Here We Go

November 9, 2008
We left for our month long learning experience today. We packed up all of our things and headed for the train station. I can’t believe that we have finally come to this portion of the trip. When we arrived in August, November seemed like a lifetime away and now its here. I’m really hoping that the next month is filled with awesome experiences that I will be able to take with me for the rest of my life. Its not that I haven’t had some cool experiences yet, its just that the earlier courses were really depressing and I find it hard to have a good time when I am surrounded by all of these terrible things. We said goodbye to Visthar at about 2:30 this afternoon and we will not be back until December 6th. Our train ride to Hyderabad was about 13 hours. I introduced the people in my section to the “What If?” game and it was a huge success. Everyone really liked it. It made the first few hours of the train ride go by really fast because we were all laughing and having a good time. I was laughing harder than I have in India. It was really an awesome time. It’s hard to believe that only 10 weeks ago most of these people were strangers to me, and here we are talking and laughing like old friends. There are even hilarious inside jokes. I was so nervous at the Minneapolis airport that I didn’t really know the people I was going to be spending the next 4 months with. I guess that I had no reason to be nervous. Some of these people are truly amazing and have given more to me than I could have ever asked for.
I’m looking forward to our course on religion in India. The only thing that bothers me is the fact that I don’t think that I have really processed the first 2 courses. We went through a lot of stuff during the first 2 months in India. I don’t want to seem disinterested in what we are doing now, but how I am supposed to study religion when my mind is still stuck on something that I saw during our first tour of the slums? I suppose that this trip is just like that. You experience as much as you can while you are here and then process it once you get back to the US. I’m worried that once I get back to the US I won’t know how to process everything on my own. This is especially scary for me since I will not be around anyone who is on this trip with me. Once we get back to the US I am done with Gustavus. I suppose that I will need to find some sort of outlet for this experience. I talked to my Pastor at home and he told me that it is going to be a hard adjustment going back but my family will help me as much as they can. I guess that I can take some solace in that back in the US.
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