Stayer Story: It's October for You Too, Amy

It had finally gotten far enough past new teacher orientation and the start of school that I was feeling like I had enough space to invite some new members of our community over for dinner and games. As the kids sat and played together and myself, my husband and this new couple sat together, they asked where we like to travel and do we get out much. As I sat there trying to answer, I realized I was tired. We ended the evening with games all together and then got our kids ready for bed. 

The next evening while I sat with a friend who has gone through many transitions with me and 2 countries, I told her how I was feeling. I feel tired of having the same conversations over and over again and I just wish I didn’t have to get to know another person all over again enough for them to be my friend and then have to say goodbye to them again. Then my wise friend said to me, “It’s October for you too, Amy.” 

For those of us in this world of international school work, October is often known as the time for culture stress/shock and for missing home for new people. But though I had taught on this subject of transition often, I had not ever thought about how this time is often hard on those of us who stay too. The people who we were already connected with in our work or Bible studies or coffee dates, weren’t here anymore. They weren’t even necessarily the people we were the closest too, but we shared life together. We knew much about each other, and we had an appreciation for each other, but then they left. 

Now here I am again trying to get to know new people. This is a familiar feeling for me - I remember in my fifth year at our first school standing in my kitchen washing dishes, and hearing the sound of new people arriving in the apartment next to us. My husband said, “It’s time to go welcome the new people.” And everything within me in that moment just wanted to scream that I was done. I was done with meeting new people. That whole year as I processed this feeling, those poor new people had to listen to me say how tired I was of new people at Bible study and how tired I was of having to get to know people all over again just to have them leave again. You might think I’m sounding dramatic but the average stay for a new staff at our first school was less than 2 years, which meant that many new staff did not complete their contract. Honestly it is understandable in retrospect. We worked in a hard and dangerous country with daily uncertainty of where to get food, medicine, if/when you would get robbed and if the water was clean. But we stayed. We stayed ten years. I just didn’t count the goodbyes. There were too many. Eventually when we were in our second school in a different country, I found myself deeply valuing community and connection but no longer knowing how to even make a friend or be a friend. My grief had become so stacked that my first visit to a church when we arrived, I found myself crying and crying because the church started the service by saying goodbye to one of their members. Someone I didn’t know, but to me represented every person I had lost. 

Much of the focus of my work is on helping new people connect well and helping those leaving to leave well, and I am still dumbfounded when people who are staying alongside me say that transitions has nothing to do with them. I have only served in 2 different countries during my 17 years of teaching abroad but I have been in constant transition the entire time. Rarely have I ever had the same job, same coworkers, same students, same classroom, same office, same curriculum, same friends for any significant length of time, or even the same home.

So when my wise friend said to me, “It’s October for you too, Amy,” I was struck by the idea. I too experience my own version of culture shock as new people change and shape what my work life and home life look like. I too get homesick for a place I can’t get back to, with people I can’t get back to. And since most of the time I lead the RAFTing and Transition seminars, I rarely sit down to think about my own experience. Nonetheless, I feel it. I feel it when I look around my house to the things I have that came from friends no longer where I am. I feel it when I go to the holiday and social events where the faces are always changing. I feel it when my son says that people always leave. How do I continue to choose this life then? The one that hurts and makes me tired.

I took a sabbatical and Jesus told me that He is my shepherd. I didn’t know what He meant, but I knew that I no longer thought I could trust Him to care for my heart or to work things out for my good. I had begun to believe that He was good and right, but that I did not matter, only Jesus living in me. 

One day when I had grown tired of not knowing how to make friends, God prompted me to notice a new staff member in our community. She attended the Bible study I went to and I thought she was great and would be a great person to be friends with. I felt like God was telling me to step out in faith and make a new friend. When we finished with the study that night I said I would walk back home with her and then walk to my house (which was definitely out of my way). As we walked I was so nervous and my mind was racing to think of some way I could ask her to be my friend that wouldn’t sound cheesy. I had told her about a Bible study that I was interested in doing and would she want to meet weekly to do it with me. She said yes and God used that friendship in my life to renew my hope, that I could make friends again. That it was worth it to reach out and connect. That my needs and my feelings mattered to Him and that I didn’t have to go it alone. 

So it’s October for you too. What can you do to take some time to check in with yourself? How are you feeling? What losses have you experienced in the past 6 months? Year? Are you retreating away from others and isolating yourself? It’s normal to want to protect ourselves from hurt, but the end result of avoiding relationships is loneliness and disconnection. And God made us for connection and brought us into this work not so that we could be used by Him but because He wants to do a work in us - to be in relationship with us. And to share that relationship with others. That can’t happen if we don’t recognize and care for our own hurts and begin to take steps towards connecting with others again. 

We need to recognize that the new people have their own losses they’re grieving and they are having mixed feelings about connecting where they are too. I often think of it similarly to how the security and customs guards at airports can get so frustrated with passengers. They yell the same instructions (that are posted on signs all over the place) to the people in line. They stay put at that station yelling the same thing over and over again as more people pass through, making the same mistakes. Though for these guards they feel like everyone should know what to do by now, they’ve been yelling it the whole shift and there are signs everywhere. For the person in the line, it’s new. It’s different than the last airport they were in, or it’s the first airport they’ve ever been in, or they’ve never tried to fly on an airplane with ALL of their belongings before, or the country they came from said it was fine to leave your shoes on and keep water in your bottle, but suddenly it’s not OK in this new place. If only those guards could remember or empathize with what it might be like for those passengers and if only those passengers could empathize with those guards, maybe then there might be less yelling and the whole experience might feel a bit smoother. 

So for those of us “old guards” where do we need to have more empathy towards those new “passengers”? If it’s been so long that we can’t remember what it’s like to be new or maybe we’ve never experienced the kind of cultural shift that these new staff are experiencing, how can we become curious instead of critical? How can we be caring instead of cutoff? And how can we help ourselves process our own losses and hurts so they don’t come out sideways towards others?