Our year is coming to an end. I'm writing this on the bus as we leave Belfast for the last time, and Belfast has given us a perfectly characteristic send-off. It has been misting, the kind of rain that no one puts on rain gear for, but everything is wet when you get where you're going. It's the kind of rain that is so fine it looks like it might just be hanging in the air, until you walk into it and realize that it is falling fog. Our year in Belfast has been like walking in the Belfast rain. We came without “gearing up” too much - we didn't have to do language training, and the culture shock of moving from the US to the UK, while noticeable, is not overwhelming. But now we’re ending our year, and our time in Belfast has affected us, leaked into who we are and how we see the world. We lived and worked adjacent to conflict all year. Ben worked with Mediation Northern Ireland, doing mediation training and participating in support and development groups around meditation, forgiveness, and life transitions. He built great relationships in these situations, and also discovered that every story that a local person tells about their past and relationships touches in some significant way on their interaction with conflicted politics and political violence. Laurel completed her dissertation on the way local museums tell the story of conflict in Northern Ireland, and dived into the questions that the act of remembering raises: do we try to tell the story of conflict neutrally, or does trying to avoid offense mean we can't say anything? Should museums present a partisan or sectarian viewpoint, or does that simply exacerbate and deepen divisions? All of a sudden, we found ourselves soaked in the Belfast mist - when we were separate from it, we didn’t know if it would affect us, but once we stepped in, it was everywhere.. We are leaving “where we came in,” as our landlord reminds us: we arrived in early September last year. The Belfast Marathon signs just went up for this year’s race as they were just going up when we arrived. Queen's University is in full swing with its new student days. The unsettlingly large spiders that we saw when we moved into our flat last year disappeared in mid-September, but they returned a couple of days ago. But despite the circularity of the year, we are facing definite endings and beginnings. We both completed masters degrees, and are just a week away from arriving at our new home in Newton, Kansas, to begin new jobs: Ben at Shalom Mennonite Church, and Laurel at the Bethel College Academy of Performing Arts. The next week will be a beach retreat in County Wicklow, followed by sightseeing in Dublin before we fly out. We are sharing this time with Laurel's sister, Ardy, who has been able to join us for the transition. So that is the end of Burnable Leaflets (Ben Laurel Belfast). Thanks for reading our updates, when we posted them, and we hope to catch up with you soon, in Newton or wherever we see you. We’ll close with Tommy Sands, the Pete Seeger of Northern Ireland, singing about the river that we crossed every day. We’ll always remember our life down by the Lagan side. Down by "our" Lagan Side:
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September 2017
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