P. SHERMAN 42 WALLABY WAY, SYDNEY

I feel like Nemo. Yes, that is right. I feel like a clownfish. You know how Nemo gets lost and he is really scared and he feels alone sometimes? That is how I feel, too. But you know how Nemo also has amazing adventures and makes some awesome friends? That is happening to me, too.

This has kind of been an emotional week for me, in good and bad ways (just trying to be honest here). Yes, I miss my friends. But it’s more than that. I miss the way my friends make me feel. I miss running downstairs to Megan’s room to talk about all that has happened in the past 45 minutes we have not seen each other. I miss talking to a bunch of random people before 9pm mass. I miss walking into Campus Ministry and seeing a bunch of smiley faces. I miss that feeling like I belong. I miss that feeling of unconditional love from friends. Nemo probably felt like this too at the beginning of the movie. But then came Dory.

I made a friend like Dory this week. Except she does not have short-term memory loss and she cannot breathe underwater. Her name is Mariam and I met her on the train after we went to the Penguin beach (we went to a beach and there were a bunch of penguins just chilling around us, no big deal, except it WAS A BIG DEAL BECAUSE THERE WERE PENGUINS RIGHT NEXT TO ME). I found out she goes to the University of Cape Town, which is the college that most students go to around here and it is close by our house. She is a sophomore like me and she told me about a psychology club that is at her school. Long story short, I ended up going to the psychology club with her later that week! I was in psychology heaven. Everyone was talking about psychology stuff and it was so nerdy and great. My friend Mariam isn’t even a psychology major but she just went. I met her friend named Princess, another American named Cherish, and a girl from Tanzania named Ase. We all hung out the whole time and I have not laughed that much since being here. I felt like I was back with my friends at home and it was a blessed night indeed! I am looking forward to meeting up with them every week.

In case you didn’t know, butterflies are kind of my thing. When I was on a retreat this summer, my spiritual director (an awesome nun from Ireland) told me about signs from God. She said that when two of her family members passed away, she asked God to send her a sign that He was with her, and within seconds two butterflies landed on her. She knew in that instant that God sent her those butterflies. She encouraged me to give it a try, so after we were done talking I went on a walk in the forest nearby. I prayed to God and told him how cool it would be if He could send me a butterfly like he sent Sr. Ita, one, and sure enough, a huge monarch butterfly flew right in front of my face. A wave of something passed through me, I am not sure what. Faith? Hope? Joy? It was one of the greatest feelings and moments.  We went hiking yesterday on a new trail and it absolutely breathtaking. We hiked up to a cave and then ended up at a reservoir where we swam. The whole time I kept seeing butterflies and it made me so happy and brought me back to that moment at the retreat. It was a good reminder of God’s familiar presence in this unfamiliar place.

OK SO NOW FOR MY BIG NEWS……I have found a good faith community!!! I love my St. Michael’s community here. It is a Church about fifteen minutes away and I go to the 7pm Sunday mass every week. I am starting to see familiar faces and I get a lot of “hellos” when I go, which is really nice. I am starting to get more involved; I even read part of the petitions at mass tonight! They have a young adult group called Genesis that I am going to be a part of. I am going to assist with their “Life Series” they are putting on. It is a nine-week program where young adults gather to talk about “gritty topics” which I am not sure what that means but it will surely be interesting. It is a young Church, which is awesome, and the choir seems some really rockin songs. Tonight after mass they gave out ROSES. I mean come on, how can you beat that? 

I made another friend, who I can compare to Crush because she is really chill. Her name is Caryn and she is a core team member of Life Teen, the youth group at St. Michaels. She was the first person I met at the Church and was the reason I was first drawn to St. Michael’s. We met for ice cream this week and it was so lovely to get to know her better. You cannot help but feel relaxed and loved when you are with her because she really listens to what you have to say (and she is good at picking out ice cream places…this place was yumzo). She goes to UCT but she actually studied abroad at UC Santa Cruz last year! She really liked America and I am trying to encourage her to go to graduate school there for Theology. Oh, and one awesome thing about her is that she likes to pray. Like in the ice cream place we prayed (I told you she was cool). And I loved it.

I also made another friend at my school (UWC) named Ashley who I mentioned before. She is from South Africa and we got together for lunch again this week. She had me cracking up and I was so happy and myself hanging out with her. She does not mind answering all of my questions about South Africa, although sometimes she laughs at things I ask. I am trying to get her to come shark cage diving with us because she is very afraid of sharks. We will see! I will hopefully see her again this week for lunch.

There is one time a week that I feel really connected to Liz (my sister) and that is Wednesdays when I am at school all day and I have a lot of free time. I go to the stadium where people play rugby and I get in a workout. This involves walking around the track, running up and down the stadium steps, and doing burpees. The whole time I listen to One Direction, who Liz loves. It makes me smile to know that she might be listening to them, too. Some of the songs are really not good at all and I try to muster through those. Last time when I was walking around the track, the sprinklers went off and I got to run through them. Afterwards, I looked down and saw a rainbow in a puddle. Nice.

I found a penny from God on the ground yesterday when I really needed to see one. I couldn’t pick it up, though, because I think it had gum on the other side. Oh well. Still made me happy.

OHHH wait until you hear this! I went to praise and worship at a Church nearby with a group from St. Michael’s. It lasted the whole night long and it involved lots of singing to songs, adoration, a talk, and reconciliation. It felt SO good to be singing all of my favorite Christian songs from back home. It was cool to connect with everyone from South Africa in that way since we all knew the words. The speaker had just flown in from the United States, and when he said he was from St. Louis I nearly lost it. His talk was very inspiring. It was about how since the day his wife found out she had stage four cancer, she was confident that God was going to take care of her.  Sure enough, after three rounds of chemotherapy, her cancer was completely gone. The doctor said it was a miracle. Hearing Steve (that is the guy from STL) talk about his wife and children with such love gave me goose bumps. My friend Cami and I ran up to Steve afterwards, and he was so excited to meet us. I ran into him at mass last night again, and he said he would say hello to the arch for me when he flew in today to STL. It was definitely meant to be that I went to the praise and worship that night.

I got to go to the observatory again on Saturday and this time some friends came along! We learned about other galaxies that are out in space, which is a crazy thought. Sometimes we forget that there is more out there than just us. Then we got to look in telescopes and we saw Jupiter, which was beautiful. Some of my favorite learning happens outside of the classroom, at events like this.

Some questions in the back of my mind regard helping the people here. We drive past the townships all of the time, and it is the saddest sight I have ever seen. There are hundreds of little shacks that people live in. They look very dirty and I cannot imagine a whole family living in one. What am I supposed to do now that I have seen this? How do I help? An interesting thing is that my friend went on a tour through a township and he said the people all seemed very happy. They appreciated what they did have. That was amazing to me and it reminded me a lot of my trip to Venezuela where I saw so much poverty but also so much happiness. I think there is a lesson to be learned there. I hope to get a tour through a township soon.

For a classroom assignment, my roommate and I were paired together and we were told to go interview UWC students for twenty minutes about a problem on campus. We picked to talk about apartheid and we went to find out if there were still lasting affects of apartheid today. We interviewed people of all different colors, and everyone agreed that students overall are past apartheid and that everyone gets along. It gave me hope and I was glad to see that this generation is going to be different than the past. The people my age are called the “Born Free” generation because they were born after apartheid. They are going to be voting in the upcoming elections here, which is really monumental and exciting.

For the longest time I have had this heavy feeling in my heart that I am supposed to be doing something particular. I have tried lots of different things to make that feeling satisfied, like going on a discernment retreat, trying new activities, making new friends. This is the first time where that feeling is not there and I think it is because I am doing what I am supposed to do. I am supposed to be here. I need to be here. It is a crazy realization!

The more I think about it, I am actually strikingly like Nemo. At the beginning of the movie he was scared of travelling through the ocean because he had never been outside of his home, and by the end of the movie he was not afraid. I feel like I am gaining a new found confidence in myself that was not there before. I may have run into some “jellyfish” like Nemo did, and I will surely run into many more, but I am excited to continue on this journey of finding who I am supposed to be.