Welp, here goes!
There was a small chance that I would be speaking about my experience in Russia this Sunday, which motivated me to finally do some more processing. I'm also getting an important piece of mail in the next two days, to which I will return later in this post. All this to say, I think I'm ready to start telling more of my Russia story.
So the last true update left off somewhere around the middle of the month.
Amtek left camp on the 15th of July, which was sad. We did get to ride the bus all the way back to the city with them, though. I got to spend 2 wonderful hours with my favorite student Alyona, dicussing colors and music. We had a similar taste in music, which was so fun! I recently found a band called Within Temptation, which I have never heard much about and thought noone else had heard of them. But lo and behold, she had! We shared earbuds--and yummy butter cookies-- for the ride. Wonderful.
We said goodbye and got to see their school in the city. I had lots of fun taking photos of the chemistry classroom--the periodic table was in Russian! ^.^ And it was great to see Yalaina's face light up with joy and pride when she showed us her new classroom and her previous student's work...! That was a good day, even if we did have to say goodbye. Although, it wasn't until several days later that I really started to miss them. I think it's indicative of the sheer weight that this trip had on me emotionally that things like "I'm never ever going to see these kids again" didn't even begin to register until several handfuls of hours later. That's just kind of how it felt the whole time--emotionally, mentally, lagging. I mean, the physical jet lag wore off fine. I think the adjustment just kind of shocked my system a bit; taking things longer to register and sort through. :(
We had a few days off. Camp was empty. Quiet. It was nice, but then got a little boring and slightly creepy. Half of the team went to Moscow for the weekend. I didn't go--I'm not much of a tourist and trying to coordinate bus schedules and currency exchanges...and paying the equivalent of +$100 for it was not for me. I was quite content to stay back at camp with three of my teammates. We even got to dance out in the rare rain shower! =)
And then things got challenging. We had hundreds of new kids show up...but we were never sure who was supposed to be in our classes or when. We had a group, and then they disappeared, and we got new students halfway through...oh man, was it confusing. Our relationships with these kids took longer to form because they didn't intentionally involve us the way Amtek did. Which left me, a few days prior to departure, feeling frustrated and guilty. I felt like I had done nothing that month. It was our last week there and I was still not in comfortable relatively-easy relationships with my students, and that left me feeling like a failure. And then I realized that I had had far less time with these students than I was imagining--I reminded myself that they were still new students and that while I had been there for several weeks, they had only been there a week. I knew that if Amtek were still there, I would have been in a different place. I would have had many more weeks with them, to love them and share with them.
But it was in these weeks that I think I learned the most. At least, the moments of learning that stand out to me the clearest. Several of our kids in these weeks were from a local orphanage, which posed interesting relational challenges. I had one girl who was so, so sweet. She was so affectionate and loved to give me hugs, which, if you know me, can be an awkward thing. But I loved giving her hugs. She was so sweet. I don't know if she was from the orphanage or not, but how quickly and tightly she latched onto me made me wonder if she was. :( But I loved her anyway.
There were two other girls in one of my classes who were very attention-seeking. Not bad kids, but certainly disruptive and exasperating. One had scars all up her arms. When I saw this, I took a deep breath and said, Okay. This is what you came for. I knew it would be there. I knew it would be, and all of the things that go into someone self-injuring were the things I cared about and wanted to stand against in going to Russia. It's why I went, I just didn't expect to see it to clearly or immediately--they didn't cover them up at all, and would pick at the scabs in class. But I digress. We never spoke about things like that, we never built that relationship. But their attention-seeking did open my eyes to what it means to serve and to care from a teacher's perspective. Loving and serving them meant having patience with them and treating them with the same respect that I showed every other student. Not giving into their demands, but not dismissing them in frustration like perhaps so many of their other teachers probably have. It seemed like the rubber met the road there. I could be loving and patient to any of my students outside of class, but it was a lot easier to only hang out with the easy kids outside of class, and what kind of service is that? The kind of love and service that He calls us to is not the easy kind. This kind of love and service matters most when it's hard, like with difficult students in class that you can't ignore.
I learned several things over the summer, and one of those was service. I'll get back to the other things later and in more detail at some other time (real life grading calls!), but for now, I'll focus on what I learned about service. I learned more of what it looked like to serve others in my time in Russia. Service requires a relationship. It's not just a list of things that need to be done and checking them off for other people. Service requires something deeper than that. It's patiently spending 20 minutes communicating one point of a simple conversation to someone across a language barrier. It's treating those problem students in a way that trusts them and spurs them forward. I want to reflect this understanding of service in all that I do here, back in my "real life" with my friends, with my small group, with my family, and with my students (both IV and those to whom I teach chemistry).
I also saw, like the Word says in Psalms, that I am safe when I follow HIM. I can trust him to care for me and to provide for me when I follow where he leads me. I was cared for and provided for in ways I never expected throughout this trip, not the least of which was being more than fully-funded. Hot water. Teammates. Forests. And not even just the trip itself. Every single step of even getting to Russia was iniated and led by HIM. For the past two years, it has all been led by him, from leaving grad school to finding an apartment and a job and eventually finding the opportunity to go to Russia and then actually going, and finding a new job and apartment upon my return, and never seeing more than one step ahead. And I am SO. HAPPY. I am so happy. I don't think I've even been this happy.
Given these things, I have decided to apply for staff with InterVarsity for the upcoming school year. There, I said it, it's out! I will have the application in hand hopefully by the end of this week! I am so excited! Oh, I could tell you so many things about this, and I will soon! Briefly, though, this is something that I feel I have poked at for a couple years now, about a year or two. I've gotten enough shoves in this direction that I feel like doing anything else would be stupid and disobedient. I love working with students. I really do. And I have always felt the need to give them space in my life and in my heart. Space for them to discover the things they need to discover in a safe place. And InterVarsity did that in my life. I'll tell more about this later. And in keeping with all this, I think I will continue to adjunct part-time and then staff part-time, at least for now. But where this ties into Russia is on on those rare occasions when I could walk around camp by myself, it would occur to me that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Just being present to the members of that community and living, walking, teaching, serving, loving with them. I want to do that with my students, really do that in a way that isn't just on a volunteer basis. I am so excited for the possibility of doing that by going on staff with InterVarsity!
And now, dear readers, I must go. I have several lab reports to grade before the morning! I will add more stories at a later date. But here's to watching the Story unfold!
