Tag: Preparation

Life’s – a – changing: Predeparture thoughts on July 4th

Jeanne Rose CasePreTrip Observations

HOLY SMOKES! In less than 48 hours I get on an airplane to go to Malaysia! (and Amsterdam).

This trip is also happening 4 days after I packed up and moved all my possessions from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania – found an apartment in Harrisburg – and attempted to prepare myself for a new job in August… while packing for this trip to Malaysia.

While I’m excited – there has also been some reservations from my Wisconsin students as to why on earth I would want to go on this trip…

  • You’re going to be eaten by a jaguar
  • Have you even looked up how many shots/medications you have to take to travel there?
  • Air Malaysia — I still don’t think they found that plane, you’re going to be lost forever
  • You can’t even handle Mexican spicy food – how are you going to eat there?
  • Did you see in the Milwaukee paper that the grandma in Indonesia was eaten by a snake?? — Better watch out!

While I have answered the shots/medications reservation — I will think positively about the rest

Reservations I do have for myself is that I do talk a big game about traveling. And while I have traveled more than some, I have definitely traveled a lot less than others. When this opportunity came up, I knew that I had to take it or that I had to stop talking about how I traveled all the time. I am mostly anxious about packing – do I have enough stuff? Is it appropriate? Is it too much stuff? To quell some of these fears, I have been messaging an old student from my first year teaching. She has done about a million mission trips through high school and college and has currently been in Niger in West Africa for the last month and will be there until the end of July as well. She received a lot of pictures of my outfits to determine if they were appropriate enough and helped me feel more at ease with my packing. When I expressed my anxiety of traveling she said “It will be so much fun! You’ve wanted to do something like this for the longest time, I’m proud of you”.

 

I know this trip to Malaysia will be life changing.

I know I just left a ton of people I love back in Wisconsin.

I know that it will be a big change to start at a new school in a new city come August.

 

But in response to my crying Snapchat on Sunday, driving the 12 hours from WI to PA

Apparently I’m good at ‘change’.

 

 

Jeanne Case

5th Year Teacher

Big Foot WI/ Cumberland Valley PA

@_J_Case

You Get What You Work For

Kaitlin LiszkaPreTrip Observations

“Four weeks over the summer, I have time for that!”

Those are my naive thoughts from this fall as I filled out my application to be a part of #AgEd2Malaysia. I severely underestimated all the time it would take to prep for this exciting journey. It is not the first international trip that I have taken, but I forgot to tack on a little extra work per week compared to my mission trip to the Dominican Republic, and most importantly, I forgot to multiple that amount of work by four. A month of travel takes a lot more time to prepare for compared to only 7 days!

Even as I sit here tonight writing this with only about half of my classwork done and a paper to write with only about a month to go (Oops… I keep hoping that someday I’ll figure out how to not procrastinate), I am thankful for the prep work that has been done. The amount of work that I’ve been asked to put in is so minimal compared to what others have to do, like write the grant for the trips funding, finalize the itinerary, make contacts, book the flights, and I could probably keep going for a whole post just listing all the tasks involved in going on a unique trip like this one. All this work in not in vain though and will definitely help dispel some discomforts of being in a new culture.

Here in the United States, wearing a normal short sleeve shirt or a pair of sandals to school is an everyday occurrence, but in Malaysia that doesn’t hold true. Thankfully through some prep work done with our partners, I  now know that and can plan accordingly, so I don’t have to add to the stress of a new situation the discomfort of feeling out of place because of my outfit. I think that most of us can say that we’ve been there and understand that feeling. You missed the memo and wore business causal to the informal banquet or didn’t realize that everyone was going to dress nicely for the picnic you decided to wear athletic shorts and a cut-off t-shirt too.

Most of us can probably also relate to those situations when you’ve sat through a lecture, the teacher asks for questions, and the response is a silence where you could hear a pin drop because no one understands the class content well enough to even begin to form a question about it. I’ve been in those situations on industry tours as well, and they can be awkward. I’m thankful for the research that we’ve been doing ahead of time that can help mitigate those situations. We now have enough background information on things like the Palm Oil Industry, or the Malaysian Government Structure, or FELDA, that they aren’t completely foreign concepts, and we can ask questions to be able to learn even more, making it a more enjoyable situation for everyone involved.

I’m thankful for the work that we have been doing now that will help make the traveling aspect of the experience that more beneficial and enjoyable. Even with my gratitude toward the prep being done now, I am sure that as we are in the country I will appreciate what we’ve done now even more, as well as find things that I’ll wish I had made more time to learn more about before departing from the US. But hindsight is 20/20, and the small amount of research we will have done now before we leave, is better than not learning anything at all!