It's How You Get There

‘I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.’ –Paulo Freire You see how tall that building is? Everyday is leg day at FTK. I have just over 30 students that I teach over the course of a week. It's a small group, but they're already my favorites. One of my most consistent prayers since getting here has been that I will love my students and be effective in helping them. Mostly, because I know what it's like to have awesome teachers who were obviously invested in me, and I know what it's like to have those who aren't quite to invested. I get it, I totally do, but especially since I have such small classroom sizes, I want to take as much advantage of it as I can to help them be successful.  Having been a TA in college and taught for many years in church, I love helping people work through the things that they're struggling with. Having vivid memories of feeling like I had a perpetual wall built up in my mind regarding anything that had to do with math, I relate...

“People don’t take trips, trips take people.” – John Steinbeck Unlike the ones preceding it, the day I finished quarantine was overcast, the sun hiding away during monsoon season. While technically not free of quarantine until noon, I celebrated early, waking up late after snoozing my alarm. Then a sluggish beginning that involved getting dressed just in time for the sibling call-in. Normally these mornings are our DND sessions, but due to finals for one of us, and general insanity for the others, we chatted with each other on a video call for the next couple of hours while I munched on my cereal.  (Fun fact about South Korea - many of their sweets and treats are nowhere near as sweet as ours in the States. It took me admittedly much too long to realize this. But it was eating their equivalent of Cocoa Puffs that it clicked. The first time I sat down to eat it, I was trying to figure out what was wrong. Bite after bite, it just didn't quite feel complete. My mind and tongue were ca...

"Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia." — Charles Schulz, Illustrator July 5th I slept. Then woke up to a man yelling into his phone, and all I could think was "Wow, I'm in Korea." I wasn't even angry that it was 5AM and I'd only had two hours of sleep. A year of planning, years of dreaming, and I was here.  The messages started coming in from home, and eventually I managed to wake up enough to put together a lucid phone call to my family. Then talked to my boss, talked to my sweet recruiter E, and my poor Quarantine Manager (QM) who was incredibly relieved when I didn't put up a fight about being locked up for two weeks.  I realized that it was a Sunday, I understood this technically even if my body was still incredibly confused about why the sun was up. I had my Sunday playlist going in the background and spent a little time in the scriptures, taking comfort in the familiar routine of study. Everyth...

It was ten minutes before my train was supposed to arrive, and the station was packing up for the night. The train was the last one for the night, and though it wouldn't have been first time sleeping at a spot like this (Denver has a cozy little bus station, FYI) I wasn't in a hurry to add train stations to the list.  I looked at the Purple Monster, it looked back at me. 56 pounds didn't seem like much yesterday morning getting it into the airport, but they were adding on now. My friend Tori had helped me pick it out back at school, and I had to admit, it was a solid roller. But considering it held most of my life inside of it, I was testing its limits. I'd prayed a lot on this trip, and I hoped one more little one wouldn't hurt.  Please, Lord, I know if I have to I can get me and my stuff there. But I'm getting tired, and it would be amazing if I didn't have to do it all by myself. I know it's my stuff, not theirs, but I'd be so grateful. T hen I st...

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all the familiar comforts of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things — air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky. All things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese   2020/7/04 The bus ride from the airport in Seoul seemed like an eternity (an established precedent for this trip). Though I had slept for roughly 8 hours on the plane, this didn't mean my body wasn't in constant confusion from the jet lag. It almost felt as if someone had told my body up was down and down was up, and it was madly trying to reorient itself, while I desperately tried to function inside of it. The bus was one of those that had two seats on one side, then one seat on the other. Looking at my options I decided that of all the firsts I'd experienced today, voluntarily socializing in a new country was not going to be one of them. I settled i...

"People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day." — A.A. Milne It's been quiet today. In a loud way I guess. My window sits over a small, but busy road separating me from the local middle school. From the few glances I've had of the outside when I went to get tested for COVID, the street comprises mostly of businesses, a small block of homes, then businesses again.  The first couple of mornings the busy sounds woke me, very different from the quiet buzzing of Midwest countryside. But I'm adaptable, and this isn't my first time living on a busy street. Part of it is all the newness. It's an odd collection of "same but different". I've heard Korean before, daily in fact between dramas and the music. I've had neighbors yell before, screech even, back at college. The slight inversion that sits over my head is also familiar, the smell and color reminding me of winter days in Salt Lake where the clouds sat over the valley, preserv...