Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

I’m Thankful…

- For adventures. And change.
- That the Lord anticipates my needs before I realize there’s something coming.
- For kindred spirits and shared experience.
- That the void created by distance can’t and doesn’t make you love someone any less.
- For turkey, Stove Top stuffing, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie shared over big laughs and meaningful conversation. A welcome change from last Thanksgiving when I roamed around Zurich solo and bought a McDonald’s chicken sandwich and a cup of cider on the street for my dinner.

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone. Can’t tell you how much I miss you all. This season has absolutely snuck up on me. I’ve been completely blindsided by the realization that it’s December. December. I’ve mentioned before that it’s been bizarre to step outside each morning to green on the trees, flowers, dust in the air, and—despite the occasional monsoon that serves as a reminder that we’re on the brink of rainy season—generally sunny, warm weather. I stepped through some dead leaves at the Nairobi Arboretum last weekend while my roommate and I were on a little Saturday excursion and about squealed. What a delicious reminder of the season. Crunchy leaves. Mmmm.

Well, this post-Obama world has been a real trip. In my last blog entry, I asked you to keep Kenya in mind as you prayed over the election. If you hadn’t heard, nearly an hour after the election results were announced here in Nairobi, President Kibaki declared November 5 a national holiday to celebrate their Kenyan brother. The eve of what we American expats have christened “Obama Day,” several of us went out to dinner at the local Yaya Centre and I’ll tell you what, we nearly got ourselves a free dinner just because folks were so excited about Mr. Obama. It used to be that we would walk along and now and then hear shouts of “Hey Mzungu!” [white person] on the street, but that week the calls changed to, “Hey! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!!!” Personally, I think the people of Kenya are in for a little disappointment when they realize eventually that despite Obama’s Kenyan and Luo heritage, there really won’t be many perks for his “brothers and sisters” out here in Africa. Sorry, folks.

Another prayer update: our accreditation process went beautifully. Oh, I can’t tell you how thankful I am for all of your prayers and encouragement! We are all absolutely excited and relieved. A lot of work went into preparing for the ACSI accrediting team’s visit a couple of weeks ago, and it seems that that has paid off. We won’t know for sure of our accredited status until January when the ACSI folks back in the States process and approve the team’s report, but things are looking good. There were four folks who came and spent the week poking around the school—one was a teacher and administrator at nearby Rosslyn Academy, another is a teacher and administrator at a similar school to ours in Cameroon, and the other two team members work with ACSI in a more direct manner. I got to know one of the ladies over a dinner we had for them at a local Italian restaurant, and I really don’t think the woman could have been any friendlier. Really sweet gal from North Carolina who’s now living in Budapest. She came and observed my English 10 class as the kids were giving persuasive speeches (a la Atticus Finch…we had just finished To Kill a Mockingbird), and just had the kindest things to say about the class and the kids afterwards. Totally took some of the sweating bullets pressure out of the whole ordeal. She even gave me a hug a few times, which I hadn’t expected from a team member meant to come and “verify” our accreditation documents and scrutinize the inner structure of our school. But I thought, “Hey—I’ll take it!”

So now I find myself officially three weeks away from my first Christmas break on the “educator” side of education. Glorious feeling. We’ve got two more weeks of class (I am working frantically to get my kids through Taming of the Shrew, Antigone, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), a week of finals, and then whiz-bang-boom: done! I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting over how this semester has gone, and while I can absolutely identify some spots where I really just had no idea what the heck I was doing, I feel really blessed at the Lord’s provision and intervention in my classroom. I am so impressed by the kind of thinking so many of my kids are doing. And I think the biggest pat on the back I can give myself (and by “myself,” I really mean Jesus…) was the call I made to rearrange my curriculum in my English classes and center each unit on a central question and theme. My students are getting ready for their finals right now in which I’ve asked them to do a take-home portion where they’ll identify an issue or topic or question that they’ve considered during their work in my class this semester and generate a “Multigenre Paper” (thank you, Dr. Romano and EDT 427) in which they’ll explore that focus through several different “lenses” (genres/perspectives) to express to me as their teacher exactly what they learned from their English class work thus far. Should be interesting to see what the kids turn in. I’ll let you know. The break will be such a welcome opportunity for rest and getting ahead for next semester. I think we’ve settled on heading to Maasai Mara in early January for a few days with a bunch of folks from school—so I have plans in order for my first official safari. Every now and then I’m reminded that my life here really is pretty cool :)

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Departing now a bit from the typical contents of these blog entries, I just want to take a moment to be a little transparent with you all and share something that’s really influencing and changing my life at the moment. Now, maybe I’m being a little too frank in sharing this with you, but I’m a big fan of transparency, so here goes. Recently, my comrade in singleness in my house has switched over to the other side and I’m now finding myself as the only single girl in a house of four. It’s a situation with which I’m pretty unfamiliar. While I’ve lived with some roommates in the past who have been in relationships and had friends who have dated people and even saw some friends get married over the past year, I’ve always felt like I’m in a solid group of people experiencing totally “normal” singlehood. Most of my good friends in college weren’t in relationships and I remember my sorority pledge class joking near graduation about how not a single one of us was engaged. Being single was standard. Typical. Normal.

So you can imagine, perhaps, my initial dismay at finding myself alone in being alone. I don’t know, I guess I had just predicted that I would be surrounded by a bunch of young single folks out on a similar stint like me—not worrying about relationship status and ticking clocks and all that. I wrote an e-mail home to my parents and mentioned this change and how I was initially reacting to it and laughed out loud when I received my most recent Thanksgiving puffy envelope from home and pulled out a copy of Jennifer Marshall’s Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of Single Life in the Twenty-First Century. Now I realize that this wasn’t a novel entitled, Old Maids: What to Do When You Realize You’re a Hopeless, Manless Wreck, and I know that my family loves and respects me in all the ways a daughter could hope for, but I’ll admit that my initial reaction to the gift was tinged with trepidation and disinterest. In my experience with perpetual singleness, I’ve grown weary of feeling like there’s something wrong with me—either something unattractive to the opposite sex and therefore keeping me from a relationship or else something altogether “off” about the way I’ve lived my life. And I’d expected to find companions in this journey here in Kenya, and found myself a little disappointed in getting slapped once again by the hand of Expectation.

But you know, the Lord is really, really good. In this little stretch of my life where I really could be feeling kind of sorry for myself and mope around all “woe is me, why can’t I find a man?”—instead, I’m reveling in this sense of purpose and possibility and calling. I suppose I can attribute much of this to that little book from my folks that sat on my bedside table for a few hours before curiosity got the better of me and I picked it up and started to read. I keep thinking or daydreaming up all of these delightful little perks of being not merely in an “in between” stage, but instead in a “not yet/here and now” kind of stage. My desire to one day get married and have a family has always, as I’m sure it is for many girls, been one of those dreamed-about shadows that, while it lingers just barely out of reach, is somehow something worthy of planning your entire life around. I’ve never been in a relationship before, but somehow I’ve still managed to impress upon myself that my value—at least in part—is equal to what men see in me. I’ve felt incomplete because of my singleness. Incomplete and wrong. But the Lord is stirring up something new in my heart. Something exciting. I’ve asked myself to think about what my life could look like if I were still single five, maybe ten, years from now—and instead of feeling dismay or disillusionment, I’m filled with this sense of “Well—that’s not necessarily what I’d choose for myself…but that could work.” I’ve imagined all of the adventures I could go on—continuing to work at West Nairobi School or moving on to something different. I could live in some big city and, despite my lamentable lack of rhythm and muscle memory, take dance lessons—or art classes or something. I’d have shelves full of books I’d actually read and not just thought about reading. I could devote my time to service and ministry in my community. I could get a dog. Run a marathon. Invest in real estate. Meet new people and try new things. I could be “cool Aunt Kate” and make up a guest room for my little nieces and nephews and have them over on weekends to take advantage of them at their best and when they start to get cranky, send them back to their mommy and daddy. I could travel the world. I could write a book. I could do so much.

What a revelation. I’m telling you—I haven’t felt this content in where God has me in ages. What a tremendous gift to have that weight of “wrongness” and doubt lifted. He has me exactly where He wants me, if only I’ll let this be that place. Things are still difficult and complicated and I certainly haven’t let go of the dreams and hopes that I have for a “someday” future, but wow. It’s great to know that I don’t have to wait around to live my life. That my greatest purpose is not in what’s five, ten, twenty or more years down the line—but in how I’m living my life for the Lord in the here and now. And boy, I don’t want to rush what God’s got planned for me. I want to soak up whatever it is He’s got in mind for me from here on out. No more silly girlish pining and whining. This is where I am. When something else comes along, I’m sure God will make me keenly aware of it, and then it’ll be time for that something else—whatever it may be.

My wish for you, dear friends, family and readers, is that God would give you peace and comfort in your circumstances, too.

Thankful for you all,
Kate