First Impressions

“We stand at the edge of something. Will we ever know what it is? Hold on 'cause the wind is rising, and we can't get away from it!” (Jars of Clay)

Those were my feeling on the eve of my PDP year at Trinity – standing at the edge of a cliff looking over, with only the faintest idea of what was to come and yet feeling that whatever was coming was inescapable. And to a lesser extent, that's what I'm feeling now.

I'm settled into my house, my house mate Abby has arrived, and teacher orientation starts tomorrow Wednesday (as I was writing this, I got a call that orientation has been postponed for reasons that will apparently be explained later). So far, life here is going well. The house where I'm staying is huge, especially for two people. We've got a decent-sized kitchen, and a long living/dining room; we each have a bathroom to ourselves, and there are four bedrooms upstairs plus a room downstairs that could easily become one! It kind of feels empty with just the two of us, especially since we didn't bring much stuff to decorate.

I had my first adventure with stocking a pantry from scratch. It was a little overwhelming grocery shopping in a new place with only a vague idea of what I might want for this week. On top of that, my house mate hadn't yet arrived so I didn't want to get too much without her here. That evening, I made a “wish list” of most of the things I could think of that I might want, and after my house mate arrived we went shopping again and picked up most of the things on my list. Of course, looking through recipes now, I'm making another list of more things I'll want to be able to make them because we mostly just have the basics. The first place we shopped was a grocery store. It had most of the things you could want but only a few choices for each so we won't be doing much comparison shopping. We've been told, if you see something you want, buy it because it might not be there next time. We have to get baking soda from the pharmacy, and we can only get it in little packets because it's a controlled substance (it's used in the process of making cocaine).

On Saturday morning we shopped at the open-air market for fruits and vegetables. That was overwhelming in a different way because there was so much to choose from, and we had to ask the price from each vendor and the questions and answers were all in Spanish. I'm so thankful that Abby speaks Spanish. It was easy to loose track of what we'd spent where, and no one gave receipts.

Saturday afternoon we went to another kind of market called the “Concha” where they sold everything from clothes to food to appliances. Probably you could find almost anything there if you knew where to look, but it was huge. It was also pretty crowded, and the cars that tried to drive through were often at a stand-still. There we picked up a toaster, a rug for our floor, shopping bags and a few other small things.

Today, Sunday was my first experience in a Spanish-speaking church. Amalia, the short term coordinator, took Abby, Julie and me to the church across the street from the school. We arrived fifteen minutes “late” and church didn't start for at least another twenty minutes. Amalia used that time to introduce us to various people, some of whom work in various capacities at the school or have children who attend. The people were all quite welcoming and friendly. Norma, the lab technician at CCS, showed us her Sunday school class for preschool children (Amalia told us later that was also an invitation to help out with the preschoolers). The style of church was pretty similar to what I'm used to; the music seemed closer to hymns than contemporary songs but that's just a guess since it was all in Spanish. When it came time for communion, I discovered that they use wine rather than grape juice. Since that's different than what I'm used to, I figured the best thing to do would be to drink it down fast. Abby also isn't used to wine at communion, but she decided just to sip it because she didn't want it to burn her throat; unfortunately, she then had a problem when they came around to collect the communion cups because she wasn't sure how it would come across if she gave them a cup with wine still in it. Quick-thinking Julie saved the day by taking Abby's cup from her and drinking it down before the collectors got to our row.

Well, it's my bed time! TTFN!