Have you ever had a year without a friend?

I remember my second year abroad. I finally had a good friend. We went on a Spring Break trip to Quito together, led a weekly Bible study together, had daily prayers together during Lent, shared the cost of a taxi together so we wouldn't have to carry our groceries home up the steep Caracas streets. I had only just begun teaching and she was the person I went to when I had questions. She was a great teacher. Then at the beginning of that second year she told me she was leaving.

We were walking through the mall one day and I was wrestling with the idea of her leaving.

I had a question that I wanted to know the answer to, "Have you ever had a year without a friend?"

She said yes.

That “yes” scared me. I didn’t want to live a year without her there. I wanted her answer to be "no" and that there was nothing I needed to worry about. Every hole gets filled.

But the truth is, they don't always get filled.

At the writing of this I have now been abroad 15 years since then. That first experience of having a friend leave stayed with me for years. I struggled. I felt left behind and betrayed. Her first year away we said we would stay in touch but that didn't happen and then the hurt seemed to dig down deep. I started to believe that as soon as I got close to someone they would leave. This was pretty easy to believe. I lived there ten years and the average stay for those I worked with was less than 2 years. Due to the instability in the country our students and citizen staff also moved away or discussed the real possibility of moving away on a regular basis. I looked around one day and found that there were few left around me who shared the same memories or who knew my stories.

Doug Ota, in his book Safe Passage, how mobility affects people & what international schools should do about it, talks about our stories needing to be seen. That we need people to read our stories and our stories need to make sense to us. They need a way to be integrated. We need to be able to make sense of the transitions between one thing and the next. They need to have meaning. And for us to feel valued we need not only to share our stories but for others to listen to them and affirm them.

Living this international life can feel a lot like pieces of our story are all over the place, like a puzzle that has some missing pieces or where the picture doesn't really make sense. We need people in our life to help make sense of our stories. But when the people keep changing, how can we make sense of our story?

I need people willing and available to read my stories and I need to be willing and available to read the stories of others.

So did those holes ever get filled? Certain parts of that hole didn't get filled. The parts that are specific to that friend. But other holes were filled. I made space for new friends and they made space for me. The coming and going didn't stop but I have come to believe that I am not without choice.

I can decide to stay connected.

I can decide to reconnect.

I can decide to make new connections.