Hey there! Maybe snow is falling where you live, as the nights stretch longer, perhaps you’re cozying up to a fire as you enthusiastically await your child’s arrival home. We’re still here, sweating a bit more than we’d like, and watching the days grow longer still. Still, with our remaining days on program in the single digits, it feels like we’re entering the final countdown, and it’s giving us the feels already!
A quick recap since our last blog! After leaving Eshowe and Zululand, we headed towards the coastal town of St. Lucia. While we were promised (by the internet) hippos would be roaming the streets, we were pleased to find that was not the case (Well, Maddie was anyway). We did, however, find a funky little town beaming with biodiversity, craft markets for our last souvenir and gift purchases and the Indian Ocean! Oh, and a BUNCH of monkeys in our campground. We took a dip in the ocean (a new ocean for many!) and went snorkeling behind some sheltered rocks, seeking to lay eyes on tropical fish. We started to close out some of our class content and said goodbye to some community staples from the last few months – Big Blue and our lovely Zimbabwean companions, Soko and Samwukange. We also have had some real tastes of the country’s water shortages and the impact of load shedding – I’m sure you’ll hear about us rocking our headlamps inside and learning how to flush toilets with buckets of water.
We’ve just arrived in Waterval Boven aka eMgwenya – a sleepy little blip on the map and the perfect place to have finals and end our journey. All of our classes have wrapped on new content and students just have a few more work blocks to finish up their finals. Mixed in with our academic finale, we plan to do some climbing – Waterval Boven is internationally recognized for its bullet-hard quartzite rock, and is regarded as one of the best sport climbing destinations in Africa. We will also take the time to put a metaphorical bow on our semester in terms of group bonding and emotional processing. Our final days will look different than our regular schedule thus far – no official classes, no study hall, no meals with Big Blue. But still us 15, being here together. We plan to go on a final expedition, hiking to a hut in the surrounding mountains. The change in scenery will set stage for what we at TTS call transference.
What does this word, this transition, mean to you? Here’s a little context.
Folks are excited to hug their families, enjoy the winter holidays, tell their stories, and let’s be real, sleep in their own beds. They’re ravenous for their favorite foods and time with old friends and consistent electricity. There’s also an air of nervousness. We’re starting to hear questions like:
What will it be like to be home?
How do I talk about my experience?
How do I integrate the things I’ve learned into my life at home? What if it doesn’t fit right?
What if people forgot about me?
What have I missed that I don’t know about yet?
What if I don’t have a place amongst my old friends anymore
How do I prepare to go home while also holding these people dearly for the last 10 days?
How do I stay in touch with this community?
What’s it going to feel like when I have my phone & computer again?
What’s “normal” school going to feel like next semester?
What, if after all this, I haven’t changed “enough”?
What if I’ve changed too much?
We’re here for ALL of the feels, and, truly, we worry about some of the same things ourselves. But we’re lucky to have been through transformation before and we know that all experiences must come to an end. The finality, in some ways, is what makes it tangible and meaningful. We also know the learning doesn’t stop when folks go home. In fact, that’s when a lot of it solidifies, once it gets compared to what their ‘normal’ once was. So thanks in advance for holding your kiddos through that process, for rolling with the ups and downs as they continue their processing of this experience and the world.
Here’s some things we plan to do to help guide them through these moments. We will help students prepare their final GS presentations; this helps them distill their experience and reflect on its meaning. We’ll also revisit a convo we had on Week One, and discuss our hopes and fears – talk about all those questions from before and more. We’ll see that we aren’t alone in these feelings and brainstorm ways to face these challenges as well as lean on each other for support. We’ll give ourselves time to appreciate the heck out of one another. We’ll plan ahead for some potential questions we may or may not get asked by the people in our lives. We’ll decide how we want to represent our experience to our closest people, our family, our friends, our acquaintances, and what to keep as special moments just to ourselves. The teacher team has a whole slew of readings we plan to bust out (I attached a few at the bottom if you’re into that!) to help frame the many components of change. We will also have some stinking fun! After our absurdly silly talent show on the Orange River, we’ve got another one in the line-up. As I write this, I also hear preparations for a “Minute to Win It” competition about to happen upstairs. We have a graduation ceremony planned and some surprises too! I can’t give ALL our fun away!
As we lay the groundwork here, we know you are wondering some of the same things, What will my child be like when they arrive home? What will they need? I’m sure you’re hoping to receive your child with love, care and consideration. Here are a few things you might anticipate and some things your student might need from you:
- Alone time & social rest! We’ve been spending a lot of time in this 15 person family and they will definitely want to spend time with y’all but it might not be every single minute of every day, especially right away.
- Patience while hearing about your students’ experience, and an open and curious approach. 100+ days on this journey a lot of days to distill into words. We’ll be helping to give them tools on this end, and it’s really helpful if y’all ask specific questions and also expect that it’ll take some time to get the full picture. I know y’all have been patient already! Hopefully seeing pictures, reading this blog and your phone calls can give you some moments to start with. Processing this experience is really important!
- Prepare for stinky socks 🤪 we’ve been wearing our clothes hard! And, our last two weeks have had intermittent water access which means laundry has been done sparingly.
- Emotional ups and downs. Most often, students returning from our program go through three main phases. First, the Honeymoon phase, where differences in their new reality are seen in a positive, romantic light: joy for showers & washing machines & phones & weekends & being able to drive! Next comes the Negotiation phase, a transitional phase where the differences between their home culture and the culture they experienced on semester create anxiety. Be prepared, as this phase often comes with sadness, confusion and stress. You might even feel some tension as you notice ways your student has transformed. It’s a normal, unavoidable, phase to go through. Lastly comes Adaptation, where students are able to bridge that gap and participate fully in their home culture while holding pieces from their semester culture close. This phase is special, and we hope to set your student up with specific aims for this phase. It can also take a long time to get here, and the journey might not be linear.
- Sleep!!! 106 days on semester + for sure staying up too late on the last night + a 9 hour time change + 24ish+ hours of travel + emotional goodbyes = very tired humans (and I’m the math teacher, so I would know).
Can’t wait for you to love on these people, big gratitudes coming in the next blog, but for now, know that I’m happy for you and very sad to say goodbye. As always, thanks for your trust.
— Morgan Comey, Logistics Coordinator and Statistics Teacher
Readings you might like:
- After the Adventure by Morgan Hite (we’ve adapted it slightly to be more TTS applicable)
- The Fear of Transformation from The Essence Book of Days (I saw that Aunge already shared this one!)
- This is Water by David Foster Wallace
