Farewell - Phase I - Cake in the Breakroom at Work

I've always actually thought it quite an odd ritual. Whenever employees leave the Tuscaloosa Public Library, where I've been an outreach worker for about three years now, they are honored with a cake containing enough sugar to kill them several times over! It was seriously delicious, however, and the sentiment behind it appreciated beyond any words that might be written here.

The opportunity to live and work abroad is something I didn't anticipate ever being given at age 43. I also had no clue, until it became reality, how difficult Tuscaloosa, my home for a quarter century, would be to leave. As an 18-year-old boy, I came to this small, Southern college town for my education, and never left. Over the next three weeks, my presence here for better or worse will quickly fade, and I will, for the first time as an adult, be absent. Too much will be left unsaid, and far too many things left unfinished—all with no guarantee of ever being able to return.

It’s hard to know what kind of exile I’m going into. I think it’s one designed especially for English teachers. I want to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) to adults, but will likely never be able to do so in Alabama’s community college system as anything other than a 6-hour a week adjunct, who dashes in from a full-time day job quite unprepared to teach students, whose patience has been tried by the situation too many times, and who find little consolation in the fact that the class is free. Most universities will only give such a teacher a shot at full-time employment with previous university experience, and international teaching experience, also.

That’s why I’m going to Indonesia with Georgetown University’s English Language Fellows program, to teach at Tanjungpura University in Pontianak for 10 months. If have any hope or prayer, it’s that I last that long. There are many obstacles in my path.