For a Dear Friend

becky    Uncategorized    

Two posts for the price of one today. A dear friend requested that I share some stories of crazy things that have happened, so I will share two. One that will be new to all and one that will be new to some.

The first incident happened while Toffer was in Nepal.  I have found that I am treated differently when I’m out alone and depending on the gender and ethnicity of the person I’m interacting with that can be a good thing or a bad thing.  Surprisingly the awkward situation I’m about to relate was from someone I would have previously thought would be appropriately friendly with me or just smile and move on.  Not so on this day.  Benjamin had been asking for days to go to our favorite Indian restaurant, though some of that might be that it’s the only restaurant he knows the name to because we ate there so often when we first moved.  We really like the food and the staff are friendly and like our boys, so I was game. It’s a place I know and felt comfortable going by myself with the boys.  We sat down to eat, half a dozen restaurant employees came by to talk to/play with the boys at various times, it was a typical meal.

I noticed a couple sit down at the table next to us, closest to Benjamin’s side of the table. I wouldn’t have expected either one of them to interact with us.  As we’re eating the woman reaches over and touches Benjamin and makes a comment about how much he’s eating. We get lots of comments like that because our boys eat a ridiculous amount of food for their ages, so at first I didn’t think a lot about it. Then she starts asking questions, while continuing to touch Benjamin while he’s trying to eat-rubbing his head, pulling on his arms, etc. I can tell he’s getting uncomfortable and so am I, but I didn’t know what to do. She asked how much Benjamin weighs, how much he weighed at birth, how he was born, and several other odd questions.  Then she asks if I take care of myself, which I thought meant if I had taken good care of myself when I was pregnant.  Her dining companion clarified that question by saying she meant partner/housemate.  Then she asked if all my children had the same father and is Benjamin’s father European (all Caucasians are called Europeans).  A few more odd questions that I can’t remember were asked after that.  For the record-I’m very much married to one man who is the father of all of my children. He’s half “European” and half Chinese (though at the store the other day he had a lady ask if his wife was Chinese because she could see it in the boys and apparently thought it didn’t come from him).  I don’t particularly like essentially being called a woman with loose morals. And I have rings on my ring fingers on both hands, so in any culture it should be easy to see that I’m married.  Regardless to say it wasn’t the nice, relaxed dinner with the boys that we were all looking forward to.

And for story number two.  We went to a neighboring country last week for a couple days, so we were staying in a hotel.  A vast majority of the people staying there were ethnically Asian of one kind or another, so like most places we go, we were really obvious and stuck out.  We ate breakfast at the hotel for sake of ease. They claimed it was an American buffet, but I don’t know a lot of Americans who eat fried rice or roti with chicken curry gravy for breakfast. Maybe just the concept of a buffet was the American part.  We actually liked the food as did the boys, so it was fine. Anyway, that doesn’t have much to do with the story except the roti part (which only Toffer ate with the curry gravy).  Roti is a sort of crepe-like bread dish that’s really tasty.  We first had it in Singapore a couple years ago and can get it here, too.  You can get it plain or with fillings.  For breakfast I like it with egg inside and a little sugar on top.

So, there’s a sweet girl (who looked like she’s actually from the country we spend most of our time in) making the roti fresh for breakfast. I stood in line both days to get it for myself and for the boys, so ended up going up more than once both days.  On the second day I went up a second time to ask said sweet girl to make me a roti with egg for Samuel. The guy in front of me in line sort of laughs and says something along the lines of “You like this very much. I see you have gotten much of it for two days now.” Wow-CREEPY!

Okay, first of all, most of what I ordered was for my toddlers and their aforementioned voracious appetites.  Apparently he wasn’t watching me too closely, otherwise he would have known that. Second, I’m not some silly westerner who is enjoying the novelty of this new food. We have a place three blocks away from our house that makes it and we eat there all the time.  Thirdly, you’re a creepy guy with a creepy laugh and I don’t like that you’re watching me. Please stop. Thank you very much.

And that’s my life, folks.

Transition

becky    Uncategorized    

It’s been a while since I wrote anything and have been mulling around various ideas. I’ve sat down multiple times to write and nothing that made sense or seemed interesting came out.  Toffer’s been doing this crazy thing called work, so while he has plenty to write about, especially his trip to Nepal, his brain is a little taxed right now.  So, I’ve decided I’ll write another post about something we spent some amount of time talking about at training and that is a very common topic of conversation in our house-transition!

Many transitions exist in life and some are walked through much quicker and easier than others.  For us, we’re going through one of the most difficult transitions possible-a long-term cross-cultural move.  We’ve mentioned transition a lot, but I thought it might be helpful to write a bit more specifically about it.  In any transition there are five stages-settled, unsettling, chaos, resettling, and settled.  In our situation unsettling also brought a lot of loss, which brings grief with it, so we’re also experiencing the five stages of grief intermixed with walking (stumbling?) through transition.

Settled means you are in a place where you have a sense of belonging, you have friends, a general routine, things feel normal and comfortable a lot of the time.  Unsettling (or uprooting if you go by plant terms) is when things begin to change in the process.  For us unsettling in some ways started when we initially said “yes” to HCJB Global, though the majority of it was the last few months we were in the US.  It’s when things become uncomfortable and the realization of the changes that are ahead become more real.  During the unsettling period we said lots of good-byes, sold off or gave away most of our worldly possessions, did many things for the last time before the big move, etc. After unsettling comes chaos-the stage when very few things feel settled, normal, or comfortable.  Then comes resettling-the time when a new normal is beginning to be established, friends are made, life has a little more order and sense to it.  And finally, we come back around to settled-a time with routine, a place where you are known and know others, a normalcy and things that are comfortable.

Right now I’d say we’re pretty much smack dab in the middle of chaos. Chaos is the point when life is just about survival mode, few things seem settled or normal.  It’s mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually draining.  It makes our brains fuzzy and our bodies worn.  We ask each other questions and literally cannot come up with answers.  We aren’t doing anything wrong nor is chaos a spiritual attack, it’s simply part of the process in a transition and one that can come up even years later for those of us who live overseas.  In some ways transition is never fully complete for us because so many variables exist in our lives.

We’ve been told that we came to the field under some of the highest stress conditions possible-two toddlers, expecting another baby, right before my birthday and the holiday season.  The only thing that would have made it more stressful is if we’d not had family and dear friends to walk us through our last days literally to the security line at the airport and if we’d not had lovely team mates who have done everything from feed us for a week when we first arrived to house hunting with us to making sure we got Christmas shopping for the boys and each other done.

Life for us at this point is very much day by day and very often hour by hour.  Some days are easier than others.  Some days we feel more confident about living here and figuring things out, other days we all go to bed just wishing we could go home.  The great thing is that it’s okay to feel anything and everything we’re feeling.  And everything we’re walking through, experiencing, feeling is typical and normal.  We’re very much over any honeymoon stage (though the aforementioned stressors made our honeymoon period fairly short).

We’ve had a few people ask us if we’re adjusted, the kids are adjusted, we’re feeling at home, etc. No, we’re not and it would be completely unreasonable for us to think that after less than three months that we would be.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now-it will take us 12-18 months to adjust, which means we’re maybe a quarter of the way through the process.  We think that by the holiday season this year (yes, months away from now) we’ll probably be feeling fairly settled here. We’ll have our household well established, we’ll be involved with a church, we’ll have made friends, we’ll know where and how to get most things we use, and we’ll have found our new normal.  The added transition of a new baby thrown in the mix does not make the process any easier and could lengthen the entire process for us, though we also won’t know how to do it any other way and it might not make as much of a difference as I think it could.  It’s also possible that this being the only home Tadpole knows might help us feel a little more at home ourselves.  We’ll see when s/he arrives how that impacts our current state.

We knew going into this that we were signing up for a difficult life.  The thing about it is that I’ve not found anything in scripture that says following God and His plan for our lives is supposed to be easy-full of financial stability, good health,low stress, and happiness.  Look at the life Paul led.  If he had believed that following God and taking His love to the nations would result in life, love, and the pursuit of happiness then he would have been sorely disappointed with the way his life turned out.  He probably would have been a lot angrier with God about the whole shipwrecked, beaten, imprisoned thing had he believed that the path he was on would be an easy one because it’s the one God put  him on.

Transition is difficult. I’m not going to sugar coat our experience and make it seem like we’re tra, la, la-ing through it all, which I feel like maybe I have at times.  We have had times of happiness and fun while we’ve been here. We’ve seen God provide in some really amazing ways and I don’t want to discount that at all.  I keep feeling like because we are what we are that we should have all these huge “ah-ha” God moments.  We honestly haven’t. What we’ve had is this steady presence day in and day out and something happen at least once a day when we can say “That can only be explained by the hand of God” (i.e.-meerkats at the zoo we visited in a neighboring country-a bigger God moment than you can imagine).

We’re going to continue walking this walk, following this path.  One day it will get easier to live here, we’ll be more settled and more established.  We’ll miss things from home a little less-hopefully not the people, though.  We’ll keep doing “thank you God for…” with the boys at the end of the day to remember that God is always worthy of thanks and praise no matter our circumstances.  And we won’t try to rush the process of transition because of other people’s expectations or our own desire to feel less chaotic and out of sorts.  We’ll continue taking life a day at a time and as time goes this will feel more and more like home and things we do will feel more and more normal. Until then, we’ll give ourselves and each lots of grace and do the amazing work God has called us to.