Have you ever lived overseas?
I'm not talking about a vacation packed with non-stop pictures and travel and fun. I'm talking about a time long enough for laundry to be done, long enough for grocery shopping routines to form, long enough for lonliness to set in.
I had the chance to spend half a year overseas after high school. The mental exhaustion was intense. The new language was an extra layer of difficulty that had to be peeled back from the most ordinary of tasks. I remember searching for words, lining them up in my mind, rehearsing them over and over as I stepped to a desk or cashier and hoped that the other person would be kind.
Now I am the person behind the desk. In my new office, every other visitor speaks with an accent. Their syllables halt in strange places and their faulty intonations make commonplace words sound like music.
For a long time, I have enjoyed tiny slivers of interaction with internationals--a few minutes on the bus, visits with a Chinese friend who now lives 3 hours away, or a Turkish friend who is very busy with her baby. Because our ministry focus is on a student homegroup that has mostly American students (by accident, not design), there just hasn't been the opportunity to interact very much.
Now, not only do I get to see and talk to foreign students every day at my job, I have a new friend from China! Lynn* is a first-semester graduate student from Shanghai, and she is my new conversation partner. Several months ago, she jotted down her name on a sheet of paper at an international student welcome event to ask for an American friend. We got connected, and I'm so excited to get to know her!
I'm sure I'll have plenty more to tell as we get to know each other, but for now, please pray for our friendship, and for Lynn as she adjusts to American life and our (very!) strange language.
*Not her real name
