beyond the green

It’s hard to believe that it is already the beginning of my third year of college! Freshman and sophomore don’t seem like that long ago in some ways, but when I think about how much has happened and how many new people I have met in the past two years, it’s hard to remember what life was like before those experiences.

I arrived on campus Saturday to register and get moved into mod 7B in Warkentin Court. I stayed in North Newton and worked on campus in the Institutional Communications office all summer, so it almost felt like I had never really left. This will be my first year to live in the mods, and I am already enjoying it. It’s wonderful to be living closely with eight wonderful girls, and yet it’s still easy to walk over to the other mods and visit other people.

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I can’t believe this is my last year at Bethel.

Ok, now that the cliché is out of the way…
I am trying my hardest to not think about the end already; I’m less than 48 hours into this year. But it is intimidating and bittersweet. I’m spending the year in a mod full of some of the sweetest girls on campus. And, most of us are single, we have the world at our feet, after all! I don’t need to think about leaving this home already. Yesterday as we all moved in, the excitement was so tangible we were bouncing with glee… skipping to supper!… singing loudly… shouting inappropriately loud whenever we saw old friends… giggling ridiculously at bubbles to ease our unpacking mess… and finding extreme joy in rocket balloons–and now everyone in the mods surrounding 7B also know the joys, or ear aches, of rocket balloons. But what comes next is inevitable… real world. Real job. The normal worries of a college senior are no stranger to me.

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I am contractually obligated to write this and post it before the end of August. Which is a little befuddling. I’m blogging about Bethel and it hasn’t yet started for me. I’ve been living and working on campus all summer and even with the recent arrival of the athletes and opening of the caf, I feel more like a member of the proletariat than the student body.

But in three more days, when I move my stuff across the courtyard of Warkentin Court in the exact opposite of the move I made at the start of the summer, I will be rejoining some of my old modmates, greeting some new ones, and rediscovering the magic of Bethel College.

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While everyone else at Bethel is preparing for the upcoming school year, I have been experiencing the Ecuadorian life for a month now. On July 23, I flew to Quito, Ecuador, where I will be studying and learning for the semester - until my plane takes me back to the U.S. on December 20.

Eating ice cream in the jungle

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It’s that wonderful season in academia when the end of semester, the end of the school year is in view, but it’s beyond a set of monkey bars that you have to cross on arm strength alone…just after you’ve finished rope-climbing over a wall. Maybe I drew out that metaphor too far, but here in the final weeks of school, there is a mental, near physical exhaustion from the loads of projects, tests and essays that cruelly sync up in due dates.

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