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May 22, 2011

10 months

I could have gotten pregnant and had a baby all in the time I’ve been here and none of you would have seen me at any stage… this is not my way (a horrible way at that) of telling you I’ve had a baby.  To clear the air, I’m baby free, but I have become an aunt twice while being in Rwanda! 

Meet Grady Michael Schmitt

Video call snapshot 15

And Layna Jane Terrell

Video call snapshot 25

These are both pictures I have taken on Skype while chatting with my seriously technologically advanced niece and nephew!  Praise God for video chat.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be a missionary 5-10 years ago and have to rely on email to correspond… even further yet, snail mail!

I have moments, even still, when I experience sadness over being on another continent when even the most minor of changes are happening back home, like the birth of two beautiful babies. Jokes, that was a BIG wonderful change.  I will be back in the states in less than 2 weeks! Woo!  It will be so refreshing and life-giving to spend quality time with people I love, but I am figuring out that lots of stuff has changed since I left on August 1, 2010.  Sisters got pregnant, sisters had babies, friends got engaged, friends got married, people got sick, people passed away, people moved on with life.  It’s not like I live in this fantasy world where I think time stands still in the States because I’m not there.  I’ve experienced a lot of change myself this year that many of you can’t relate to because you didn’t see it as it was happening. My best analogy for this feeling is that change hits like an atomic bomb when you’ve been removed from home for so long.  If I was there during the changes, it would still affect me, but I think it would feel more like a gradual growing flood.  I still am not sure which one is easier to deal with—and the short answer is that both are difficult, but you can see a flood coming, so in my mind, you have some time to prepare for its entry to your life.  A bomb?  Well, I’ve never actually experienced a bomb explosion, but I can’t imagine having any time to process how life will continue after the explosion.  All I’d be able to focus on is the bomb itself.  So, as I think about coming home for a limited time, I am working on preparing myself to process all the changes that have happened without me. 

May 11, 2011

Pretending

I can’t pretend very well.  I think I used to be really good at pretending because I remember playing by myself a lot as a kid.  That statement could raise a lot of questions… to settle it I will just add that there was a large age gap between my sisters and I and so I had to come up with creative ways to pass the time without annoying my teenage sisters.  So yea, I think I was good at pretending.  Whether it was creating a soap opera with my Barbie dolls or playing against myself in basketball—do not judge—I liked creating a world that wasn’t a part of reality.  And by the way, every time I played myself in basketball, I won.  Just sayin’.  Somewhere a long the line,  I sadly lost this magnificent ability to pretend. 
Playing pretend as an adult is really frowned upon.  More or less, people think you are crazy.  This doesn’t mean that adults don’t pretend… but as an adult, pretending can more so be defined as lying or over exaggerating the truth.  We pretend to be people we are not.  We pretend to know all the answers.  We pretend we can handle more than we actually can.  We pretend to be more busy than we actually are.  We pretend that things don’t bother us when they actually do.  We pretend that life is worse on us than it actually is. 
Scratch what I said earlier about not being able to pretend.  I might be the guiltiest person alive when it comes to adult pretending.  My first thought and reason why I started this entry was to say that “I can’t pretend that physical pain doesn’t hurt” but now I think that I go the opposite way and I do pretend that it hurts worse than it really does.  Ah, caught. 
I recently have come down with a virus… one that I never expected to reveal itself in me until I was at least 78 years old.   Chicken pox has come and found me again, but this time in the form of shingles.  Out of all the illnesses I thought I would have the unfortunate contact with while living in Africa, shingles was never on my probability list.  But alas, here I am, 24 years old, chillin’ with my leftover pox.  I don’t know what you know about this virus, but it’s very odd.  It’s one of the only rashes that don’t itch and is painful.  It actually does nerve damage and can hurt years after the rash goes away.  The break out is on my right shoulder and chest and man it hurts (Not to over emphasize my pain).  The first day I learned that it was probably shingles, I cried a lot.  To my knowledge, the chicken pox virus was contagious, so shingles seemed like it would carry that characteristic as well.  My worst fear was that I would not be able to come to school the last 3 weeks (arguably the most important time of year) because I would be “untouchable”.  I got a miniature taste of what lepers felt like.  Take a deep breath.  Turns out, I am contagious, but only to people who have never had chicken pox and only if they come into contact with the infected area.  Solution- stay away from pregnant women and wear shirts that cover the grossness.  Done. 
If the worst case scenario would have come true (allowing my contagiousness to make me untouchable) I think I would have wallowed a lot more in my shingle skin.  The one thing that helps me to be positive is the fact that the pain hurts much less when I can be around people and not be seen as a huge virus.  So praise God for that!
My friend Hannah said very gleefully that there are many words that rhyme with shingle so I should write my blog as a poem!  This was her example poem in honor of my condition:
I decided to write a jingle
because I felt a tingle
and to my absolute horror
I found it was a shingle

May 4, 2011

Awkwardness… turns out I like it

When I first thought about teaching, middle school was the dreaded age of students for me.  I always thought of that age as being really stressful because of the many many changes occurring within each student going from being a kid to being a teenager.  I did not expect that 7th-8th graders would be my favorite grades to teach by the end of this year.  Maybe it’s just the particular class I have, or maybe I assumed too much of how I am incapable of relating to these kids.  I love them for many reasons, but mostly because they are still kids trying to be funny and dealing with the whole fitting in thing.  They still want to do kid stuff like play tag, jump rope, pretend they are in gunfire(boys are weird), do special hand claps, etc.  However, they are to the point where they want to fit in more with what the older “teens” are doing so they usually hold back their childlike behavior.  This combination makes them really awkward, which I like. 

For Young Life, a couple of weeks ago, we played Capture the Flag at the school.  Tons of kids 7th-12th grade showed up, but almost ALL 7th graders were there.  Their presence was known, mostly because they literally had no clue what they were doing, but you’d see them just running around screaming or hiding behind walls (usually on their own side). 

A few days ago, I had one of those days that at the end of it all, I couldn’t put to words all that happened.  I just looked at people dejectedly if they asked me how my day was.  Most of the craziness of my day happened with my middle school class—but I can’t blame them for everything.  First thing in the morning, I walk into my classroom, after being away for a long weekend and trusting a sub to tend to the kiddos, to find a tornado had hit and my desk had thrown up all over the floor.  I stood in shock at the mess because I had to teach in less than 40 minutes and was not expecting to spend half of that time playing clean up.  I realized later that my window latch was broken and there was a hazardous storm that weekend while I was away. 

Moving on… Surprisingly, the morning went really smoothly after that.  Ohhh but then 5th period came and in marched my beloved middle schoolers.  One student gave a PowerPoint presentation over the artist Van Gogh, which involved a class activity afterward in which he had placed a large piece of paper behind the Projector screen.  You know, for the sake of making a dramatic transition.  Well, I went up to help him put the screen up, but it wasn’t quite that simple.  As soon as I pulled down for it to go up, a gun fired!  Not really, but that is the sound that it made and the reason my students all screamed and some even paced the room because their hearts actually jumped from their chests.  Yup, the screen completely broke and would no longer go up and out of the way.   So then, I had a student help me hold up the screen so the presenter could move his class activity to another wall away from the screen trap.  During this class project, students came up two at a time to paint short brush strokes to mimic Van Gogh’s style.  This, being kind of chaotic already, became even more so when one student “accidentally” fell backwards off of his stool.    More uncontrollable laughter.  The aftermath was over after a few minutes and we seemed to have moved on from the silly crazy screams and laughter until the kicker came.  I was at my desk grading papers when I hear someone say, “What are you doing!?”  along with a lot of onomatopoeia that I can’t even try to recreate.  I look up to see the same student who fell out of his chair, holding up a HUGE falling wooden bookcase that, until that moment, held all of my students’ artwork.  He couldn’t push it back to the wall because he was a short 7th grade kid, so he just stood under its wrath letting everything pile out on the floor to get stepped on by 10 other kids who ran to rescue him.  By the time I got to his aid, another student had positioned himself to take the hero role and we were able to push the shelf safely back to its home.  I’m thankful to report that only a few pieces of art were stepped on enough to actually permanently harm the integrity of the art.  “How did that student get stuck under a bookshelf?”  Yea, I was getting to that.  The top shelf of that bookcase was reserved for their class to store their artwork, but since he was too short to see onto it, he stood on top of a stool to peak, but still wasn’t able to see.  He pulled himself up by grabbing onto the top shelf and so you have him loosing his balance and bringing the shelf with him. 

After the bell rang, students just ran out and left my class a mess.  I think they were in such a hurry to rid themselves of the dysfunctional  quality of my room, they jet as if there was literally a fire in there.  The debris was unbearable and I had never felt so defeated by clumsiness before.  The next class period, I stepped on two pencils, and a pencil sharpener twice—breaking it the 2nd time.  I needed a hug bad. 

Luckily, the next day 4 students were absent which made for an easy breezy class with very minimal drama.  I love those kids, even when their awkwardness causes a headache in the art room Smile