My Two Year Long Vacation

Yesterday, one of the children I babysit bombarded me with questions about my fast approaching departure. Now, I have become accustomed to a series of about 6 questions from every adult I meet regarding my journey, they are usually the following: 

“How many shots do you have to get?” 

“How long is the flight?/Where do you transfer?”

“Will you have running water?”

“What about malaria?”

“Can you come home at all?” 

“How much sunscreen are YOU packing?”

So, I was ready for those questions with carefully detailed answers which would reassure the worried party that I was competent enough to handle this. But did the five year old ask any of those questions? Nope. She did not. She didn’t yet have an image of Africa as a scary far off place that required shots, sunscreen and bed nets. All she knew was that I would be gone for two years, for some reason that she didn’t quite understand. So, she asked the questions I’ve been asking myself for the past few months. She asked the questions for which my answers were much more candid, far less reassuring, and probably more revealing. She asked these simple questions:

“Do you really have to leave us for TWO whole years? I’m really going to miss you.”

“Who made you do this? Was it your mom? Did your mom want you to go?” 

“Then it was your dad, your dad wanted you to do this?”

“I just don’t understand why you have to go on a two year long vacation!! By the time you’re home, I’ll be 7!”

Maggie asked me questions about my purpose. When most others asked me questions about logistics, my five year old friend asked me who ‘made me do this’? Well, it was my choice, which is hard for a five year old to understand, but this journey was something I discerned as the most fitting next step for my life. Of course, my parents, family and friends were all at the forefront of my mind in the discernment process and they all journeyed with me at different points along the way, starting from last August when I returned from Kenya, but at the end of the day it was my choice. I chose this as a pathway for me to share and become my authentic self with my family and friends at home and the family and friends I will meet in Dar es Salaam.

Maggie also got me thinking about the concept of a vacation, what it means and how this might really be something like a ‘simple living style vacation’. So, I did what my mom always taught me to do when I didn’t quite understand a word, I looked it up in the dictionary and found this: “Vacation n. : 1. an interlude, usu. of several days or weeks, from one’s customary duties, as for recreation or rest.  . . . 4. the act of vacating”. In some ways these definitions do fit- I will be taking an ‘interlude’ from my customary duties and I will be ‘vacating’ my very comfortable room in my parents’ home, but I guess it’s the difference in purpose that is most important to note. I’m not ‘vacating’ for personal relaxation or rest, I’m really challenging myself to live without the everyday comforts of my American lifestyle in order to learn- to learn about the way I live and the way others live and the ways we can live together in harmony.  

The most liberating part of my discernment process was when my dad said to me in a phone conversation, “Katie, you know Mommy and I are your parents and are naturally worried about your safety, but in the end, you are an adult and you are the one who will live most intimately with the consequences of your choices. We would never dare hold you back.” So, Maggie, I made this choice and I will be living with it, in it, and through it for the next two years and I am so happy I did.