Phases.

Some people might think that I shouldn’t be counting down, but I like keeping track of things, and this week marks a quarter of our time here complete. This realization fills me with an odd sense of relief; I have made it this far, and can do this again three more times.

Since my first day of kindergarten to college, I’ve always been on the quarter school system. There has always been a sense of relief after finishing your first quarter, and before you know it second quarter is over and then the entire year. Each passing quarter I consider a phase of my academic year: first quarter I’m driven and have a fresh load of energy from the summer, but by the last quarter, I just want to be outside and studies often come later on the list of priorities.

Similar to school, I'm sure somewhere along the line of preparation, someone said that you would go through multiple phases as a student missionary. 

The initial culture sock was expected. The heat, the culture, the fact that I was going to be away from home for nine months; everything was so new and different. I remember coming home from the very first day of school, a day where I only observed, and thinking that I was way in over my head. I remember being near tears as I looked down at my watch; it was already 5 p.m., I wasn’t home yet, and all I wanted to do was go to bed. I also remember the first time I rode my bike home from school. Scared to ride our bikes down the middle of the road like the rest of the Cambodians did, we waited on the side of the road for almost 5 minutes before there were no oncoming cars in either direction. All of these “firsts” contributed to the overwhelming feeling that came with culture shock.

A phase that I didn’t expect to feel was the desire to have chosen a call somewhere else. Five days after landing in Cambodia, we turned around and got back on a plane headed to Bangkok, Thailand. I had always said that I did not want to go to a city to be a student missionary. For some reason I thought Phnom Penh was going to be a little less “city like,” but I was wrong. To say I was jealous of the SMs in Thailand, even in an extremely large city, is a great understatement. The air-conditioned classrooms alone made me envy their location over mine. Honestly, still more than 2 months in, part of me wishes I would’ve taken a call there; though being in Cambodia is building my character and making me a much stronger person.

After the first bit of culture shock and wanting to be somewhere else for the year, I moved into this awkward middle phase. Though it was only a couple weeks ago, I honestly don’t remember how I was feeling. I counted down the days of the week, just like I had been, participated in my first set of parent teacher conferences as the teacher and graded lots of papers. I was going through the motions of being a SM teacher, having hard days here and there, and good days on the others.

A week and a half or two weeks ago, the phase I call the “I don’t want to be here" phase rolled in. I couldn’t sleep, days seemed to take months, and every moment I wasn’t helping a student or talking to someone, I was thinking about being at college, living my normal life, instead of being a SM. It was rough, to say the least. Up until this point, I hadn’t really gotten to the point yet that I seriously missed my friends and family back home. Of course I missed them, but for the last three years, I’ve lived away from home and this didn’t seem too much different. Wanting to be home or in Walla Walla are both very uncharacteristic feelings for me. Yet the deep desire to be back, living my normal life, consumed my every thought. Too much time sitting in my apartment and overthinking life at home contributed to this desire to have everyday life back. For the first time I realized that life back in the states was moving on, and it was moving on without me. I’ve always known that this was going to happen, but that actual feeling was more than anything I had predicted. Coming to terms with these feelings was equally difficult.

I was extremely driven and just as much overwhelmed my first quarter of college. Winter quarter was neither good nor bad. Spring quarter was filled with psych classes from Egbert, struggling to focus long enough to finish my homework, planning for this year, and spontaneous adventures extremely uncharacteristic of me.

My first year of college and my first quarter of my SM experience have a lot of similarities. Just as I made it through my first year of college, with the focused drive of fall quarter and the spontaneous adventures of spring quarter, I have made it through my first quarter as a student missionary. Through all the ups and downs I have reached, in my mind, a big milestone in my time overseas.

First quarter: Complete.

-Alex