Akron & Onward

Post From August 20:

Sorry for the lack of updates! Basically, all I have to say at this point is that if you’d like blogging from me at any point in the next 11 months, you should start praying that things go severely downhill. This past week of life was just too good to take time out to blog.

After an extremely life-giving, life-affirming week of orientation in Akron, myself and the other IIJP SALTers (Sara, Trisha, and Jo) are en route to Amman! Since these are names that will probably be reoccurring, let me give you the rundown on SALT Team Middle East. Sara and I will be SALTing in Palestine—she’ll be in East Jerusalem working with an organization called Sabeel (Do yourself a little favor and click on that link because Sabeel is the ultimate.) while I’ll be just a few miles away in Bethlehem. Trisha will be living in Irbid, Jordan and working as a teaching assistant at the Arab Episcopal School there. She’s not sure exactly what she’ll be doing yet, but it’s possible that she’ll be working with some of the deaf children that attend the school. Jo will be SALTing in Iraq and working as a teaching assistant at a kindergarten run by the Coptic Church. More exact details are also TBD for her. While not technically part of IIJP, Jordan (who is a person and not a country for the purposes of this sentence) will be living at a monastery up in Syria and teaching English as well as computer skills. Sara, Trisha, Jo, and I have collectively decided to make it our goal to adopt Jordan into our little regional team as he’s the only SALTer in MCC’s Lebanon-Syria region. We already have something mind-blowing in the works.

On that note, a shout out to all my fellow SALTers who may now be reading! As we’ve been travelling and exploring, Trisha, Sara, Jo, and I have been thinking of you all and missing you dearly! How rad would it be if we could all just tune in to each others’ adventures whenever we wanted? It gives me goosebumps to think about the places you all are right now and all of the beautiful people you are meeting—Bah! Live it up, my friends.

For readers at home, orientation in Akron was so great. I don’t know even know where to begin. It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed so much in one week. The orientation was not only for SALTers going to countries all over the world, but also for volunteers coming from countries all over the world to serve in the United States/other countries so it was basically like one big cultural festival. The whole week was just a beautiful picture of the Kingdom—people from all over the world united around one vision and loving one another. The people that are a part of this program are just some of the coolest individuals on the planet; it has been a privilege getting to know them. My roommate in Akron was from Assuit so it was fun to talk Egypt with her! Sally is super passionate about a retreat center in Egypt called Anafora that I went to last summer so it was really neat to find a commonality there. That lead to a lot more discussion.

Then, at 1:30 PM on August 19, we began our journey from Akron, PA to Amman. After a quick but important game with some other SALTers at the airport, we boarded the plane and bid farewell to America for a year. The flight from Philadelphia to Pairs was unbelievably fabulous—I slept like a baby. With huge thanks to Chad SALTer Rosemary, we decided to make the most of our 5.5 hour layover in Paris! Rosemary had given us directions to Sacre-Coeur so we hopped on the RER from the airport and made our way over to Montmartre. Our journey there was uber impressive. We made it there in record time and then trekked all the way up the hill to this beautiful view:

[Just kidding. No time to upload. Pictures to come later.]

After enjoying some fresh French air, we stopped for some baguettes and chocolate croissantsand began the journey back to the airport. Unfortunately, the way back was not such a quick trip. We got on the wrong train back to the airport which was extremely unfortunate. We were all holding our breath hoping this mistake wouldn’t cost us a flight to Amman. It was a close call, but we made it!

So right now we are on the flight from Paris to Amman and we’ve been joking about how we hope that someone will be picking us up from the airport. If not, we’ll just roam the streets of Amman screaming “MCC?! Where are you?!” and see what happens. We also have no idea if we’ll be heading to live with host families tonight or…where we will be staying. But it’s no big deal. We’re just excited to get there!

As I’ve been thinking about what this next year of life may bring, I’ve been also been thinking about all that went on in this last year of life and I’ve come to the conclusion that a year is a really substantial amount of time in which a lot of things can change. I’m preparing for rather major worldview alterations.

I’ll update more once we get settled in Amman!