News!! (Old and New)

I left off my last post desperately wanting to tell all about the changes that the wonderful experience of the Confluence and Cultures class and Soliya influenced in my life. However, I'm going to hold off for now because I have very exciting news that I have to share (to get somewhat caught up with this blog), and I'm running out of time to share it! I've known about this for a while, of course, but as I had gotten behind on blogging, I hadn't shared it yet.

Mike, the professor for my Confluence of Cultures class, has led a trip to the Yucatan Peninsula during the past several summers. This involves exploring ancient Mayan sites, but also teaching a short summer camp in the village of Yunku. He would have liked to have recruited the entire Confluence of Cultures class, but out of all of us, I was the only one who took the bate. So yes, after much planning, I will be traveling to the Yucatan with about 9 other students for the last two weeks of the month of June. We leave one week from today!


I could not be any more excited about this opportunity. As I am hoping to teach English as a foreign language abroad after graduation, this is going to provide invaluable experience, for one. Add to that the interaction with another culture (which I've discovered I absolutely adore), and this is just an ideal way to spend two weeks of the summer.

Of course, this is also involving a fair amount of work. I'm taking three classes that go along with the Yucatan program, Global Systems, Conversational Spanish, and an anthropology course on Mayan civilizations. On top of that, I'm taking Literary Theory and Criticism (yes, that is as thrilling as it sounds!) for my English major. So currently, I'm working away on school work.

On top of that, I have some more news (annnd this news is newer than the other). I just signed with AmeriCorps last week. I heard about this opportunity through the Center for Honors, Scholars, and Leaders at UNC, and as there were opportunities to serve at either the Boys and Girls Clubs of Weld County or the Global Refugee Center, of course I looked into them and applied. I had an interview the week before last and then signed on my birthday, June 5! Now, for those of you readers who don't know what that is, it's a governmental program that engages people in in community service work with the goal of "helping others and meeting critical needs in the community."

I will be working as an AmeriCorps volunteer at the Global Refugee Center in Greeley for the next year, and my first service day is actually tomorrow. Exciting!!! I will be writing more about the GRC and what exactly it is, but that's all for now.

Life Altering

We were to bring two 5 page papers with us to our first Confluence of Cultures class. One was to be over cultural background and the other over religious background. We sat in a circle in our classroom in the basement of the campus library, and as I ended up next to the professor, I had to share first. Now, I'm not a very outgoing person generally. I'm not awkwardly or painfully shy or anything, but I'm not the person to just open up. So what I shared was fairly limited. I didn't want to share any details at all with this small group of strangers. Little did I know, the sharing we did that first day would only be the tip of the iceberg. This class definitely pulled me out of my shell.

Words cannot describe the experience Confluence of Cultures offered me. I wish I could write every detail about it, but I'm pretty sure you don't want to read the quantity of a book in one post. But in short, it became far more than just a class. Granted, it was still very class-like in some ways. We had several books to read and papers to write during the semester. However, Mike, our professor, also brought in a personal element with several guest speakers and group discussions. Confluence of Cultures was a class to learn about Islam, Arabic countries, "the Middle East," culture, religion, etc. I truly cannot say what all I learned from this class. To sum it all up, this class seemed to me to be about personal discovery and reflection. This personal discovery and reflection for me was partly about religion, partly about nationality, but deeply about humanity, myself, and what social categories and their implication meant to me.

In addition to our in class meetings with the 10 of us and Mike, we had weekly Soliya meetings. Soliya is a web platform that connects students in the "Western world" with students in the "predominantly Muslim world" through video conferencing (think conference call crossed with Skype... or just look at the photo below lol). The first week of Soliya meetings, I had a Thursday meeting at 4:30 am. I basically rolled out of bed and turned my computer on. I have to say, I was very nervous. I was expecting arguments and awkward silences. Let me tell you, that was not the case at all. I had an amazing Soliya group from the very start! With 8 students and 2 facilitators from the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Tunisia, and Egypt who were Christian (of various types), Muslim, and Atheist, we had quite the mix. I know no other words to describe this experience but beautiful and insightful. Over the several more weeks my Soliya group met, we discussed everything from politics to religion to personal stories and everything in between. The two hours flew by every time we met, and from the moment the sessions ended, I began looking forward to the next.

I will discuss the thoughts this experience provoked and the changes it inspired much more in depth in my next post or two, but all in all, I have to say, my Confluence of Cultures class with its readings, discussions, guest speakers, videos, reflections, and Soliya component absolutely changed my life. I cannot say how thankful I am for this incredible experience. I never thought a college class could be so life altering, but this one, through the people I interacted with, was just that.

So for this experience I would like to express my undying and most sincere gratitude to:
Mike, Alessandro, Caity, Corey, Elleanna, Genesee, Ibrahim, Jim, Sarah, and Tracey (Confluence of Cultures class of brilliance)
and Jeanette, Ruaa, Amany, Barrett, Jenna, Jordy, Lili, Roca, and Samira (my Soliya group).
You 19 amazing people have changed my life forever <3

The Drudgery of Life...

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything, and honestly, it's because I didn't feel like I really knew what to say. The opportunities I spoke of towards the end of my last post, "Much Required" seemed small and insignificant every time I tried to write them.

I did try to write them several times. My posts all began something like this:
"The way I see it, if you try to reach a certain goal and it is in the will of God, He'll make sure you have opportunities in place to get you there. Upon returning to UNC in the fall, all of the students who had studied abroad were required to attend a "re-entry" session where we talked about our experiences. It was there that I discovered the possibility of international teaching, or teaching abroad. Immediately, I was drawn to this path for my future. After giving it some thought and prayer, I met up with an adviser about it and started setting my educational path to lead to this goal. To fall right in line with that, I soon got a job teaching in an after school program at an elementary school nearby. I loved it so much, and each and every one of my kiddos meant the world to me. I was excited to see where this would all lead me."

While all that is great, and I had been wanting to share that information with everyone, it hardly seemed sufficient for a blog post (especially when you consider the nature of some of my other posts). So I never posted about it.

I ended up falling back into the drudgery of life in the fall semester. I went to classes, went to my jobs (I also worked at Kohl's), went to church, and went through the motions. It's not like I was depressed or anything; I just wanted so much more out of life. I wanted to squeeze it and get every little drop of wonderfulness out of it that I possibly could. But that wasn't happening.

I felt really alone and empty too. I had given up what I once saw as the most meaningful relationship in my life because I felt like it was what God wanted, and frankly, I found myself pretty friendless. See, I started dating that guy about two months after I first moved to Greeley, so he and his family were really the only people I spent time with up here. I had no close friends at school. And people I knew from church are sprinkled across Northern Colorado. So while I was diving into God, I still felt alone and lacking.

But the semester winded down. I met with advisers about classes to take in the spring, met with my honors adviser to make sure I was staying on track with the program, and signed up for a slew of English major classes that I was sure would eat me alive. My boss offered me a promotion for the next semester from "children's activity leader" to "children's activity director" meaning that instead of showing up and teaching material someone else gave me, I would plan and write the curriculum, schedule the activity leaders, and basically just run the show. I accepted and quit my job at Kohl's.

And then I went home for the holidays. Winter break was so uneventful that it's really all just a blur in my memories, even though it was only a short five months ago. There was one thing I had to make sure to do though: sign up for an honors class. So I pulled out the piece of paper I had scribbled on. "Confluence of Cultures." It sounded interesting. So I went to register for it. I was surprised when the system gave me an error message saying I needed instructor approval. I emailed the professor asking him about it, and he responded that he limits the number of students in the class by requiring that students apply with one paragraph consenting to take on the course work and one paragraph describing why they are interested in the course. So I checked out the syllabus he sent, which entailed one book after another and one paper after another, a couple big projects, several guest speakers, several documentaries, and a two hour a week commitment to Soliya (which I found to be a sort of video conference call online). I replied to his email with the paragraphs and got accepted to the class. I didn't think much of it; it was just a class that met the requirements. But it ended up being so much more...