The road not taken

In Canada it is the Labour Day weekend and here it was the end of Ramadan, the month long fasting and feasting of the Muslim community. It has been a more quiet day out on the street. We could tell it was Holiday.

I spent all afternoon, pouring over my books and trying to decide what textbooks to use with my students. I’ve assessed them now and I have a better sense of their abilities and how far I can take them. As I was preparing tomorrow’s grade 8 English Literature lesson, I fell upon a favorite poem of mine by Robert Frost. The poem is called The Road Not Taken and I probably studied this when I was in Middle School. Here are a few lines :

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long as I stood

And looked down as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth

 

 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

I think Robert Frost wrote this poem for me  as I ponder  the road I have taken, the choice I made to live in Conakry, Guinee.  Last year was a year of reflection for me. It was a year of deep self-evaluation. It was a year of discernment. It was like walking on a road in the forest of choices.  The decision of living overseas was challenging.  It was a year-long process of tossing ideas around about the motivations that I had and the motivations Raymond had to want to go live elsewhere outside Canada. We talked about leaving our  children, our home, our  well paying jobs and our comfortable lifestyle. Why leave everything behind ? What are we looking for ?  Are we crazy to leave all this ?

 Dialogue after dialogue, our road became clearer.  I kept asking : what motivates us to do this?  Raymond answered that he wanted to end his teaching career working overseas. He also wanted three things : 1) to live in a warm place 2) to make tons of money and 3) to not work too hard. He didn’t get all his 3 wishes by coming to Conakry, he only got the first!  For me, wherever we did land, it was imperative that living in an overseas location would have to be good for Raymond, good for me and good for us as a couple. So Conakry came to the surface of our choices and it looks like Conakry chose us!

 My personal quest had been long coming. I had been stressed for the 2 past years as far as my career was concerned. My personal and social life was great but not my career life.  I was extremely dissatisfied with the public school system. I felt limited with the counseling work I could do in schools  and simultaneously I felt stressed and stretched beyond my capacities and time with the demands of this job.  Too much time was spent with useless paper work and not enough people work.  Too much time was spent in meetings and not enough time was actually spent with students. Too much of my time was spent talking about needy students and not enough time was spent actually helping and supporting those needy students. Elementary schools are very intense places to work and I resisted the fast pace.  I wanted to get out of this system, this box called the school system. My head was always buzzing with mental to-do lists.  It was like I was always running in my head.  I started looking for counseling jobs elsewhere,  outside the school system. I met the chiroprator who was also manager of  Port Moody Integrated Health, a centre that offers massage therapists, chiropracticians  and a naturopathic doctor.  He was looking for a counselor in private practice to complete the services.  I was very attracted to this work, imagine actually counseling !  I could see myself greeting clients, seeing many different kinds of people and helping persons that really wanted counseling. I let myself dream for awhile. Then the reality of paying $600 rent every month(whether I had seen clients or not), having 2 weeks holiday a year and working evenings and Saturdays came to break my bubble of temporary joy.  I could not acccept these working  conditions, not at this point in my life.  After I let go of this dream, I applied for the Fraser Valley College in Abbotsford where they were looking for a college counselor. This job appealed to me even more as there was freedom to create and lead workshops pertaining to anxiety, stress and career choices at the college level. I never received a reply and I was dissapointed. Looks like my road was not leading me in that direction.

So the road not taken was the comfortable road, the road I drove so often to 50 Bedingfield Street in Port Moody, BC. That was the road I loved to take because it took me home. Now home is here in Conakry.  This road  I chose is leading me deep inside myself to the depths of me. Living here is teaching me important life lessons about money, lifestyle, comfort and the difference between wants and needs.  It is teaching me to ask important questions about the way I lead my life.  Living here in Africa is teaching me about me. And that is making all the difference.

(This is Bivan Camara our driver, posing with the school vehicle he drives every day on the many rocky roads of Conakry.)