The Worst Part of my Job

Coming into this job, I knew that there would be some things that were part of my job description that would not be fun.  Living in a house with thirty-some-odd college students brings inevitable problems with alcohol and noise.  I knew that I would spend some time "herding cats" around Italy's most-visited cities.  From my first days in Florence,  I quickly learned that the internet and I would not be friends and that the perpetual struggle between man and technology was one that would come to shape the rhythm of my days.

But for every moment when I am tired and frustrated and ready to throw all the routers and modems and cables onto the floor and hit them repeatedly with a baseball bat...there are at least a hundred moments when I feel that I am right where I am supposed to be.  There are times when I get random hugs at my desk and there are times when I get to hear about my students' adventures in Italy and abroad and there are times when I get to introduce someone to the best pasta or pizza or gelato or a hidden treasure in Florence that they have never seen before.  Best of all are those rare, perfect moments when somebody comes to talk to me and tells me how their semester abroad has shaped the way they look at the world, how they feel like the world is opened up to them. In these moments, I remember what it was like to be a student abroad and how it changed the course of my life and how exhilarating it is to think that nothing is impossible because you have the whole world laid out in front of you, just waiting for you.

Which brings me to what has really been the worst part of my job: saying goodbye.  Because at the end of the semester, these people that have been my travelling companions and my friends (even MAPS), these people that I have watched learning and changing and growing for four months (some of them longer!) go to different places and I have to give them a blurry-eyed hug and choke out some words and say goodbye.  And frankly, it sucks.

Of course, there's something beautiful about it, about having new friends in different places and new people to visit and all that.  And it's important that students return to the US, hopefully having learned something and hopefully with changed perspectives, ready to make the world a better place and all that.  Isn't that why we do the things that we do??

But at the end of it, when you've been through so much with a group of people and come to know them and love them, it's still hard to say goodbye because they've taken up a little place in your heart and when they leave, they take a part of you with them, they can't help it.  But, I believe, they also leave a little piece of themselves with you and they leave your heart a little bigger for having known them.  And this is how we grow.

I read this quote by Miriam Adeney on Facebook, posted by a student, and it really resonated with me:

"You will never be completely as home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place."

I couldn't have said it better myself.  

So here, I say thank you to all of my students from the past two semesters that I have had to say goodbye to. And I wish them well and I say that I hope they are taking something real away from this experience.  That after they finish telling their family and friends about the pizza and the wine and the gelato, they will sit down for a moment and reflect on what all of this means, what an amazing opportunity they have had and how much they have grown and learned.  I hope that they will think about what it means for them moving forward.  And I hope, above all, they never feel completely at home again.  Because, just like me, they are curious and restless, dying to keep travelling and learning and meeting new people and embracing new experiences.

And I remind them, that it's really less of a goodbye and more of a ci vediamo. 

Thanks for everything, guys!