Epilogue: What will you do with this?

I have enough drafts of this blog post in my recycling bin to kill a cybernetic tree.  It is a good thing I draft these on a computer.  Cyber trees can regrow quite quickly.

My Grandpa told me a story, that when he broke his ankle, all of his pastor friends came and visited him and offered their sympathy.  After they had all left, a chaplain nun came in and asked him “What will you do with this?”

Most people underestimate how much reentry sucks.  Even when you are warned, you underestimate it.  Even when you have been through it before (coming back from Holden) you underestimate it.  I figured that I had gone through 9 countries worth of culture shock.  There was nothing that America could come at me with that I hadn’t already been through.  How wrong I was.

The thing about culture shock in another country is that you, for the most part, if you come in with a fairly open mind and a desire to understand, you can learn a great deal.  And even if you disagree completely with something, you can comfort yourself in the knowledge that, if it was ever really THAT bad, you would eventually go home where things are normal.

So what do you do when you come into a culture that you already know, and find just foreign enough to be disconcerting?

The thing that I cannot seem to reckon with, no matter how hard I try, it the apathy that most Americans have for most social issues.  There is no engagement with politics, with social issues, with anything.  Every other country I visited (with the exception of Switzerland), when people weren’t happy they would protest.  We don’t even vote half the time!

But I guess the real shock to my system has come in the relative lack of excitement my life has.  There is very little to do in Northfield besides study or go into town, and the town is not that big!  I was used to doing something everyday.  Or if nothing else, encountering a different culture everyday, which took energy and was exciting even in itself.  Here, I do the same things everyday, and most of those things involve sitting.  I get so bored sometimes!  The problem is that my course load is heavy enough that I don’t have time to do much else, even if I wanted to.

I’ve had a good two-month pity party for myself.  The people around me have offered me sympathies as best they are able.  But that has not gotten me anywhere.  If anything, it has just made things worse.  The question now is what am I going to do with this? 

I don’t really know the answer to that right now.  In the long term I know I want to go abroad again.  But in the shorter term, it is a matter of figuring out what I have learned on global and applying it wherever I am.  It is a matter in finding the adventures around me, or making my own if I must.  But for some reason (and I would like to think that there is a reason), there has been lit in me a fire to do something.  What, I don’t know.  But I guess that is what I have to figure out.

Helena McMillan says that you never completely fully readjust.  And maybe that is not a bad thing.  But no matter what happens, it has been a life changing adventure, one that I will never forget.