Week 2: Ups and downs

If the first week was super hard, the second week had many ups, and many downs. I realized after the first week that patience probably would be my keyword this season, and that everything wouldn´t come as easily to me as I would have liked.... this might be a good thing for me to learn.... keeping at it when it doesn´t come easily. I´ve always hated that, most things had to be fairly easy for me from the beginning to pour my heart into it.

Somehow I had it in my mind that leaving home and moving across the world, from living in a nice apartment and driving my own car to living in a community with an unknown number of foreign girls would be easy! That I would just be good at it right away. That I would just love all of it. That it all would be an adventure. Sometimes the dream is better than reality, at least in the beginning. It´s not until the end of the story the girl gets the prince, the war is won by the good guys and the mystery is revealed. And then you realize that it was all worth waiting for, all worth the hard work, all worth the loneliness and the struggles. Hopefully.

Well, so I´m definitely in the beginning of the story, and as I wrote last week, I was out for a rough start. This week has been better. Much better.

One of the reasons was that the 12 male staff (we´re about 24 staff - 12 boys, 12 girls, roughly, some full time, some having other roles besides being school staff) - decided to give us girls a special night. They singlehandedly made us dinner, picked flowers and turned them into little bouquets, got dressed up, picked us up and drove us to this really nice house with a really nice yard and served us all night. After three course meal, they handed each of us a handwritten note with personal encouraging words before two of them gave speeches on how amazing we were and how much we mean to them ending in them praying for us. It was incredible! (that´s when you know you´re in America...)

                                   

Obviously one of the other reasons why this week was better than the first, was getting a scooter!! It was an intense hunt down! I was online for hours, checking anything from craigslist (finn.no i USA) to Amazon and motorcycle stores, involving the men I knew of, and one particular amazing guy Nick that I´d just gotten to know (one of the staff), and had my friend Kari drive me around to check out mopeds available. And then - as it often does - it ended up with the first scooter I looked at, owned by someone buying and selling scooters, but living on the same base as myself!! So now I´m spinning around town again!

But the two biggest reasons why this second week had more ups than downs were because this girl (with these cute kids) came to my aid after her kids weren´t sick any more, let me vent on her and opened her house to me (again!) so I could stay for the week end -

Beautiful Kari, you´re amazing!

- and because I decided to tell the people around me, mainly the girls I was starting to get to know, how I was feeling. That changed a lot. Just being honest with what I was feeling with those I was feeling it towards. How rough coming into this new environment was on me. 

And it made a huge difference.

So now I´m getting ready for week three in Kona. Probably another week of ups and downs, highs and lows. I´ll try to be patient through it!!!