, to discover that they cannot hook up the ipod. So we have no music. We try to figure out what else we can do. Half of us shoot down the hokey pokey. We figure out that we can play the ipod loudly into the micorphone and decide to go with it *as we are walking down the aisle to perform*. No joke.
We were in various states of dress and cleanliness (but with matching shirts) and we were definetly not all together, but we survived and made (most of) us laugh hysterically when we were done.
Laughter is amazing. I didn't expect this to involve so much of it. More amusing stories and oddities of life in Russia/in a Soviet-era camp to come.
And God is still good. (tbc)
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Status Update
Adjusting to life at camp in Russia. Eating lots of food 3-5 times per day, kids flocking to us at any moment and looking at us like celebrities, and it being light out at 11pm and again at 4am. And the +9hour time difference from Michigan. Grateful that I have teammates and that internet access is relatively easy. Looking forward to getting settled into classes begining tommorow and having a chance to thoroughly unpack and to skype with friends later.
Hope to share more insightful things once I get settled.
EDIT: +8 hour time difference from Michigan
Hope to share more insightful things once I get settled.
EDIT: +8 hour time difference from Michigan
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Jot
I'm in Russia!
It seems so surreal that what was a collection of photos in a 5 minute presentation less than 2 years ago is now a real country, with real people, that I am going to meet within the hour.
Wow.
It seems so surreal that what was a collection of photos in a 5 minute presentation less than 2 years ago is now a real country, with real people, that I am going to meet within the hour.
Wow.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Weaving
It's getting late, and it's been a full week so far, so I don't have much time before I need to go to bed, but I wanted to blog a few things.
It has been a week of ups and downs. Nothing extreme, which is good, but still swinging from optimism to anxiety and back, sometimes within the same day.
I love the way that walking with HIM is a sequence of opportunities he invites us into. I love the way that he gives us promises in his Word and then gives a chance to take him at it. I am eager to discover what Joshua discovered. I am eager to discover that HE will be with me wherever I go. I love the reminders of the promises that I have kept and collected and (in some cases) worn over the years, especially as of late, and being able to know them deeply, and yet there are still more promises to discover, still more depth to the promises already given.
We were doing an exercise in the Mediterranean room (where teachers teaching in that region go to learn things specific to their region) this afternoon and there were books out on the table and shirts and other cultural items tacked on the wall, and I find a penetrating curiosity about them, and one I've felt before as well. I don't know if it's just curiosity or indicative of something more. I'm not dwelling on it or anything, but something I'm noting.
God is good.
(x-posted)
It has been a week of ups and downs. Nothing extreme, which is good, but still swinging from optimism to anxiety and back, sometimes within the same day.
I love the way that walking with HIM is a sequence of opportunities he invites us into. I love the way that he gives us promises in his Word and then gives a chance to take him at it. I am eager to discover what Joshua discovered. I am eager to discover that HE will be with me wherever I go. I love the reminders of the promises that I have kept and collected and (in some cases) worn over the years, especially as of late, and being able to know them deeply, and yet there are still more promises to discover, still more depth to the promises already given.
We were doing an exercise in the Mediterranean room (where teachers teaching in that region go to learn things specific to their region) this afternoon and there were books out on the table and shirts and other cultural items tacked on the wall, and I find a penetrating curiosity about them, and one I've felt before as well. I don't know if it's just curiosity or indicative of something more. I'm not dwelling on it or anything, but something I'm noting.
God is good.
(x-posted)
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Starting Line
1:30AM Michigan time.
After two flights (one of which involved the flight attendant asking if there was a doctor or person in the medical field on board and paramedics upon arrival), a 2 hour shuttle van ride (because the drivers didn't know where they were going and couldn't read handwriting or understand our English), and 15 minutes dealing with a newbie security guard who couldn't find room keys for me, I am in my room in LA. Training starts tomorrow afternoon.
I'm going to go pray and sleep now. It's been a long past 48 hours...
After two flights (one of which involved the flight attendant asking if there was a doctor or person in the medical field on board and paramedics upon arrival), a 2 hour shuttle van ride (because the drivers didn't know where they were going and couldn't read handwriting or understand our English), and 15 minutes dealing with a newbie security guard who couldn't find room keys for me, I am in my room in LA. Training starts tomorrow afternoon.
I'm going to go pray and sleep now. It's been a long past 48 hours...
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