Processing, Grieving, Learning

I am taking a class this semester called "Violence, Poverty, and Social Justice." I had taken the professor before and liked his teaching style, plus I thought the class would help me to explore issues--particularly on the international level--about which I was really ignorant.

What I didn't expect when I signed up for the class was how much I would feel these issues pertaining to me personally as I think about my time in Romania. I realized this summer that, in many ways, I never really processed all the things that I saw or experienced over there. I'm not totally sure why that is: I think some of it was just have been fresh out of high school and not having schema--in terms of life experience, academic knowledge, theological insight--to fully grasp what I had been part of. I think it also had a lot to do with the fact that I immediately returned to the world of "going to college," which was all-consuming and had very few "access points" for which to think about, talk about, or process Romania.

I read a book this summer about street children and that sort of kick-started thinking about it all again, and now in this class we're reading about chronic poverty, structural oppression, street children, etc. and it's all coming back to me in waves. I started a book this week about sex trafficking that is haunting and powerful and just makes me very angry--I think I have to be careful about who I talk to after I've been reading this book because it shakes me up so badly. While the book doesn't relate to my experience directly, it does bring to mind so many old memories and events and even just observations that I never fully realized before. It's a bizarre experience--grieving and aching for the first time over things I saw nearly 4 years ago. I'm struggling, too, with some shame over my responses at the time. I think so many things just passed by me unnoticed; the child at the Day Center who became a prostitute, the kids who were lured into making pornographic videos, even just the everyday stories of alcoholic fathers who made them leave home. I know at the time I felt like I cared, but my responses to it all seem pitiful now. I feel like I didn't know how to cope with it all, and so to some degree I just held it all at arm's length. Reading these books, talking to friends, and just thinking about it make me wish that I had done so many things differently.

At the end of the day, I know this will be an ongoing experience. Hopefully, I will always be maturing in a positive direction, and that will mean that I will always be able to look back with a greater awareness and wish that things--really that I--could have been different. But while repentance is important, I'm not sure what to make of this regret. It's certainly not productive; I cannot retrospectively wish maturity on myself, for all my desire to. I can continue to learn, though, although I have no idea where it will take me. This seems to some degree so passive, but I am trying to process and discover as much as I can and simply wait, trusting that this will all be used and redeemed--whether I go back to Romania to live or whether I never get the chance to even visit, but I use what I have learned in other ways and in other places.

Everyone should read The Natashas by Victor Malarek--devastating, but important.