The rest of the story

As I have been labeling my posts from the last three years, I have been struck by how much is not said. Despite the 8 pages in my passport decked in German visas, the struggles necessary to get them barely amount to a footnote in my blog. In order to keep friends from worrying, I never mentioned that a gun was pointed at me in Bahnhof Deutz a couple of weeks after arriving in Germany, or that a few days later my wallet (with all of my credit cards and other documents) was stolen from my purse as I sat in a crowded Starbucks.

No mention is made of all of the cleaning and tutoring jobs that I've held. The exhaustion exacerbated by three moves is not at all apparent (for those who never put it together from the oblique references here, I went from the Bonnets to Mullheim-Wienerplatz to Stegerwald Siedlung to the Studentendorf in Efferen). The frequency with which I was blessed by being able to host American and other international friends is memorialized primarily through the absence of posts because I had no time to write. Wonderful trips to Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, France, the Netherlands, and various regions of Germany are either briefly related or ignored completely. Most notably, my work for the church here has often been so carefully written about (because of confidentiality issues) that I am no longer sure about whom I was speaking in many of my posts! It should be interesting processing it all when I am in the States. If I am able to find the time, I hope to write down some of the more interesting stories here so that I do not forget them.