Overseas Teaching is not a Vacation

I had some requests to write again.  It's hard to know what will interest people.  I've talked mostly about the good things...the adventures.  Maybe I should visit some of the difficult things.

To seek adventure is part of the reason I chose to do this overseas thing.  Some of it HAS been an adventure.  I am a bit surprised that I enjoy adventure given that I have lived a fairly sheltered life up until now, but I do love the challenge of newness.

View of Yaounde from Mt. Febe

That was my problem in Champaign-Urbana.  The town has everything you might want for a lovely, stable, Americana lifestyle.  It is fairly safe and very clean.  It is full of smart, educated, interesting, and caring people.  It is immensely cultured and forward-thinking, even if it is a smallish, Midwestern town in one of the most embarrassing states in the US. What a great town, that C-U!  No wonder it literally sucks everyone back to it.  I've seen so many people leave for new adventures and then somehow return.

But for me, depression had set in. Depression does run in my family.  And, like so many, I had begun to make questionable decisions, begun to move in unhealthy directions, and begun to become extremely hard on myself internally in order to stimulate life to move forward.  I envied my friends and family who could stay in one place, walk into the same house over and over, frequent the same eating establishments, see the same people, and keep to the same routines, day-in and day-out and stay happy.  I always wondered why I couldn't be like that, and as part of well-established pattern of beating myself up, thought that I was the flawed one, the one who couldn't make a perfectly comfortable and stable life in the glorious C-U work for me.

I don't think I'm alone in these feelings, however.  I think feelings like this are very common among women of my age, education level, and socio-economic status.   Transitioning into middle age and feeling the responsibility of the American middle class expectations and desires have taken their toll on many.   It's at this point that I think people have three choices.  1.)  Resign themselves to a life of depression and martyrdom or victimization.  2.) Make unhealthy and hurtful choices and force a change of life in perhaps the wrong direction.  3.) Try something outside the box in an effort to figure out how to make oneself happy.

Street scene in Roma

Almost immediately,  when on my magical trip to Italy with my best female friends last summer, I noticed that I felt none of the foggy, weighty stress and the wind-knocked-out-of-your-lungs pressure of my everyday life.  My senses were heightened to the nth degree.  The colors, the textures, the tastes and the smells were at their very highest definition, and at that time, I wondered if life could be like this always?  Or was it just the release of being on vacation?

I remember as a child going on our yearly family vacation.  My father was adamant about going on some kind of a vacation every summer, no matter how small, and he saved and saved to be able to do so.  He became a different person as we drove out of the city limits.  He immediately became lighter and more joyful, and mind you, light and joyful are not words anyone has ever used to describe my dad.  But, I witnessed it happening every summer.  I loved those family vacations.

Could my life have a light and joyful component?  Let me think outside the box. Why not try being a teacher in another country?  Africa, here I come.

2012 Holiday Celebration and Art Exhibition, American School of Yaounde

From This....Christmas 2011 in C-U

My reflections after five months are this:  It is hard giving up security.  It is hard giving up the myriad of talented artists and musicians with which I had painstakingly built 20-year professional and personal relationships.  It is hard giving up being with your family and friends for the first Christmas in a lifetime.

To This....Christmas in Cameroon 2012

It is also hard navigating new professional personalities in a small-school environment, and it is hard coming home and living in a building with those very people.  It is hard hearing, second hand, what some of those people think about you and your family.  It is hard teaching outsiders about the complexity of autism.

And surprisingly, the lack of water, the fluctuating electricity, the faulty washing machine that has ruined many of my clothes, the various bouts of illness, the moldy grout around the kitchen sink, the lack of putt-putt golf or a movie theater, and one hundred other similar things aren't really that hard.

From this...Julian 5 months ago

I do feel  lighter though.

To this...Joseph in the school Holiday Musical

It's Christmas Eve Eve and I have 4 presents to wrap.  I write, read and sleep frequently.   I sit on my balcony and listen to beautiful Cameroonian birdsong and watch the woman below, who lives in a roofless, abandoned building, cook over her wood fire.  For the first time ever, I watch my son play with preschoolers to high schoolers and be accepted and even admired.  Stress and pressure for me have lessened to a great degree.  Life, right now, is even.  It feels odd, and it is certainly an adjustment from the heaviness of what life used to be.   And because I still wonder and worry about the future, joy is moderate.  But... this isn't a vacation, is it?

Full moon from our balcony in Bastos