The Road Goes Ever On and On

I currently live 918 miles from my parents' house up in Sioux Falls, SD. I moved here just over a year and a half ago to start graduate school. Since then, Waco has become a home base of sorts -- not a place I especially enjoy living in, but a place to come home to, where I am rather independent. I've enjoyed my proximity to Austin and Dallas, and, for the most part, the weather, though it swings back and forth between extremes far too often. However, I never planned on staying here for very long.

In fact, I've never really seen myself living in any one place for a very long time at all. I have, at most, a five year plan for my life, most of which centered around whether or not I'd be able to get a job to pay off my student loans. I have to confess: After a Bachelor's and a Master's, both at private institutions, I have a lot of student debt. Not as much as some people I know, because I was lucky enough to have scholarships in undergrad and assistantships in grad, but enough to be daunting.

As you can probably guess, with some of my loans coming due in September, I was rather nervous about graduating in May and not being able to find a job. In fact, in my mental calendar, all of the dates from mid-March to mid-May, when I graduate, say "FIND A JOB."

I'm writing this to announce that various other little things have replaced such a designation on my mental calendar - things like, "Apply for visa. Get passport renewed. Put bed and other furniture up on Craigslist. Figure out cell phone costs. Sort through book collection again and find the ones you absolutely cannot give up. Figure out storage costs."

As you can guess, I have a job now.

But what sort of job requires visas and passport renewal?

That's right, I'm moving overseas.

We got an email about two weeks ago on the list for Baylor English graduate students informing us of a job opportunity for an English Lecturer position at Baiko Gukuin University in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi, Japan, a full 8,877 miles from my original starting point in Sioux Falls, SD. A week after finding out about the position, I applied, and now, not even a full week after that, I have accepted the position, and am investigating passport renewal and work visas, preparing to leave one week after graduation.

This prospect terrifies me. Absolutely terrifies me. But, I've never really been one to back down from fear. Heck, if I did that, I wouldn't have gone to England, I wouldn't have stood on a balcony of a church's bell tower 300 feet above the English countryside, I wouldn't have seen the famous gargoyles on the top of Notre Dame in Paris, I wouldn't have shaken the hands of a hundred schoolchildren in a dusty backroad in Vizag, India. It is this urge to conquer my fear that leads me on to newer and bigger things, challenges I never thought I'd actually face and the discovery that yes, I can do this.

Ironically, the thing that terrifies me is not the whole "living in Japan" thing - that I know I can do. It's the whole "teaching people who don't speak my language" thing, which is why I'm stopping by a bookstore ASAP and getting some guides to learning Japanese. I speak none of it, but am willing to learn.

The position appointment is for two years, and I'm paid around $3200/month (assuming I've calculated the Yen to dollar conversion correctly, which I hope I have - I didn't feel it appropriate to ask at that moment) and I get a furnished apartment, rent free, near the campus. The city we are in sits, from what I can tell, on an isthmus between Japan's two Southern Island - the main one with Tokyo, and the lower one with Nagasaki. In fact, Shimonoseki is mid-way between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, places of interesting historical importance. I am also only about a ferry ride from South Korea, which means, during one of my vacations, I'm definitely going to the DMZ, and to Seoul, and Busan. I have several friends who are either there or just finishing up years in Korea, teaching English at various age levels, so I will certainly have no lack of places to visit and see. I hope that at some point, I can visit China, Thailand, Taiwan, and maybe even, if I have time/money, go South to New Zealand. In fact, I plan on that toward the end of my two years.

So, now that I have the job taken care of, I can spend even more time just concentrating on my thesis (I have to turn it in two weeks from yesterday), and work on doing the little things to prepare for Japan.

As it is, I will probably change the title of this blog to reflect something much less specific than "Dianna in India," and will be doing blog updates as I prepare, as I experience all Japan has to offer, and as I adjust to living in a culture so completely different than my own. The Japanese and the US have always had an interesting relationship, and I'm excited to explore it from a different angle. This blog will, of course, maintain its social justice and human trafficking focus, and it will be interesting to explore how the Japanese deal with social issues. Prayer as I undertake this new step in my life would certainly be welcome.

Below is a map of where I'll be. The little "A" is the town.

Lenten Thoughts

Three years ago, my friend Paul wrote a blog about his choice Lenten fast that year--backspacing. His plan was to give up going back on his word, to give up saying things he didn't mean and to decide that he meant the things he did. I thought it was a very interesting concept, though one I couldn't get fully behind because, hey, I'd never practiced giving up things for Lent.

Growing up Baptist, we didn't do a lot of things that could be connected to any sort of liturgy or church calendar, other than the holidays of Christmas and Easter. No Pentacost, no Lent (that I was aware of, anyway), no Feasts for different saints.

When I got to college, I had some friends who gave up stuff, but I never really felt like doing it because hey, that wasn't part of my tradition. After going to England, however, I discovered that the tradition I was raised in didn't matter nearly as much as the traditions I chose to follow once I had given them thought. The idea of Lent intrigued me - in the days leading up to Easter, giving up something that means something to you in an effort to spend more time getting to know Christ. It's connected to the idea of fasting, a spiritual discipline that's been rather lost in the church.

Fasting is deliberately depriving yourself of something you want or need in order to concentrate more on your spiritual life.

This is the purpose of Lent.

Last year, I finally participated in Lent. It didn't necessarily give me a clearly spiritual life, but it did help me streamline my time management, and helped me get through my three graduate classes. I gave up Facebook, and participated in Blood:Water Mission's 40 Days of Water. The denial of my tri-weekly Common Grounds Earl Greyer tea was a bit of a trial, but it did save money, which I was then able to donate to build wells in Africa.

This year I'm doing it again.

Well, not 40 Days of Water, though the end of the Lent period will be celebrated in the form of a donation.

I'm not giving up my coffee and tea, but I am giving up a portion of my daily diet: Meat.

Yes, you read that right. For Lent I am becoming a vegetarian.

I would be silly to surmise that who I am is completely separate from where I grew up. South Dakota's meat industry shaped my view on eating animals--it was just something we did. Vegetarians were silly people who thought animals more valuable alive than they would be on the plate. And to some extent, that's true. Meat gives a number of nutrients that are hard to find elsewhere, that supplement one's blood iron content (a big problem for me) and provide energy and less fat than a normal all-carb diet. South Dakota likes to emphasize the economic concept of eating meat as well--just outside of Mitchell, SD, there is a large billboard reading: "We South Dakotans Reject Animal Activists! Meat is Our Industry!"

I didn't meet a full-fledged vegetarian until I went to England in my junior year of college--at 20 years old. Jennie was a brash, fun Brooklynite, the daughter of, I believe, Messianic Jews. She believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but still held to Jewish customs. Her hold on the traditions of her family, and of her own convictions made for an interesting friendship that sometimes clashed with my then staunchly conservative beliefs. She was a vegetarian on moral grounds and cared deeply about the animals she encountered. For Easter and Lent (which occurred while we were in England), she had to be on a rather strict diet because she had to follow the Jewish dietary system, meaning the week of Passover, she was restricted to forms of Matzo.

Her convictions were inspiring, and when I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer's most recent book, Eating Animals, I was inspired to try an experiment.

Needless to say, when I told my mom of my Lenten plan, she didn't react too kindly. She is worried that a diet consisting of mainly carbs and vegetables for a period of 40 days (with Sundays off, which makes it a shame that Chick-Fil-A is closed then) will result in my sudden and untimely death.

Right.

In addition to meat, I'm doing the additional cleansing of time-consuming activities: No Facebook, and possibly no Twitter for a time.

What are you giving up?

"a magic beyond all we do here"

Many of you know and many of you don't--I am currently working on my Master's Thesis, in an absurdly time crunched effort to walk across the Ferrell Center stage in May with a white hood hanging around my neck. My thesis on the idea of a spiritual community/church in the Harry Potter novels has been quite a few years in the making, taking on different approaches, different ideas and different tacks depending on where I am sitting on that particular day. It is one of the many projects that I imagine I will never fully finish, and I am okay with that. My life is full to the brim with unfinished, half started, half baked ideas, and honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. Seeing something completed is nearly as fun as knowing that everything (even that which is "done") is still in process.

Regardless of that tangent, I wanted to share this with you. The creator of the boy wizard, Harry Potter, has given precious few interviews since the release of the seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and yet, as far as authors go, she has been remarkably accessible. I imagine that one day I will have a chance to sit down for coffee with her, and discuss her time at Amnesty International, which is how she paid the bills in her early 20s. In doing research for my thesis, I have been subsequently doing a lot of research on her, and have found the following video quite moving and pertinent to what I do with my life. Even if you are not a fan of The Boy Who Lived, you may be interested in hearing about the imagination that created him is something far much more than words on a page.

Listen, think about what she has to say, and imagine what we can do.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. (via http://harvardmagazine.com)

Naan-Profit

Shortly before I went to India, the guitarist for a band I have enjoyed for years tweeted a joke I have repeated many times since: "I would like to open an Indian fast food chain and call it Naan-Profit." The joke struck a chord with me, as it combined two of my favorite things - Naan, and the idea of non-profits. Though, a not-for-profit fast food chain seems kind of silly...and Indian fast food even more so. I shall explain.

What I didn't realize though before actually traveling to India was that I had never had true Naan. Before leaving for my trip, I had had maybe two meals of Indian food in my life. When I went to Boston for the first time, my friends Anne and Jess took us to a wonderful Indian restaurant near Harvard, and I had Tandoori chicken with some rice and curry. Incredibly spicy, but delicious. And just last summer, shortly after finding out that I was going to India, my roommate and I were in Austin and had dinner at the Clay Pit, an Indian restaurant near the Capitol Building. I had a tandoori chicken salad, with cold tandoori chicken and delicious dressing. Some bread and chutney came with our meal and I was totally that this brittle, cracker like stuff that tasted like a salt-less saltine was Naan, a common Indian side that comes with practically every meal.

I grimaced. If this was Indian food, I was not looking forward to such meals. "I suppose I can eat rice. A lot of rice." I thought at the time.

Boy, was I wrong.

I heard plenty of warnings about the spiciness of Indian food before going over, and worried about whether or not I could handle it. I come from the very middle of the United States, a breadbasket kind of place. We don't do spicy. When I went to Buffalo Wild Wings on 40 cent wing Tuesdays in undergraduate, the most I could ever handle was around halfway down the spicy chart--Asian something. My family never cooks with many spices, and, growing up, I never had a meal that made my nose run because it was so spicy. When my parents moved me to Texas, we went to a Cajun restaurant, and my mother requested a Cajun steak...with no spices on it. That's how bland my family is.

Needless to say, I was scared that the only option I was going to have would be the quite spicy Indian food, and that I would either starve, or die from the heat.

Unfortunately, what should have been a good slow introduction to the Indian food was interrupted by illness on the first day there. Rather than eating Indian food on the plane, and getting a feel for the type of food it would involve, I was instead thrown into it when I was handed some chicken, some Naan and some rice after getting back to the hotel after my hospital stay. The chicken was already spicier than I would have liked, even though San-Schou (no idea how to spell his name) assured me that it wasn't bad. "This, not bad?" I thought. "Oh dear."

Rather than filling my somewhat nauseous stomach with a massive amount of spicy chicken, I instead reached for the pile of bread wrapped in foil, pulling off a chunk and eating it. The glutenous, lightly buttered bread was precisely what the doctor ordered for a poor feeling stomach.

Over the next week, I would learn the wonder of Naan. In a restaurant at the hotel in Rajahmundry, buttered Naan would be combined with delicious tomato soup that was, surprisingly, too sweet to eat on its own. In Nellore, the Naan cooled my tongue after some spicy chicken lollipops (seriously, that was the name of the food). And at home base in Vizag, either sweet Indian bread or Naan were available at nearly every meal. Naan became the go-to food for sopping up extra sauce on your plate, to create a wonderful wrap around chicken curry and rice, or to dip in Daal, another spicy, strangely textured Indian side.

Naan is the Indian version of toast, cleaning up extra food, but tasting good on its own. During my first meal back home in Waco, I found myself wishing that I had homecooked curry chicken and Naan. My average fare of spaghetti and tomato sauce seemed...bland. I had acclimated, and was now craving spice.

Fast forward to today. I have decided, in honor of my upcoming birthday (birthdays are a big deal to me), I am going to treat my friends to as close to genuine, homecooked Indian meal as I can get.

This weekend, I am doing a practice run.

There's an old saying that you don't truly understand someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I say, you don't truly get someone's culture until you've attempted to cook their food. So much of culture is surrounded and wrapped up in what we put in our bodies on a daily basis. If you ask an American what things are symbols of America, the answer will probably include Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, Steak, Hamburgers, French Fries, BBQ Pork or Ribs...and so on. There's a reason behind the saying, "As American as Apple Pie."

By the same stroke, you could probably say the same thing about India, at least in a very general sense: "It's as Indian as chicken curry on rice!" By embracing and attempting to cook and enjoy another culture's food, you are trying to respect traditions that culture has had for years, decades, even centuries.

Standing at the counter this evening pressing out little balls of dough into tiny circles, I realized that I probably wasn't patient enough waiting for the dough to rise the first time, and even before that, not patient enough in waiting for the yeast to...well, do what it does. Wanting to see the end result, I probably didn't let natural processes do their work. The bread looks...okay, but it certainly nothing I would want to feed to a native Indian, or to my guests, for that matter.

As cheesy as it may be, this seems like a pretty good assessment for my life in India. So much of India is unexpected, so much of it takes patience. We Americans are so used to getting things done, to efficiency, to the microwave meal that doesn't take three hours of preparation. If a problem arises with a product line, we expect a solution on our desk by 5PM that afternoon. If something is wrong in the Health Care system, we expected Congress to fix it NOW, regardless of how much we would also want to be sure that the law passed doesn't screw over our children and grandchildren. If we see people hurting, we want to act NOW to stop the hurt, not wait to see what the best course of action is, or even whether what we are doing is wrong (think of the missionaries now sitting an Haitian jail...they were quick to act, but didn't have the patience to think that what they were doing just might be a problem).

Embracing another culture takes patience.

Learning to love your neighbor, and your enemy, takes patience.

Helping others takes patience.

Making Naan takes patience and understanding of the proper technique.

I don't have it down yet, but I'm confident I can get there soon. And with that, I hope I can understand a little better what it takes to love someone else, even if it just by spending the time to bring them some comfort.
_____________
Photo credit: Fellow Indian traveler Marissa Lorusso, dear roommate and awesome person. :)