Faces in the Crowd

Sorry about the blog silence over these past few pivotal weeks. Settling into life as a full-fledged Volunteer has taken much of my energy, and I had little left to tell you about it! Even now I'm only going to give you an overall sketch because I've got to get on with my lesson plans for tomorrow.

But, on the whole, the thing about making a home for myself here is that my sense of belonging is coming in very slowly even though I have to jump right into family/teaching/life. Maybe it has to be that way for me to make strong connections that won't wear out over two years?

This feeling of nowness is so very different from training because the expectations of me are preceding my adjustment (training gave me nothing but time to adjust, I felt). But here, I land with a new family and am expected to belong to them for two years before we've found any kind of rhythm for living together. I get the same feeling at my school: I'm torn between wanting to get the lay of the land and needing to hit the ground running.

And the most disorienting part of all for me is not quite knowing the people of my community. For both my town and school I feel a little lost in the welcome of a large, interconnected group of people who all know who I am but who I don't yet know. There are easily a hundred people every day who can greet me with "Hello, Mollie" (or, more popularly, "Peace Corps!"), but to me most of them are just vaguely familiar faces. The heavy work of adjusting is forming those individual relationships--those friendships--that will help light my way to familiarity with my community here.

Those kinds of friendships are slow in coming, and it's still too soon to say who my support network is here. My immediate family, my principal, my counterparts have all at least made formal commitments to help me or to work with me. And I'm happy to say that a few of the other teachers at my school and a couple of the other women in the community have been warm and welcoming. So that gives me a handful of people here who I hope one day I can call friends.

I suppose it’s obvious that the urgent need to feel settled clashes with the slowness of relationship building. It’s also probably redundant to point out that this dilemma leads to some pretty serious homesickness. But the wonderfully good news is that just as I was feeling this loneliness the worst this past Friday afternoon, I had a chance to stop by the Peace Corps office and check my locker, which was overflowing with mail from home. So thank you for writing! Thanks EJ and Annie for giving me identical sentences of news (“The Yankees won the World Series. (boo)”). Thanks Britty for the package that finally arrived. Thanks Mrs. Ottoson for the great seasonal greetings & encouragement. Thanks Ruthanne for the note stuck in my locker. And thanks Mom & Dad for never letting up with the steady stream of letters, photoessays, and encouragingly silly tidbits. You all continue to remind me why I’m out here doing this, and that I’ve already got a pretty swell support network who loves me very much.

So thanks for that! And more on the mail front, it looks like my family has its own PO Box that you can use to send me mail more directly. So feel free to send mail either to PO Box 9 or to PO Box 1773, depending on if you want me to read your letter at the PC Office or at home.

So thanks for the encouragement and the love. I’ll be sure to let you know how it’s going after I’ve had a bit time here … today was my first day of classroom teaching, after all!

Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for this challenge, partly because it makes me that much more thankful to have you all in my life.