One Moment

This is it! One moment to take life and make it what you want.

Staging was a unique experience filled with 43 strangers (all fellow volunteers), skits, discussions, new friends, meals at exotic restaurants, a roommate named Mallory, and a capstone in which we each chose among the following: actor, dancer, storyteller, artist and musician/poet. Now those of you who know me should know that I wear my heart on my sleeve (therefore I cannot pretend to be someone who I am not) - no acting...I only dance on very rare occasions and while I can appreciate interpretive dance I cannot necessarily perform it...I suck at telling stores as EVERYONE who knows me can attest...and while I play the flute I am not necessarily a musician. So I chose (drum roll please!)...musician/poet. Our job was to explain the importance of cross cultural integration and the aspects we had learned in some sort of musical/poetic way to the rest of the group. Well we were fortunate to have several volunteers with musical instruments with (Joel and Russ both had guitars and Kathy had a trombone!) and several people in the group could sing. I cannot. Therefore we created a haiku to explain what cross cultural integration would mean to each of us. The haiku is as follows:
Salaam new family
Firm Peace and Understanding
Now we all see green.

For most of you this poem may not make any sense...let me expand.

Salaam means hello in Turkmen and we will be living in host families for the majority of the time while in Turkmenistan. One of the main goals of Peace Corps is to be able to have a successful term of service all volunteers must integrate into the community and gain a new understanding of their community. Finally Sheila (our Staging Director) told us a story. There are two communities in the world. In community one every person born from today on has and will always be born with two legs, two arms, two ears, one nose, one mouth and a pair of yellow sunglasses. In community two every person born from today on has and will always be born with two legs, two arms, two ears, one nose, one mouth and a pair of blue sunglasses. Now a person from community two decides to join this organization called Peace Corps and visit community one. They are going to stay in community one for two years and three months. This person lives with the community, works in the community, learns the language, and has a profound connection with community one. When the person returns to community two they explain to all of their friends all about the community across the world and they very precisely explain the central cultural trait or difference: In community one everyone has green sunglasses! It is supposedly most important to begin a cross cultural experience by first and foremost understanding your own culture and knowing that that culture forms your expectations/experiences/history and therefore is the basis for you as a person.

We sang this haiku with Joel, Russ, and Kathy playing beautiful music in the background and I was so superbly entirely in touch with Peace, the world and myself that I began to tear up.

I feel so blessed to be starting this experience and I look forward to the 'new me' of 2010! Look out world - here I come!

Thanks everyone for supporting me and for all of the letters you will be writing, I truly appreciate it!

This is the last chance I'll have to update my blog for a while, so thank you to my family for updating it and keeping everyone posted!

All my love.

Salaam new family
Firm Peace and Understanding
Now we all see green.