Shifting Sand

Looking back at the heavy fog that was our walking weather for most of the duration of our journey until now I almost miss it. It was comforting in some way. It muffled one’s senses and made it so that all I could focus on was the One who was going before me and beckoning “follow.” Now that we have come out into the open on the other side of the pass, I feel myself almost shrinking back at the glaring brightness of reality.  Here we are, with the panorama of our future stretching out in front of us in all its stark clarity, and frankly, it’s a little overwhelming.

I grew up a small town country girl in the mountains and loved to explore the piney recesses on horseback. Then I married and we made our home in the prairies where I grew to love the wide open spaces and the gentle landscape of planting, crops and harvest. Mountains are solid, strong and bold, the prairies are steady, sure and simple. Here, I feel as though we have stepped off of  sure, dependable terrain and are wading through sand, the deep soft  kind that pulls you in and makes you slip always to one side as you go, stretching muscles in your legs you never even knew you had.

I didn’t imagine it would be like this. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I had some romantic notion of what life would be like here that doesn’t line up with reality.  I knew, we knew… we KNOW very well the reality of life here.  Maybe that is what makes it so hard right out of the starting gate.  Maybe if we weren’t so keenly aware of deep rooted traditions, culture, reality, we would be cushioned by a little of that honeymoon phase. But of course all that would result from that would be a delay in the crash, and sometimes those delays make you come down harder than ever.  No, I wouldn’t pick that if I had the choice.

In a way, we are both experiencing the phenomenon of what is called “re-entry” in missionary vocabulary.  We are coming back to a culture we once were part of only to realize we are no longer part of it and never will be part of it the way we once were again. The things that have happened to make us no longer part of it are rich experiences and lessons that of course no one else has shared or can relate to and because of that you are an oddity. We both went through this when we left the ship and went back to our respective home countries 20 years ago, then again when we moved to Italy in 2000, then again when we moved to Canada in 2004 and now, oh yay, we get to live it all over again.

This phenomenon of being a cultural oddity has a word in missionary vocabulary, too.  It is called “third culture”. You come from one culture with its own unique shape and characteristics and you find yourself seeking to integrate in a new culture that has a completely different shape and characteristics .  Visualize Canadian culture as a square and Italian culture as a circle, and of course right away the old adage “square peg in a round hole” sums it up well.  When you first find yourself being torn out of one culture and dropped into another, it is inevitable that you feel keenly the jut of the angles that  are in juxtaposition to the shape your own life has taken.

In Canada we complain about the busy parking lot at Costco, having eight people in line in front of us at the till, the road conditions, computerized telephone services. Here, you can call a company or even the immigration office every five minutes all day long and never get an answer, and , surprise, surprise, no answering machine message to even try to glean information from if you wanted to.  Oh, and don’t expect anything to make sense.  If immigration says on the sign by the gate that their opening hours are from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm you would imagine you could drive the hour or more to their office any time between those hours and expect to be served right?  Wrong. 

What you won’t know and can’t know  unless someone gives you the personal cell phone number of someone on the inside who can tell you how to go about successfully applying for residency, is that you need to be in line by 8:30 when they open the gate because they will allow 70 people in and then close the gate and that is it.  Those 70 people get to go inside and spend their morning hoping and waiting to be seen.  We were the third people in line, and guess what they did, as we went through the gate, they checked and stacked our passports from the bottom up, so the first person in line was the last one to be served, meaning we were there by quarter to eight, waited till quarter to 12 and got out of there at quarter to one. Because two people who could only type with two fingers did both the gate processing and the paperwork processing inside.  Oh and good thing you thought of the right questions to ask that person with the cell phone because they would have forgotten to tell you what documents to bring and you would have had to go away and return and rewait three or four different times to procur the list of documents and photos and photocopies they require. Because they won't give you a paper that lists them, they will tell you when they get to that part of your processing that you need to go and come back when you have such and such.  And next time the same. Words can not begin to describe the insanity of the lack of system.

Wherever you go, whatever you do, be prepared to spend at LEAST two hours waiting to, and then filling out paper work.  And I am not kidding.  Just to open an account at the post office yesterday we spent two and a half hours with TWO people taking down our information, every single personal piece of information you could possibly fathom, including places of birth, the equivalent of our SIN numbers, identity card AND passport numbers, I can’t even remember what all, and just like in hospitals back home, they don’t just ask you these questions once but you go through a series of questions for one form and then repeat and repeat the same information at least four times to get through four different forms that are about four pages long each. We must have each had to sign our names about twelve times to complete the paperwork for our account.

The same was true for getting insurance for our van and ordering our kitchen from Ikea.  Truly, it is almost frightening.  Every move you make requires almost every possible piece of information about your identity.  Why in heaven’s name  Ikea needs to know where we were born is truly beyond me, but I think it’s because there are 60 million people in this country and identity and possible mixup between the 20,000 Giovanni Macarone’s  is an issue.   All this to say, with there being so much paperwork for us to go through this first month and the fact that you need to wait in line for at LEAST half an hour here wherever you go, often an hour or more, it has been exhausting and time consuming.

And then there’s the kids. Doing this as forty something, conscious and seasoned adults is one thing, and by no means a small thing. We have six beautiful, sensitive, amazingly tender children in our care and keeping who have stepped into the sand with us. Yeah we know they have a bit of the honeymooner in them. Especially since they love sand.  But sand can get old when it gets into your comfy shoes and rubs along your tender skin, when it blows into your eyes and you weren’t prepared to shield them with your hand, when it’s so hot it scalds you feet.  They are experiencing that too.

Italians are nothing if they aren’t opinionated and comfortable stating those opinions as fact. Because to them, their opinions are fact. So wherever we go we get two reactions without fail.  1. We are wonderful 2. We are crazy.  Italians are drawn to our family, the number of kids, the way they play together, take care of each other, their manners and our closeness as a family unit. It is wonderful  and rare in their eyes.  But it is so foreign to them, and their immediate response is one of concern for our kids.  Why would you bring them here?  Why would you uproot them from a safe, comfortable, secure, wonderful life in Canada and come to this? How will they survive being ripped from a 5 bedroom house in the country and crammed into a two bedroom apartment on a main drag?

We know very well what they mean by “this”. Especially here in the south. Wherever we look we see situations that make you catch your breath.  It’s not apparent on the surface but the reality of people’s coffers and scraping by day to day is inevitable when your only prospect is to take a temporary job planting tomatoes or else start learning German in the hopes of getting a job in a country that actually has a thriving economy. We know people who are doing both.  And yet when I hear these concerns over and over I have to say in my head, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”  For how the enemy would love to use these words and concerns to plant fear and anxiety in my life in regards to our children.

So here we are, wading through shifting sand, catching our bearings and our breath, taking in the cacophony of new sights and sounds (and it really is a cacophony) and seeking to do it with grace, and hope and joy, which are the things we most want to represent here.  And when our footing seems unsure, which is with most every step, we have a sure hand to hold and we are learning to cling to it and find comfort and strength in this one sure thing, that “when all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay.”