Time

I know it has been a very long while since my last post, where I did say that there would be a next time.  I'll get back to that point in a minute.

I still look back at last summer with many emotions.  I've come to the conclusion that I will be processing this for a while.  I think all impactful (and I mean truly impactful, not just emotional) experiences will always be open for the examining.  I still think about the week-long mission trip to Costa Rica that I took my senior year of high school--that was 7 years ago, 7 years next month.  Nothing super-obviously revolutionary happened then, but I took risks I never took before, in a way that I could never take now.  I was super shy, but I still remember sitting on the bench in the part with Jill (I think that was her name; it sounds right at least) while everyone else on my team was playing soccer or maybe "Mas Alto!"  I knew zero Spanish.  Really.  I could say, Hola, commo estas?  But if they said anything other than Bieno, I was lost.  Ha.  But I sat and watched with her anyway, and attempted some sort of communication, but mostly sat in silence.  Now, in the same situation, I'm not sure I would have so naturally approached her.  I would think too much about it.  I would agonize over what I would say.  I would force conversation that didn't need to happen.  It challenges me to remember what I learned that week, that perhaps I was meant for such a time as this (Ester).  That I give what I can offer, and that is what is needed. 

Likewise, I think 7 years from now, I'll still be processing my trip to Russia.  I have no idea where I'll be in 7 years, but I'm sure that I'll remember certain facets of this trip, and be challenged in some way or be reminded of something I learned, like what it means to serve, or what it looks like to be surrendered to His leading.

I'm sure that I still don't know where this trip "leads."  I'm sure that the ramifications of me having gone on this trip are still to be seen, in ways that I will never expect.  For example, last weekend, I got a call from a friend and ministry partner.  He told me that they were going to be going to Russia this summer to help lead a conference for students there with his church, and he wanted to invite me along!  Oh, how exciting that would be!  Alas, I will be teaching here during that time frame.  But I am half expecting the other shoe to drop--for my supervisor to walk into my lab or office one day, or send me an email saying that they don't need me to teach that summer session, thereby enabling me to go to Russia again this summer!  How crazy awesome would that be! Maybe next year...

Okay, I know I said I would explain the weird dinosaur picture...but I have to go eat dinner now.  I'm exhausted after a day of teaching but I still have grading to do.  Maybe I'll take a grading break later on this evening and tell the story.  It's not as great a story as the anticipation is probably leading you to believe, it's just a complicated story requiring details.

Adieu (oui, c'est francias)

Some photos....

Alyona and I toasting bread over a campfire--they add garlic and olive oil to the toasted pieces--it's their traditional campfire snack!

Um, this will be explained next time...

Alyona and I saying goodbye in Cherepovets

At the Hermitage State Art Museum in St. Petersburg on our last day in Russia! From back to front: Rebecca, Spencer, Anna (our local guide and friend of Galina, not pictured), me, and Candy

Spencer and I on our way home.  Spencer's showing off her braclet that Evgeny made her!

Camp Yantar family for the last few weeks!  Saying goodbye.

It's Time

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!

We're "halfway" there...

So maybe I'm not halfway there, but I liked the title... An update is long over due. This still probably isn't the cohesive answer to "How was Russia?" people are looking for yet, but it is time for an update, and there are things to update about. My roommate and I have found an apartment. It's wonderful. We love the house and I'm enjoying the presence of my roommate. She's going to seminary for biblical counseling, so we certainly have some interesting things to talk about. It's been good to live with her so far. Unfortunately, both our schedules are so crazy that there are sometimes weeks when we literally don't see each other for 3 days straight. I also like the fact that I have 20-35 minute drives to both of my workplaces on country roads, so I have space to think. I like this. :) My new job as an adjunct lab instructor is going really well, also. I really enjoy it. Grading is a little burdensome, but nothing spectacularly terrible or anything. I like teaching and I like helping the students. It encourages me when my students say, "You explain things really well." Even though I don't teach lecture, some of my lab students are coming to my office hours because I explain things better than their lecture professor (who has a PhD). That's encouraging. I have new things to think about now that I'm home from Russia. It still doesn't all "fit" the way I'd like it to, but I can say that it was a *good* trip and that I am grateful for it. I'm moving into new stages in my life with lessons learned from this summer (on which I will post later). Even though things are insanely busy, I am happy. Every step to this point has been led by God, and I look forward to the steps ahead.

Delay

I'm sorry to say that though I have been back in America for just over two weeks now, I still do not have anything to really say.

When it comes to public blogs, I prefer them to be more like articles or essays. I take a lot of time to ponder what I'm saying, why I'm saying it, and how I'm going to say it. In order for me to write anything here about my trip, I need a chance to process it.

I have been asked a few times how the transition back to normal American life has been, my organization's staff has wished us smooth transitions back (of course, along with tools to help).

The problem is that I haven't even had time to transition. I haven't had a chance to process. I'm desperately searching for an apartment with a new roommate, and finding our pickings exceedingly slim. Options open and then close. We are dreading the close of one option that looks fabulous. I'm staying with a friend until then, so I still only have with me what I took with me to Russia while everything else sits in storage. My old landlord is being true to form--unclear, vague, unresponsive to emails or phonecalls. I'm starting a new job in two weeks as a lab instructor. I still am clueless about what is going on this semester in terms of InterVarsity leadership and structure, or who these new volunteers are, and I still haven't talked to my area director--which we have been planning to do since May. I feel like everything is on pause, and yet I have a longer to-do list than I feel I've ever had.

There are the beginnings of changes in my life, but I have yet to fully implement them. There are stories to tell, but hardly cohesive sagas. There are lessons learned, but words are hard to come by.

I hope to come by them soon, so that you, my faithful readers and supporters, will know what happened and what you helped support.

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

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!