Thursday, February 03, 2011

First week of work

Friends in Nth Queensland are blogging about the cyclone here.

I've joined a team who minister to international students at a university, last night was my first FOCUS event. We celebrated Chinese New Year by eating nian gou (spelling??) and dressing people up as rabbits.

Today I'm trying to get my head around my new role, the last few days I've been away on a staff retreat, getting to know the staff team and learning about what I'll be doing.

Its great to finally meet people and start learning all this stuff, but I must say I'm feeling very overloaded with new things. It will take me awhile to get my head around everything and work out what I'm doing.

It was very exhausting spending a few days being "on" all the time, making sure I catch everything that is said and work out if I'm meant to be understanding it and doing something about it. Also being "on" as I was with new people 24/7.

(Although they are very entertaining people- most of them also have an Australian accents, which I find amusing (at the moment).  And some of them are Asian/have lived in Asia which makes it fun- and means they understand my re entry stories, such as the road crossing thing.)

The hard thing about living on a Bible college campus is it's hard to just duck home  and into my bedroom for a break from people. To get to my room I need to walk past lots of friendly Christian people who live here too! It will be great to get to know them in the long run, but all these new things at once are quite challenging.  And it doesn't help that my sleeping pattern isn't really a pattern yet, due to change and noise I'm  walking around sleeping all the time. (It's not that I'm still on Khmer time which is 4 hours behind, I'm actually getting up early, around 5.30 like I would in Cambodia, but I'm going to bed later and there is no chance on arvo nap.)

I'm really missing having familiar people, places and routines. I'm looking forward to Soeun finally arriving, and getting into a routine with work. (And catching up on sleep!)

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