truth is...

I’m still alive, I promise! Here’s the three-day low-down. On Saturday, I swam and laid out by the beautiful pool here at my apartment complex. Then I ran a few errands and finally bought some more groceries (you can relax now, I have milk and butter). I met some more people and relaxed all day! All of this is tiring! On Sunday, I had a custodial training class for eight hours. You would think that in a custodial training class, we do things like practice using the right chemicals and tools for certain cleaning jobs, right? Wrong. Instead, twenty new cast members got to watch two elderly instructors pretend to use the right chemicals and tools. For eight hours. Needless to say, I was exhausted by the time I got home so I listened to a CES fireside at my apartment with my roommates. The cool thing about Sundays here is that they have a singles ward for the college program students that meets every Sunday morning like a regular ward but they also have something called “night church”. Because Disney requires all college interns to have a full availability, we don’t know if we will definitely be able to attend church every Sunday morning, which is a huge bummer. So night church is for those cast members who are working on Sunday mornings; it is basically just a short Sacrament Meeting at 8:00 pm. But this Sunday they had a CES fireside instead, so we listened to that on our dial-up/whatever-you-wanna-call-this-stupid-internet-cord-that-should-have-been-discontinued-like-ten-years-ago. That brings us to today! Eight more hours of training about Epcot! It was actually so interesting and I learned so much about the park that I’m going to grow to love. We were able to tour around the whole park and even ride a few rides. I learned that I will be working specifically in the World Showcase part of the park. Epcot contains the World Showcase and Future World; originally two separate parks but they were combined for financial reason (who ever thought that the Disney Company had to cut back on something…). So the World Showcase is basically a huge man-made lake with eleven different countries represented around it in miniature parks. Each country contains restaurants, movies, attractions, bands, replicas of cultural icons, and much more. Working the eleven different country lands are over 500 cast members who are actually natives of the country they represent. In fact, a lot of them are young adults who are here on a one-year working Visa that allows them to teach us Americans their true culture. All in all, I am so excited to learn so much about other cultures over these next four months!

Just a side note: I hope everyone understands that I am having a lot of fun. I think that my durable optimism may be too much sometimes so I wanted to just give a small dose of reality straight from my mind this very second. This kind of stinks. I am not superwoman here… I can’t just be thrown into any situation and be completely comfortable from the beginning. This is the hardest thing I have ever gone through in my life. It hasn’t even been a week yet and I am exhausted and have had to fight doubts that I can even finish the program. I have gone through a lot of different experiences in my life and have had so many leadership opportunities and I feel like I have jumped into and conquered, if I may, each one, so why should this one be any different? I honestly don’t quite know yet. I do know that I am here for a reason. That reason is still very unclear, especially when every single aspect of my life seems to be ten times tougher than I thought it would be. I came here with no one I knew from home and expected to magically (no pun intended) make best friends who I could depend on or even meet someone who would be okay with me hugging them just because I need a hug. But those things haven’t happened yet. I don’t intend to worry anyone or invoke pity on myself but I just feel like I should be truthful. Sometimes being down here sucks and I just want to crawl back home. But I can’t do that. I may not have any family or good friends here to lean on, but I do have my Savior. He is the reason I have been able to do everything that I have this far in my life and He isn’t going to give up on me now. He has kept me here for the past six days and He is going to keep me here and keep me safe and keep me comfortable for the next 112 days. He has been through this exact loneliness that I am going through and He knows what I need to overcome it. He wouldn’t bring me here if He didn’t. So I am going to be searching for the reason that I am here, and I’ll keep you informed. I know that Disney doesn’t really need me to keep contribute to their story but I have a feeling that I need Disney to contribute to mine.