I Sveikata

I don't love teaching every day. Maybe even most days. But today...

My students were momentarily, angelically, miraculously quiet and focused, dutifully bent over peer editing worksheets. The seldom-appearing late afternoon sun was painting bright swaths of light all over the walls and whiteboard. Suddenly somebody sneezed.

"Bless You!" rang out in at least 4 (probably 5 or 6) languages - Russian, Lithuanian, English, Kyrgs - and I almost had to stop myself from laughing out loud, my smile was so big.

Most days the uniqueness of this place doesn't register with me. I no longer find pronouncing names like Sniazhana or Bakytbek terribly unusual. Even the occasional Kudaibergenova surname rarely raises an eyebrow. But today... counting the nationalities in my 2:45 class (Belorussian, Russian, Lithuanian, Kyrgs, Uzbek, Latvian, Moldovan), I felt and knew what a miracle it is that they are here, and I am here, and we say "bless you" to each other's sneezing any way that we know how.

The whole crazy gang

Adventures at the sauna with Jared & Jerilyn

Everyday Life

I realize that my blog posts since returning from Christmas break have been on the rather ponderous and melancholy side. Granted, it has been a hard January for many – my Lithuanian friend Kristina’s mother passed away last Monday, Wednesday night two LCC students got into a serious car accident which was witnessed by two fellow teachers, friends in the States are dealing with serious illnesses, friends at LCC are stressed and getting sick, and struggling. It’s not a bad thing to be a little mopey now and then, but I’m also aware that some of you may not be wanting so many glimpses into the inner-workings of Jen’s crippled psyche and more peeks into Life in Lithuanian. Here’s a little photo essay/day-in-the-life picture of Klaipeda life this winter.

Church in Lithuania - translation headset, English Bible, Lt/Eng dictionary, Lithuanian word list notebook, personal journal. (Not pictured, Lithuanian New Testament)! 

Lietuviu Kalba, Russky Yezik

Living and working in such a linguistically diverse and interesting place, it seems that no matter what the conversation begins as, we all eventually end up talking about or in the smattering of other languages we share between us. I have a shelf of notebooks and dictionaries in my office that I call, “the shelf of good intentions.” It holds my Eastern European, Hungarian and Lithuanian phrase books, language textbooks, notebooks with lessons on Lithuanian and Hungarian language (plus a little of the Arabic alphabet), and now another notebook with my clumsily drawn Cyrillic alphabet for the beginning Russian class.

The fun thing about LCC is that everyone is sort of always in the process of teaching whatever language they know to those who want to learn it (whether that be English, French, Lithuanian, German, Albanian, Krgys, Ukranian, Belorussian, Latvian, Russian, Spanish, or whatnot!). This means that my brain is a pretty muddled place most of the time! I’ll inevitably use Lithuanian phrases when talking to Russian-speakers who know no more Lithuanian than I do. Or out of nowhere will pop up a Hungarian phrase that is stuck over from my year-and-a-half in “Magyaroszag.” I cling to my very limited knowledge of the magyarul because even in this part of the world, Hungarian is somewhat exotic in its unrelatedness to all the other Indo-European languages. It is my one little pebble of knowledge that keeps me from feeling like a totally lamo monolingual American. I milk it for all it’s worth, even if the sum total of my Hungarian fluency could be contained in a few notebook pages and my remaining ability to count to 1,000!

What is good, though, is that Lithuanian is a veritable cognate-paradise (paradicsom – meaning paradise AND tomato in Hungarian, interesting) compared to Hungarian. There are a lot of common roots that are familiar to English speakers, which speeds up the comprehension process greatly. Lately, I listen to sermons with only one ear of the translation headphones and my other ear listening to the Lithuanian. In social settings, I listen A LOT and closely, and most of the time I feel “aš suprantu daug, bet negaliu kalbeti” (I understand much, but am not able to speak). If I actually carved out the time to study, imagine what I could do!

An ordinary night after school: making dinner in my kitchen with my Latvian friend Janis, who is also my new roommate Sarah's boyfriend. (Sarah's taking the picture.) 

One of my favorite streets, Janonio. Probably 'cause of the Bandele Namai (Bakery House) you're looking at right here. If I miss my #9 bus in the morning, and it is after 8 a.m., I take a slightly longer walk to bus #3, which conveniently takes me past the lovely bandele place. :) 

The Mercy of Snowboots

For Christmas this year I asked for snowboots, sweaters and warm socks. This was more providential than I could have anticipated as the past week and a half in Klaipeda (indeed in all of Central and Eastern Europe) have been the coldest in half a century. Temperatures have been far, far below 0 Celcius – about -20 or so, with windchills that make it feel like -30 (aprox -18 or -19 Farenheit). I should be thankful - and am - that I'm not in Georgia (in the Caucausas) where Russia has cut off oil supplies and the entire country except for parts of the capital, Tblisi, is without power and electricity.

I’m not sure I can even articulate the depth and seriousness of this kind of cold. Your abdominal muscles clench as you try to breathe, any exposed skin quickly looses sensation. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter how cold it is because you can’t feel anything anyway. I am not unfamiliar with this kind of cold – heck, in college I took a ski class at night, in January, in Minnesota. But, the main difference here is the fact that so much time is spent outdoors, waiting for busses, trekking home, trekking to the store, etc. In the States, the extent of our exposure is that lung-shattering jaunt from the warm car to the warm foyer or garage. No garages here. No cars. Just my new boots, knee-high socks, silk long johns that I don’t think I’ve taken off in a week, flannel pajamas, two duvets on my bed, and constant infusions of herbal tea.

Finally, today it’s a balmy zero degrees Celcius. I think I’ll go for a nice long walk!

This almost makes up for the -20 C weather. Almost. 

My new street - Sportininku gatve - after snow. 

Conversations Killers

Ever been to a party that was just too proper and adult? Want to shift the conversation from Russian history, or linguistics, or EU politics toward more bodily-function oriented discussions? Want all eyes in the room focused on you? If so, I offer you these guaranteed conversation killers, uttered at a recent gathering by LCC Spiritual Life director, Pisey Sok:

1. If you could hate one race, which would it be?
2. Have you ever been friends with a midget?
3. Do you think you can pee while skydiving?
4. If you had to cannibalize one of your friends, which would you eat first?
5. Could you cut off one butt-cheek and survive?
6. What do you do when you’re in a stall without toilet paper?
7. Have you ever had your nipples hurt really bad? (This was to the guys)
8. Where are the Feet Mountains? (This asked because, and I quote: “if there are foot hills, there must be feet mountains”)

Sometimes holy places aren’t obviously holy at first glance.

One place that has become a holy place for me in Klaipeda – probably the most special – has been the prayer room at the student dormitory. This might be because the church I attend meets in the school auditorium, or because I don’t regularly visit some of the beautiful churches in town, but I think more likely is that I have felt and experienced the Spirit there in some very distinct ways.

Tonight I walked through the -20 degree (Celcius) cold to attend dorm worship night at 10 p.m. This gathering of students and some faculty is one thing that I have been looking forward to getting back to since the semester began 10 days ago, so I braved the breath-stealing cold! Singing and praying with the handful of students who were there tonight, I felt something inside me give way, loosen its grip.

To be blunt, it has been a hard, hard couple of weeks since returning. My heart has been stopped-up, fidgety, unteachable. I haven’t been seeking the Lord like I want to be. I have let myself listen to some of Satan’s more pernicious lies. The strongest of those lies is the fear that as things change and different people flow in and out of my life, the joy of the Lord will somehow leave me. This is the fear I cannot face – and this is the lie that Satan tells. He tries to tell me that serving the Lord will not satisfy my heart, that I will be lonely and forsaken by the Holy Spirit.

Thankfully, when I am in a holy place, Satan’s lies lose their power – his voice is not so loud and I can hear God’s voice again more clearly. So tonight, amidst the cold, cold dark, I could cry and pray for centering, for vision, for a heart that listens more to my Father’s voice and less to my own fears.

Take my heart, and form it

Take my mind, transform it

Take my will, conform it

To Yours, to Yours, Oh Lord.

Crawling out from under

I'm sure a great number of you out there are wondering how life in the LT is going and I have to apologize for not keeping up better these past weeks. I'm beginning to find the rhythm of the semester and have a better sense of when I'll have time to write and think! I have some great stories from the semester that I'll post soon, but for the moment I simply wanted to pass along a verse that a friend reminded me of recently. She had been going through a rough time last spring and I had written her an encouraging email with these words. This week, she was an encouragement to me by simply reading them back to me! The Word of the Lord is truly living and active!

"The Lord your God is with you,
He is mighty to save.
He will take delight in you,
He will quiet you with his love,
He will rejoice over you with singing"

- Zephaniah 3:17

New poem on Expat Letters! http://www.expatriateletters.blogspot.com

The Mercy of Hope

One of the best things about this whole blog phenomenon is that I often find encouragement and sustenance from other friends who are walking similar paths of faith (hi Annie). This week I have been having a rough transition into the semester, and have beeing feeling pretty hopeless - just worn out by looking toward the future, not having enough energy to even get me through an hour. Hope has felt, oddly, like an enemy.

This morning, I was reading the Bible, intentionally looking for a Psalm to buoy me up and help me get through day 3 of the semester when I came across Psalm 25, which includes the cry:

"Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.
The troubles of my heart have multiplied;
free me from my distress and take away all my sins."

The Psalmist's request of the Lord is that He will:

"guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Savior,
and my HOPE is in you all day long."

That idea that I should hope in God all day long is profound - it's a reminder that hope should be a daily thing, not just a far-off longed-for hope, but a sustaining sense of God's presence. On her blog today, Annie included a passage from Thomas Merton's book, No Man is an Island,in which he talks about hope saying:

"Better than hoping for anything from the Lord, besides His love, let us place all our hope in His love itself. This hope is as sure as God Himself. It can never be confounded. It is more than a promise of its own fulfillment. It is an effect of the very love it hopes for. It seeks charity because it has already found charity. It seeks God knowing that it has already been found by Him. It travels to Heaven realizing obscurely that it has already arrived."

"Our hope is the pledge of a new heaven and a new earth, in which all things will be what they were meant to be. They will rise, together with us, in Christ. The beasts and the trees will one day share with us a new creation and we will see them as God sees them and know that they are very good.

"Meanwhile, if we embrace them for themselves, we discover both them and ourselves as evil. This is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil--disgust with the things we have misused and hatred of ourselves for misusing them.
"But the goodness of creation enters into the framework of holy hope. All created things proclaim God's fidelity to His promises, and urge us, for our sake and for their own, to deny ourselves and to live in hope and to look for the judgement and the general resurrection."

Home (?) Again

I'm back, and safe. As laiminga buti cia - I am happy to be here. I will spare you all a similarly detailed account of my epic journey back to Klaipeda. Perhaps a simple mention of the 12-hour bus excursion through the Baltics (Riga to Vilnius to Klaipeda) will suffice. Ever been woken up at 3:30 a.m. by angry Latvian women speaking Russian, trying to get you to lug your backpacks and things out of "their" seats? And then, once they realize they're in the wrong, lugging them all back into place? I then mistakenly took the "slow" bus from Vilnius to Klaipeda, and got the very long scenic tour of Lithuania. It began to feel like Narnia - always winter, and never Klaipeda!

But I'm back. Friday evening was spent with friends, a great dinner of chili, and prayer for the upcoming semester. Saturday I met with my fellow writing teachers to plan our new course, and I finally got myself to the theater with a friend to see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, so now all my Christmas wishes are complete. :) This morning at church was a fun time of reunion with church friends, communion, and singing in Lithuanian (I MISSED that).

I will not gloss over the fact that these past couple days have been emotionally hard. I knew they would be. It's a combination of jet lag, an altitude change, no sunlight, stress over the beginning of school, changing routines, shifting relationships, and an intense desire for God to renew His Spirit in me for the semester ahead of me. I feel at home here, but not completely. I felt at home in the States, but not completely. Changing and travel always exposes me to the temporality of my connections to this earth, the tentative nature of all my relationships. Except for one.

Once again, I am struggling with all my stregnth to hold onto the hope of my Home in Our God. He is the one unmovable foundation, the relationship that will never change, the "only one," as the Caedmon's Call song goes, "who will never leave me." In the dark January night, on the bus between Riga and Vilnius, I was listening to some piano arrangements of old hymns, and "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" suddenly piped through my ears. I clung onto its words - "there is no shadow of turning with thee, thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not, as thou hast been, thou forever wilt be." What I need now is another promise, that "morning by morning, new mercies I'll see." I definitely need some new mercies. Definitely.