..review

So 3 out of 4 winter breaks has come and is going and it followed the trends of the previous two, with quite a bit more intensity.

Timeline of my break:
Finished school December 7th, left for Camden, New Jersey on the 8th, came back to Seattle on the 21st, went to visit my grandparents the 22nd-25th, and will be going to Portland for New Years tomorrow.

There has been a lot of movement and traveling but it has been littered with struggle and frustration, fantasies of chain smoking, and censored conversation with my family.

For the sake of brevity I guess I will just run through what the hell has happened over the last month in my life.

Right before I left, we had a semi-good bye party for John. He has decided to travel for the next quarter and so this would be the last time we all had a chance to enjoy his company for the next few months. We spent the night throwing Lunchables bologna at the walls and at some point our kitchen table turned into a tattoo parlor. The joy of freedom from academia and stress was apparent and we stayed up too late to enjoy the last few moments of our lives together. At some point in the night a small group of us gathered in the guest bedroom, where John was repacking his bags, and we decided to pray together. This spontaneous eruption of prayer is probably the most sacred time in our house for me and it was so fitting. In that moment I was overwhelmed with the amount of blessing that had been poured out on us over the last quarter and the amazing blessing of being able to share life with the people in that room. Not to sound clique, but God was really there.

I slept for 2 hours, got up and put my luggage in the car for the airport at freaking 4 in the morning. We said our goodbyes and some where fine, with the promise of familiarity in just a short 3 weeks. The goodbye for John was not really like that though. I had been wondering what that moment would be like since his announcement of traveling was made in our living room a month before. I hugged his little torso, with a fresh tattoo of 'HOPE' from the night before and left for the airport. I let myself cry awake.

But I got to the airport and I had to shift gears, preparing mentally for two weeks of a SPRINT group and a new place, with new challenges and problems and people. The flight was good, filled with excitement and my journey to Camden began with a prayer in the airport. We arrived in Philadelphia 7 hours later and Matt picked us up, drove us over the Ben Franklin Bridge, through Pennsaken, and to our home.

I worked in a 7th grade class room in the mornings with Mrs. Richards, a 50-something white teacher from the suburbs and 18 beautiful kids. Ador, AB, Shane, Ricky, Cierra, LeShawn, Alexsandra, Joel, Edwardo, Natalie, and others where the energy filled potential that sat in the seats and where bustled around the school by raised voices for the two weeks I was there. To be completely honest, the classroom was really difficult for me. I wasn't really integrated into the course. Mrs. Richard's was reaching the end of the quarter and exhausted so I did what I could and graded papers, imputed scores into the computer, and explained the Holocaust. It was exhausting to watch her yell and after a week I was frustrated to the point of tears, watching a good 40% of the class day rot away in a struggle for silence and stillness, objectives that seem futile and pointless to me, a simple diversion to creative engagement and positive re-enforcement on the teacher's part. The best part of the two weeks that I was there was the hour I was left alone with the class, to monitor 'free time'. After about 20 minutes of knitting and other various activities, boredom entered the classroom and the volume rose, indicating a need for some direction. So Shane came up to the front of the class and shared a poem that he had written about a love just out of reach of his clammy, prematurely aged hands. And the class was quiet and then they erupted in clapping and began to clamor for their chance at classroom fame. Cierra came up and shared a poem about her life in Camden and then the class snapped with reverence at her accurate depiction of marginalized hope in a 'place like Camden'. It was this moment that Mrs. Richard's returned to the class of civilized poets. In my pride and self-righteousness I felt like it was my middle finger to her two of screaming demands.

I would leave, have lunch with my team and then scrounge up a ride to the downtown after school camp. I worked with 12 kids there, between the 3 and 5th grade. They were noticeably more intense than the kids at Camden Forward and the experience was much more confrontational and brash. I found it much easier to love these kids, in all of their cursing and song-singing that in the artificially forced silence of the private school. I worked with Jacob on his social studies homework, Shaniya on her reading, Tanequah on a crayon rendition sun bathing rabbits, and Robert on basic phonics. Robert is in 3rd grade, has a learning disability, and can't read. He can also plaster this ears to the side of his head which is pretty funny. His nickname for me was Squidward and it kind of made me sad. Haha. After school was great. We left with the grand finale of roller skating. The is something neutralizing about a common activity where screaming is okay and everyone is on the edge of failure. It was the deepest sense of settledness I experienced in Camden, rolling around in circles with my lonely hand filled with the love and trust of learning roller skaters.

I struggled immensely in Camden. Poverty is fucking horrible. It watch children be neglected and an entire section of society ignored is infuriating and I don't really know what to think/do about it at the end of the day. I found myself looking at my skin color with confusion, realizing how little I know about myself and how awkward I feel in my caucasian suit. I am excited about this awkwardness and excited to stumble into learning something new about the world and myself.

God was in Camden and he was there in little ways and in big ones too. The people that are there are brimming with God. I have much more to learn about this and I feel like it will come with more reflection and time and conversation with God.

Coming home. Haha. The same. Nothing changes but I change and then this become an intense disconnect because I have the same face and the same laugh, but my brain is different and my heart is different and my understanding of myself and God and this world are all different. So I get asked how it was working with inner city black kids and don't know what to say and I get talked at about how many people in poverty would not choose to leave because of a lack of moral fiber and sit in shock and I get told that hating rich people is a sin and that I comprise 1/4 of the perfect American family. I am at the point where I don't know how to engage my father. I don't know what loving him looks like because I feel loved by him but entirely misunderstood, which leaves me confused and frustrated as hell.

I don't know how to be the quintessential daughter in a lilly-white, suburban landscape when I don't think about family like that anymore and I experience God in community. So I cry because they don't know me and its hard to love people who are so close but who don't understand. I fear that I come across as an arrogant bitch and I don't how to be and how to love.

So its good to be back in my house, where laughter comes easily and God is here in life and not just in verbiage. I am really excited for this next quarter. I am excited to learn, so much! I am excited to love with abandon and get hurt and get up and be okay. I am excited to fall asleep talking with God and wake up dreaming about foreign relations with China and laugh at how fucking ridiculous I am.

It should be a great quarter.

..failure

Sometime I feel like I fail at all of my relationships at the same time.

I think that this might go in cycles and it something that I need to pay attention to.

I don't think that I have a place to fall that is soft, relationally, and at the end of a exhausting quarter, its all I want.


God is good, he provides. He is perspective and he is the greatest sociologist. (Damn sociology. I hate you right now)