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January 31 - Wisdom & Action
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Today after our last day of one of the best weeks of my life, letting go was hard but I have learned more than I could ever put into words. I've found over the week that the more I put myself out there and the more selfless I was, the more I learned about myself. I started in the Little Flower classroom on Monday and Tuesday and although I loved teaching the younger children, I found it hard to connect with them. Then on Wednesday, I was moved to the 7th grade and found it much easier to bond with them and made much deeper relationships within the first day. It also helps to have a 7th grade brother so spending all my time with him made it easier to spend time with the seventh graders at the school. Through the students and the trip, I have been able to slow down everything in life and realize what is important to me and reevaluate my own priorities. I have realized so much about myself in so many different ways that I feel like tomorrow I will come back a very changed person in a good way. I’ve realized I don’t have to have everything figured out, and I am allowed to ask for help. You shouldn’t keep all the feelings you have bottled up on the inside or you will crumble, trying to take the world on your shoulders will never help you or anyone else. Some things that have changed about me, I'm still thinking about how I feel about them because I have never seen my life from this perspective before and it is a lot to process. I think that it is important that everyone should take time if their mind is fogged and remind yourself if your priorities are still what you truly believe in. Most people who come here say that you can't change Browning but Browning changes you. Which realistically you aren't going to change a whole lot in a week about these school children. But after spending time here with people that have very different views on life puts your own life into a perspective to see what other people's views on life are. Everything moves slower here, and I love that about Montana. I wish we could do that at home, and I think it would relieve stress from a lot of people’s lives. Montana is a life changing experience, and I have changed so much since Sunday. -Luke
Back
This Friday was the most painful day of the whole week. But it was also the day where we fully realized the impact of our service. The kids at De La Salle meet a new service group almost every week, so in the beginning they couldn’t care less about us. I think because they knew any friends they made would last, at the maximum, a week, they were forced to erect some barriers between them and immersion groups. I can’t imagine making a new set of friends every week, just to never hear from them again. But it’s these kids’ realities. They even had traditions for when groups left, like collecting the immersion group’s nametags and asking for their signatures. But we could tell this Friday was different. I was so close to many of the Little Flowers, the combined 4th and 5th graders, and they felt the same way about me. Saying that leaving them was hard is an understatement. A couple of them opened up to me about some very sensitive issues going on in their lives, things I don’t think I could have handled at their age. Things I couldn’t handle at my current age. The hardest part for me is knowing that I get to go back to my privileged life while they are practically sentenced to living difficult lives. That’s something I’m still trying to reconcile and understand, and I don’t know if I ever will.
There was one girl in the Little Flowers who, for the entire first day, would just stare at us every time we tried to talk to her. During the week, she began to warm up to me a little more, especially when I helped coordinate and participated in the Fifty Nifty States Song Talent Performance of the Little Flowers. I remember sitting with her when she slipped on the ice and bumped her head, and we just sat and chatted a little for the whole recess period. She also redesigned my nametag by adding some Montana mountains and changing my name to Potato, which I begrudgingly accepted but now I love. When I said goodbye today, she was the only one that came directly to me and gave me the longest hug, and moped away, head down, her hair almost hiding the tears. She was the hardest to say goodbye to.
This place is hard to stay goodbye to. The outline of the mountains slowly melting into the town of Browning during the school drive. The beautiful emptiness of the miles of snow crested hills. The natural flow of the Blackfeet language and Browning hospitality. And leaving these relationships which we somehow developed in just one week. Normal life seems impossible to go back to, as if this week was my entire life and before was a dream. Going back will be hard. But I would rather have gone on this trip and lost new friends than stay at home and remain ignorant to these experiences, despite how painful it is to leave. -Mateo
