Another Phase of Temporary Hostility

     When I signed up for this experience I knew everything would not be clear skies and sunny days. I anticipated feeling afraid, scared, indifferent, angry and of course crying. I did not think it would be easy living here for a year. However, I never imagined becoming so uncomfortable that I would want to throw my entire scholarship away and return home early. AFS warned us about the many negative emotions that would come while being abroad, the chances of changing families at least once, getting sent home early and/or not being able to adapt to your host family or your host family not being able to adapt to you. All I could think to myself through those orientations was, "NOT AMBER BROCK!" Now that I am facing the reality that being here is character building I guess I counted my chickens before the hatched. I have never been a quitter nor a weak individual, but I must make it clear to you all... an experiece abroad (not CAN but) WILL bring the strongest people to their knees. When you take a soldier from his base, or a gangster for his own stomping grounds... he tends to back into a hot corner and dry up like a raisin in the sun, in the face of a fight: fruitless, fightless. I truly believe I still have some fire in me but being so far from home... the fight in me has vanished. In this type of experience I have come to learn that you ONLY loose when you fight back. In addition, after you have lost the fight and chances are that you will there is only one place to run to...back to your home abroad, where the fight began. I have never felt so stripped from my comfort zone that I could not be myself, feeling like I do not even know myself... it feels like Modern Oppression at times! Here the only thing that has always separated me from the other: my strength, has been snatched and its intensity drained until it takes on a pale white shade. COLORLESS, Lifeless, Strengthless. Everybody keeps telling me to enjoy my next 7 months here and duke it out, but how do I drift off to sleep at night in such discomfort, 7 months is a long time.... I'll tell you how long in fact: 212 days, 30 weeks and some change, or about five thousand and eighty-eight hours. This emotional rollercoaster is no fun and I pray that this too passes!

P.S. Romans 5:3-5 and 12:12

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worketh pantience; And patience experience, and experience hope: And hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given to us.

Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer.