I met the Prytup family today. Pavel is going to spend 50% time at Good Shepherd and 50% time with the MCC Income Generation projects. Betsy is going to spend 50% time at Good Shpeherd and 50% time at home with their two small children.
I printed some documents to help in the discussion, especially in regards to the income generation responsibilities and have also had some time for informal discussion. Talking to them, even though they have a lot of epxerience in this part of the world (Pavel grew up in the USSR and former-USSR and they have visited many times in the past years) and are also more qualified to do what I have been trying to do these past years (Pavel has a Masters in International development and Betsy worked in a children's home in Ohio), reminds me a lot of what it was like for me almost three years ago.
Countless questions were swimming around in my head.. What was I going to DO for three years here? Who are these people and will I ever get to know any of them? What's the difference between all the different types of Baptists here? What is Orthodoxy? How will I work with these people and would my job description evolve? And also little things like will our electronic items work on 220-volt curent? Would we have to buy all our water? And the list went on and on.
And now, here we are getting ready to go home and here are these people in shoes similar to the ones we were in not that long ago. And they have questions too. Questions about things I mostly take for granted. How many of these questions have I really found answers accurate enough to give them a decent response, and how many un-understood things have I just grown accustomed to not knowing the answer to or the reason for?
I remember the people I appreciated the most in those first weeks/months. I won't name names, but they were the ones patient enough to answer my oftentimes ridiculous-seeming questions, empathetic enough to realize I woundn't understand everything at once so simple answers were necessary (even if they didn't always give the entire picture), and honest enough to say "I have no idea" when that was clearly or even not so clearly the case.
Helping these new people in their transition will probably be a great way to process and bring closure to my own time here. And I hope that I will be as patient, empathetic, and honest enough to follow the examples of those who I so greatly appreciated about three years ago. I probably won't, but maybe these new coworkers will be forgiving. I'll probably learn more from them than they will from me. And they only have to put up with me for a week-and-a-half. Unfortunately, sometimes it will be in large doses. Poor newcomers.
Dave
