Happy Thanksgiving!

I am here.  *cringe*  I may have been shirking my blogging duties for the past ten days, but I do exist.  And I accept full responsibility for my actions.  Or lack thereof.  It may be comforting for you all to know that part of the reason I didn’t write anything was that I really couldn’t think of anything worth writing about.  I am very busy right now, what with finals at the junior college next week, and the Christmas concert for my music classes, and a baptism, and recruitment for teachers for next year…but most of that seems sort of boring.

Actually, I should talk about my new work as a recruiter/pretend HR person.  Perhaps you all have picked up on the fact that job descriptions at the mission tend to be amorphous and vaguely defined.  I teach at the high school as well as the junior college; the junior college teachers also provide feedback for each other on everything from curriculum questions to classroom techniques.  I recently read and commented on Eric’s drafts of final exams…not that my comments helped him much, but hopefully they lightened the mood.  On top of that, when Betsy left, I started to attend the meetings of the Junior College’s “steering committee.”  It’s not exactly a board, but it makes decisions.  And I take minutes for the meetings.

I guess what I’m trying to say is just this: jobs morph and expand.  In fact, my responsibilities here seem to follow the refrigerator principle: no matter how empty the fridge begins, and no matter how large it is, “stuff” expands to fill all available space.  So anyway, my newest project has been the somewhat daunting task of recruiting people with Liberal Arts-ish backgrounds, who also happen to want to donate the next year or two of their lives to teaching at our school as volunteers.  Woohoo!  I have been sending out emails to everyone and their brother, and in the process have discovered two things:

1) The Catholic college world is even smaller than I had thought.  The contacts the other volunteers have given me for Franciscan and Benedictine have included TACers who went to school with my parents, and whose children went to school with me.  My cousin, who went to Franciscan years ago, forwarded me my own email, which he had received via an alumni email chain.  Another of my emails to a different Catholic college was returned by a former volunteer at the high school here in Benque.  My conclusion: everyone in the Catholic college circuit is at most one degree of acquaintance removed from everyone else.

2.  In a wild, unexpected twist of events, I kind of enjoy this kind of work.  I was as surprised to discover this as anyone who knows me will be, I think.  When I graduated from college and started looking for a job, I struggled to take advantage of my contacts.  I hated, and still do hate networking on my own behalf.  It is not something I’m good at.  For that reason, I thought it was an enormous joke that I would end up recruiting for my job.  I thought, “I’ll do my best, and hopefully God will do the rest, because I am not good at this at all.”  But apparently when I am networking for a cause I care about, and when my tentative requests are met with warm approbation and interest, I quite like the job.  The jury’s still out on whether I’m any good at it, but at least that’s something.

That said, please keep our search for possible volunteers in your prayers.  Also, if you or someone you know is interested, and has a background in Liberal Arts, Philosophy, Theology, Humanities, Classics, English, History…or even Business, since we are offering a Business major as well…please get in touch with me!

Anyway.  Back to the holiday at hand.  Thanksgiving is, of course, an American holiday, but the school employs so many American volunteers that they have a tradition of celebrating it anyway.  Sort of.  Our celebration consists of a half day at the high school, mass, a school-provided dinner of rice and beans and chicken, set up and served by the American volunteers themselves, and desserts provided by the volunteers as well.  A little unorthodox, but at least it marks the occasion.

In any case, the real point of the holiday is, in fact, thanksgiving, and I do have much to be grateful for.  I have been trying to remember to ponder my blessings more frequently and habitually.  I am thankful for God’s hand in my life; the hand that brought me here suddenly and surely, when I did not know what to do.  And really, I should not neglect to mention St. Therese’s intercession as well, since the opportunity fell into my lap during a novena to her.  I am thankful for my background, my education and my other experience, which suited me to do this job, even as imperfectly as I do it (and that itself is a testimony to God’s support).  I am thankful for the opportunities I have had for the past 24 days to ponder and reflect, deepening my relationship with Mary as we prepare for our Marian consecration on December 8th.  Finally, and dearest to my heart (though perhaps it shouldn’t be), I am deeply grateful for the relationships I have with the people in my life: my family, my friends at home in the U.S., and the people who have come into my life and welcomed me into theirs since I have been in Belize.

All of these things should perhaps lighten the tragedy of having no turkey and stuffing (or even pie!) today.  Then again, since food is my One True Love (as we all know), that is a tough pill to swallow.  Actually, since it doesn’t even feel like Thanksgiving today, it is not nearly as tough as it would be otherwise.