First Week at Jubilee

Wow, what a blur of events has passed me by since I last wrote.

I was struggling to decide whether to continue this, and I ended up doing so because I'm only writing letters to the amount of people I can handle, and so this seems like a good way to keep in touch with anyone else.

To catch up:

I ended up having a wonderful rest of the roadtrip with Meira, going from Boone, to her brother's place in Savannah GA, to a few days at her house in Gainesville FL (where we went to the prairie, visited friends, played an intense set of raquetball with her dad, and walked down the Devil's Millhopper), then up through the night to Wisconsin (complete with in-car dance parties and too many energy drinks and creepy Tennessee gas stations in the middle of the night), and we spent a couple days with my family and around town in Madison.

Then there was Thanksgiving and a couple weeks at home with mom and dad. In mid December, I went down to Chicago to pick up Verena from the airport, come all the way from Germany to stay with my fam for Christmas. We spent a week in Chicago seeing the sights (German xmas market, lincoln park zoo, museums, chinatown, Wheaton) and then headed home for Christmas in snowy Wisconsin.

We spent two weeks there, taking time to go to Madison and to Lafayette IN to visit the gramps. And we had a wonderful time through all of it, baking things, reading to each other in German (Der Kleine Prinz, poetry, kid's books), and talking talking to fill up all the time from the 5 months we had apart.

Then on January 2nd, we both said goodbye to the rest of the Warners and took the Greyhound down to Chicago (verena for the airport, I for another busride). We said our goodbyes in a crowded bus station, waiting way too long for the bus to arrive. Then I got on the bus headed south, straight to Atlanta. Then another bus to Athens. Altogether the trip took me about 24 hours.

And now I'm here, after lots of waiting and letters and phone calls...I'm here, just outside of Comer, GA, at the Jubilee Partners community as a five-month volunteer. I unpacked my overalls (just for you Meira :o) and some sweaters and probably not enough underwear and settled into my tiny room in the Koinonia House. It's the biggest building on the land, where the kitchen and the dining hall are, but also housing 6 volunteers, four women and two men. Those are the single volunteers, and then the married ones live in various houses on the 260 acres Jubilee owns. Altogether we make 14.

Then there are the partners, the long-term, committed folks, who also live in the houses. Most houses have more than one apartment, and some families have kids, so they really live with only the essential amount of space. I think there are twelve partners...something like that.

And then there are the refugees, living in another cluster of houses about a half mile down the road from the K-house. They live over there to maintain their own community and culture, but the volunteers and partners are down there all the time. We teach English classes, have childcare so the parents can go to class, and have class for their children too (that's what I will teach). There are five families here right now, but two of them will finish their 2-month stay in about 2 weeks, so that will change the dynamic here soon. And everybody comes over to the K-house for dinner on Sunday nights, so it's a packed house and we play music and sing too.

Ok.

I just finished my day of work today, so I have the rest of the day today and tomorrow off. I've been here 7 days now, and there's still so much that I haven't written about. It'll all come out eventually. Anyway, just wanted to let people know that I do have some internet here, but I don't really have time to be on it all the time, so things like facebook kinda go out the window with that. shoo, I'm tired. I think I'll go make some tea and read a book or something. This'll probably get written on about once a week. And that's that for now. Love to you all.

-Caleb-