Not goodbye, but... See ya later!
My goodbye to my sweet friend Jeje was tough. Jeje cried the most
in our little farewell ceremony earlier that afternoon and I think
whenever anyone on my team so much as glanced at her, our hearts
instantly broke and tears came to our eyes. Jeje is the
cutest and most precious person I’ve ever met. She is so dedicated to
her studies and yet so adorable and needs so much care because I think
her heart is just broken in a lot of different ways. In the little bit
of time that we actually got to talk to Jeje’s sister (who speaks
English fluently) we came to understand that Jeje has only been in SK
for a little longer than we have (after leaving her home country, she lived a long time
in China) and she has been having a lot of problems adjusting.
We’re the first Americans she ever really met and the first real friends
she’s had. It was so hard for us to say goodbye to each
other, I’ve gotten so attached to sweet Jeje, I love spending time with
her, even if it’s just practicing her English words.
Nisheeka and I have has some awesome opportunities to share with
her who God is, and what He’s done for her. I gave her a gift of a Korean-English Bible with specially marked passages and she cried while she opened it. I told
her to use it to practice her English and to read the things I had
highlighted. Jeje said, “I will study.” and I just said “Yes, please
study this... this is the most important thing to study.”
Jeje studies
the most and the hardest out of anyone I’ve seen at the school and I
hope she uses that study power for something other than vocabulary
words. Our goodbye to her was so hard on me and Nisheeka in particular
and we knew we just needed to end it before we all spent the night at
the school crying over everything. I just made sure she knew how
much we all loved her and that for us, as another sweet friend likes to
say, “It’s not goodbye, it’s see you later!” I really hope that’s true
for us! “I love you, my sister, Jeje!”
While we’ve been here we’ve faced a lot of different kinds of
problems, frustrations, etc. Getting used to a culture that is so
opposite of your own is difficult no matter what. But what makes all of
these hard and frustrating things worth it is relationships like the
ones we have with Annie, Ethan, and Jeje. These students light up our
life whenever we walk through the doors of our school. It is the hardest
thing thinking about being separated from many of them, since we’ve
spent so much time and poured so much into them. It honestly reminds me
of Paul and the Ephesians, whom we’ve read about this summer in our
study of Acts. Paul had some tearful goodbyes to his dear friends in the
church at Ephesus and Acts 20:32 says "Now I commit you to God
and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an
inheritance among all those who are sanctified." I think this is how
most of us are feeling now, we’ll be gone but we commit them to God and
pray that He will still grow them in our absence, like only He can.
-Karima
