thoughts on our first year

Recently I have been thinking about our first year...what exactly does that mean? Our first year in the Czech Republic or our first year of marriage? For us, the two can't be seperated, so this post will be about both of them. I know that in the past Jeremy and I have shared a lot about our activities inside and out of the church, but not really about our personal struggles and joys. I feel like this is a good time to do so.

Newly weds in a new country
We got married four months before moving to the Czech Republic, and I would say that we had an ideal situation. We both worked at a YMCA camp as naturalists, where we had friends, a community, our first home, and it was comfortable. It was there that we started our transformation from girlfriend/boyfriend to a married couple. Those of you who are married know that this can be both fun and frustating, because no longer are you living only for yourself and your well being, but you need to make adjustments to your lifestyle to met the needs of the other person. Cooking dinner is a good example of this. I might want to eat soup, but Jeremy would want to eat pasta; therefore, we would have to come up with some other option that both of us could agree on. So we had alot of adjustments to make.

After coming to the Czech Republic it felt like we needed to re-do all of the adjustments we had made in Ohio, plus more, since we now lived in a completely foreign country. Honestly, I underestimated how difficult this change would be. Not only did we need to a adjust to the language, culture, food and people, but also the reactions of one another while these adjustments are taking place. For example, going to the grocery store. In the united states I know what I can and can't buy at the grocery store, but here I'm still trying to figure this out. During our first few months here, the grocery store was a stressful place full of people with carts, narrow isle ways, and ofcourse everything being in Czech. It would take me about forty minutes to find half the things I was looking for and I would come home frustrated because I couldn't find something, or I couldn't understand that the cashier said to me, or the person behind me was pushing their cart into my butt in hopes to making me go faster. I would then tell Jeremy about the experience in hopes that he would understand and help me to feel better. So we had new emotional struggles that we needed to help each other deal with.

I am an introvert and Jeremy is an extrovert. This combination can be good for sometimes, like planning things, but adds a level of stress to other things, mainly social interations. In the U.S. this was not as apperent, because there was never a time when we could not make our needs clear to someone, and I knew how to deal with my introvertedness. After our move I was completely out of my comfort zone and felt like I was drowning at time. There were so many emtional stress, but the biggest was learning a new language, which effected everything we did. Jeremy took the lead in most social settings since his Czech was better, and I was afraid, but this put an incredible amount of strain on him. Our first year I didn't do a good job of supporting him and practicing the language with him, which has created a wide gap in our ability to communicate in Czech, but also made him feel that he is was let down in a time of need.

Old hat
We came into a program that was going into it's 6th year. A group from Oklahoma, who knew Pastor Jan and his family, had been coming to Policka for 5 years to do a English summer camp at the church. After the 3rd year of camp, a young woman from the group, Kati, stayed to teach English out of the church year round. She stayed for two years and we were hired to take her place and add new ideas to the already existing program. I found this was more challenging than I thought it would be, mainly because the first year I didn't have a single helper for my seven kids classes. I had to rely on a dictionary and the higher level kids for communication, because my Czech was not at a level where I could help them understand what I was saying in English.

Another challange was the feeling that we needed to live up to the past programs. Which meant that we needed to really think about how to make existing programs, classes and the halloween party, as good as, if not better than in the past. Ofcourse this is difficult to do since we weren't here, and we can only go off of what Kati wrote on her blog and what the kids tell us they did and liked. My most feared phrase in class was "we already did this with Kati" because it meant not only that the kids would not listen to me while I explained what we were going to do, but also that it was nothing "new and exicting" for them. We did plan some completely new events, which were sucessful, but for the most part, it didn't seem like people were interested in coming. It was like they were tired of coming to events at the church being led by Americans.

I would say the most suprising challenge that arose stemmed from us being second in line. On a number of occations people would tell us how much easier it is for us since there are two of us. They would tell us how lonely Kati was, or how difficult it was for her to adjust. I would like to think that people were just trying to make us feel better, but it had the opposite effect. It made me feel like my struggles and feeling of loneliness were unwarented. Yes, Jeremy and I had one another, but we spent our first year not knowing anyone in our appartment building or really anyone outside the church. We did make some wonderful friends, whom we can never express how much their friendship means to us, but it was and is still lonely at times. I don't want to make this sound like I am saying that our time here was more difficult than Kati's, I just want to show that our struggles looked a little different.

We have about ten months left in Policka, so there is still more to learn and see, and ofcourse more people to meet. I would like to ask that you keep Jeremy and I in your thoughts. I would be a great deal to us. Peace.