Hello friends !
I haven't blogged at all this year, except to catch up on my blog posts from last year, which is just plain embarrassing. So I thought, why not give you a brief overview from this past year in Paris? I think it often helps me to write about my experiences so, in a way, this is as much for me as it is for you. For those of you who haven't heard, I will be living in Paris again starting in September, which is very exciting! I just can't get enough of France.
This past year I have had the pleasure of working with a Christian student organization called Agapé in Paris. It is an extension of Cru in the U.S. and we attempt to launch student movements on different universities, We are dedicated to sharing who we believe Jesus to be with students, helping students grow in their faith, and opening up dialogue around spirituality and religion in general in Paris. Never have I ever grown so much in my own faith, grown so much as an adult or met so many people that are different from me in political, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. It was a very rich experience that I never imagined would change me in so many way, and one for which I am immensely grateful.
I had the pleasure of working with a team of 8 other Americans and another long-term team of 3 Americans who became my family and who were very difficult to leave. As I have experienced before, friends you make abroad become very important friends—friends that stay with you for a long time and yet simultaneously you never really see them in real life. However, you've lived something life-changing with them and so you hold them dear to your heart.
The experience of being a foreigner is particular. People often think it's easy to live in a country like France. It's beautiful, it's romantic, and it's Paris, for goodness sake! These things are all true and of all the foreign countries France is a pretty amazing place to live. However, I've found that living abroad comes with specific hurdles.
Some thoughts on living abroad:
1. You will always feel like a foreigner. No matter how long you live there. You begin to fall into a rhythm and you feel more comfortable with the language and the people but you never really will feel French. I feel more American abroad then I ever have at home. I never even thought about being American (what that means about who I am, the way I was raised, my worldview, etc) until I left the country the first time in 2014. I am very proud to be from California and to have grown up surrounded by the ideas and people that I have been surrounded by—a thought which never crossed my mind before moving out of California and particularly this year on a team of people from all over the country.
2. You may never feel like a native but you will have an increased ability to appreciate the foreign culture as well as your own. As a foreigner, you sit on the outside in a special way, where you can see your own culture, but you're removed from it, and you can see the new culture, but you aren't completely inside of it. In this way, you can get a better hold on the positives and negatives of your own culture and the new culture. You begin to see that there isn't one right way to do things but many right ways. This shapes your vision of your future life.
3. When you are in one country, the other country always feels more like a dream than reality. I think this is a normal human thing to do. When you leave a place, you don't have as much time to physically spend in it and so your mind occupies it less. I think often about my time at Cal but I don't have the same mental hold I had on it as when I lived there. However, the feeling is intensified with living abroad because the two places seem like different worlds. There are different foods, cultures, languages, ideas, etc. They really are two distinct places. And your experience was (normally) so vivid you think you should be able to hang on to it more tightly. That you should be able to see it clearly because it was so instrumental to your life. But, life gets in the way. You have responsibilities and joys in the place you've moved back to and the foreign country or home country begins to feel blurry around the edges. I'll call it the flou effect. Because flou means blurry in French and that seems apt to describe a halfway between France and the States kind of place.
I'm sure I've written about all this before but I never fail to relearn lessons I've learned before. Anyways, I intend to post some pictures of this year too for those of you less wordy folks.
Photos to come of Paris (duh!), Belfast, Salzburg, Olhão, Malaga, Vogüé, Granada, Toulon (yes, again!), Monaco, Carqueiranne, Latte, and all the other cities I got to see this year!
Cheers to cross-cultural understanding!
