Month: August 2009

Wheels!

On By Jesse ZinkIn Uncategorized1 Comment

In South Africa, I had a car – a bit on the small side, but it moved forward and backwards when I asked it to. In Alaska, I could walk most places I needed to and had access to wheels when I needed them.

In New Haven, my wheels are a hand-me-down from my father. I love my new pink bike!IMG_1494(I’m hoping the colour will actually work as a theft-deterrent.)

I have been using it constantly this week around town. New Haven is mostly flat, which makes for pleasant and relaxed riding. The goofballs who started the Divinity School decided it needed to be a “light to the nations” or something and so put the school on the highest hill in New Haven. I have tried every possible approach to that hill and none of them are easy.

There are other cyclists among my fellow students. We made quite a peloton around 1:30am the other night on the way back from a karaoke contest.

In high school, I rode my bike to school until Thanksgiving. I bet I can go past that this year.

Languages

On By Jesse ZinkIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I find myself thinking a lot about language in this in-between time from the close of my orientation to the beginning of classes.

Again and again during orientation I found myself marveling, “This is so easy! I can understand what everyone is saying!” After struggling through so many interactions in South Africa because of the immense language barrier, being able to communicate in English is a great blessing. (I do have a newfound perspective on the life of an international student and have been listening to their concerns – “everyone speaks so fast!”)

But there’s a new language to learn as well. It’s the lingo of Yale and Berkeley Divinity Schools. There’s a whole wealth of words, acronyms, and phrases that continue to confound me: Second Temple student, ISM, Patristics, CLC, and many, many more.

There’s also the language of the academy and the ivory tower. The challenge for me is to a) re-learn this and b) figure out how to communicate my experiences of the past few years in a way that people understand. There’s so much I want to share sometimes but I just don’t know how to say it in a way that does justice to the experience. I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the importance of the Anglican Communion but it doesn’t come close to the experience of actually belonging to a non-English-language church in another province. I wish other people here could have that experience.

I should note that amid the challenge of learning and re-learning all these languages is the challenge of just figuring out how life works – where classrooms are, where the ATMs that don’t charge fees are, who everyone is and where they come from, and so on and so forth. It can be kind of overwhelming.

Getting Ready

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Back when I was preparing to move to South Africa, I wrote a few posts about my expectations/hopes/fears/dreads for that transition. It’s too long a story to tell how I ended up going to Yale Divinity School – you’ll have to hear it in person – but I’m in a similar position of hopeful/fearful expectation as I was two years ago. This transition is causing me some anxiety.

Living Outside – I haven’t lived in the lower-48 states since 2005. That doesn’t sound long but every time I’ve come back for a (brief) visit, I feel more and more out of place and sense small but significant shifts that put me further out-of-touch with the culture of “my” generation. Now I have to live there!

The Kindergartner’s Fear: “No one is going to like me!” – OK, so that may not be quite fair; after all, I’ve done a fair bit of moving these past few years and always ended up with good, new friends and I have every confidence I can do the same in New Haven. But I am somewhat worried on a modest variation of the kindergartner’s fear: “no one is going to be interested in the same things as me!” We’ll see.

All those people/places/events to learn! – One of the hard things about moving to a new place is figuring out a new routine – where to get your hair cut, buy groceries, find an ATM that doesn’t charge you an arm and a leg to get your own money, learning the location of all my classes, picking those classes, etc., etc., etc. That was exhausting in all my previous lives – Wolfville, Chicago, Nome, Mthatha. And now I have to do it again?

And what about all those people? There are literally going to be hundreds of interesting and fascinating people I’ll want to get to know. I fully expect there are going to be people in this group who will be friends for the rest of my life. Meeting new people and making new friends is also totally exhausting, especially when I’m not doing such a great job keeping up with all the existing friends.

(I’m comforted by the fact that each time I’ve made a similar transition in the past all the energy I’ve invested in figuring my way around town and – especially – meeting new people has been totally worth it.)

Oddly, I’m not too worried about going back to school after such a long break. I am foreseeing that will be a relatively smooth transition.

Amid all these concerns about the future, I have a lot of hope and expectation as well. Primarily, I’m hoping all these questions I’ve been rolling around in my head these last several years will find their proper answers and that new ones will come along to take their place.

Only time will tell, I suppose…

A new beginning

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My life is undergoing some major transition so I thought my blogging presence should as well.

My two years as a missionary in Mthatha, South Africa are concluded so I’ve also concluded the blog I had about that time. You can still read through it, however, if you’re interested in overseas mission, HIV/AIDS, life on a garbage dump, living as an ex-pat, learning to speak another language, the Indian Ocean, or any of the other fabulous, exciting, frustrating, and transforming experiences I had these past few years – http://mthathamission.blogspot.com.

Before that, I worked as a news reporter for KNOM AM/FM in Nome, Alaska and was also a volunteer EMT. You can read about my life in Alaska at my old Alaska blog – http://nomeak.blogspot.com.

Many readers of my South Africa blog asked and encouraged me to continue blogging in this new phase of my life at Yale Divinity School and those requests are the prime reason for this new blog. (That, and I like to write.) I see it as a way to keep writing and reflecting on the transition back into lower-48 culture after several years away, keep my friends and family updated on life, and let my mind wander across goings-on from Nome to Mthatha and everywhere in between.

However, I want to note up front that what made my blog from South Africa interesting was that I had great material to work with. The people and stories I encountered there are so unusual and so far from the norm of middle-class U.S. that they naturally made for great reading. I expect to have lots less of that kind of material to work with at YDS.

Nonetheless, I’ll give it a shot and see what happens. My guiding principles in the earlier blog were to criticize only myself and focus on relating isolated instances and individuals. We’ll see how well those transfer to this new endeavour.