Tales from the Lawrenceville Offices and a Future Plan

Buzzed into the offices bright and not-so-early on Tuesday morning, my day started with meetings.  The goal of the next two days was to gauge where I was in the re-orienting/processing phase that inevitably happens when returning to the US after time abroad, take care of office paper work and finance tasks, give me some time to process with different people and to make a plan for at least the near future.  This seemed like quite the task and somewhat overwhelming but for me as a lovely verbal process-er, it helps to retell stories and to talk through things so although my head was fuzzy at the end of Wednesday, I woke up to Thursday happy and strangely lighter.

It is always nice to put faces with different names and email addresses, I also enjoyed being reconnected with friends that I have gotten to know over my last few years of interactions.  Some of the bonding took place during the retreat in Malaysia where bread pudding and evenings at the hotel lounge made for shared comedy and happy memories.  Thanks Sue (pictures above with me) for rekindling some of those memories and for great talks and laughs over the past couple of days.

Besides debriefing with Sue, lots of yummy meals and meetings with almost ever office department, I also got the chance to do a bit of impromptu art.  For some people this might be their debriefing dream (good or bad) but for me it was a means to an end.  After some roughly cut silhouettes that ended up looking more like strange old men instead of  cute Onobasulu children, I ended up with a paper full of the paper equivalent of stick people and books with Onobasulu titles pertaining not to real Onobasulu books but instead to things that happened, were normal or part of day to day life there.  Not my finest artwork but yet another way to help process and work through the past three years.

So after all that excitement, I had some productive meetings with guys who work as directors over different world regions and areas.  This was where we discussed options for the future and what it would look like to stay working with literacy but with a team in another part of the world.  India is still one of those options but the feelers are out for other teams and situations that might work.  I am doing a bit of trail blazing with this but that just makes it more fun.  The next few months will give me time to talk to teams, maybe visit some places and prayerfully look into what the future could look like.  At this point I will be back in California at least a couple of months with no plans to come back to Georgia until July for some more pre-field training.  The future is a bit hazy at this point but it is all very exciting.  Basically the world is open to me and I know more or less what I am looking for so I am going to explore which doors remain open and which doors shut.  So that’s the plan…at least for now.

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