Urim songwriting workshop: First morning

The window beside my bed. I stared at it a lot, finding the crosses in the woven pattern.

Thursday morning was the first day of the workshop. The first morning is always a trying experience for me. Not the actual teaching; once I get started, I'm fine. But the hours between waking up and starting the workshop are stressful. The nature of this kind of workshop is that I don't know much about the participants beforehand. It's hard to know what their expectations will be, of me and the workshop. Usually I don't even know exactly how many people will show up. This time, the local coordinators had set a limit of 30 participants, and about 17 people had already paid the course fee (a small fee that helped pay for the lunch food they ate each day). Possibly more than 30 people would come; but it was equally possible that fewer than the 17 paid students would appear.

Though I'm fine with the teaching, thinking about the teaching beforehand is scary. For one thing, all my teaching this time was in Tok Pisin, a language of wider communication spoken in many parts of Papua New Guinea. I'm fluent in Tok Pisin, but I don't find it an easy language to improvise in. The way I would joke in English doesn't work in Tok Pisin. If a session isn't taking as long as I thought it would, it's hard to stretch the time in Tok Pisin. When I do, I end up feeling like I'm up in front of everyone just babbling away; it's not fun. Teaching cross-culturally is an endless learning experience.

Teaching in Papua New Guinea is different in many ways from teaching in America. This isn't a culture of sitting-in-the-classroom, so people in the workshops may not have had a lot of experience sitting all day in a school setting. And those that have had more school experience have likely learned more by a rote method than by interaction and discussion. Sometimes when I ask a question, hoping for lively discussion, no one jumps in to say anything. My workshops rely heavily on the participants getting involved, so I always fear that they won't, and then I will sweat a lot as I try to guide the workshop in the right direction.

So those hours leading up to the kick-off are the times that I feel most inadequate, wondering if there isn't someone else in the world who would be better at this than I am, and why it's me and not that person who gets these opportunities. These are times of prayer, a lot of talking to God, just to make sure I'm really in the right place, doing the right thing. Honestly, you'd think after I've done this as many times as I have, I wouldn't still be such a baby about it. Clearly there's still work to be done on me.