So, I lied...

So, you know how I said that everything with my community was great?

Well as of last night that's a complete lie and I don't expect it to change any time soon.

Yesterday was supposed to be our house party with our Program Coordinators, Bill and Mary Frances and Ryan, the other staff member who works with our community. We were going to go ice skating and then have a nice dinner at their house. Instead, at about 12:15 we all got this email:

Dear Friends,

We are writing to tell you about a change in our plan for tonight. Unfortunately, we need to meet and talk about some things with community. We will still have something here at the house for dinner, but we feel like it’s too important to talk and so we won’t be going ice-skating, etc. Just wanted to give you the heads-up.

We can still plan on gathering at 6:00pm.

Thank you!

Mary Frances and Bill

All I knew at this point is that somebody broke our kitchen window Monday night so I expected us to be having another discussion, and probably having us reconsider (again) how much drinking our community is doing, and about how thing have gotten broken and we really need to work on that, etc. etc.

Instead, what we come home to find out is that one of our roommates has been kicked out of the program, and was currently on his flight home at the time that we were meeting.

~sigh...~

What proceeded to happen was a rather long period of awkward silence, followed by a number of questions posed by my housemates, few of which I feel were adequately answered by our coordinators.

Not too much was really said until our Coordinators left and we were able to talk as a group on our own.

What our frustration comes down to is mainly that we were not at all involved in the decision, that it was completely taken out of our control... that we feel he was unfairly judged based on some of the stupid things he did (which were not small things by any means and do need to be addressed) and not on how much growth he was going through because of us.

Even if at the end of the day, it was the best thing for Nick to leave the community, for this to be decided for us is so frustrating.

It also doesn't help that we all know there were personality clashes between Nick and one of our coordinators. So it is difficult for me to see this as a completely objective decision made for the safety of the program and for us and for Nick.

This is obviously a very complex issue that isn't going to be resolved any time soon. But, the decision has been made, we can't change that. All we can do is talk about whether or not it was the right thing to do, and hopefully help our coordinators to handle this kind of issue better if it should happen again. Other than that, our community is completely different. One person has even threatened to leave if this happened. So maybe I will be down to 9 housemates sooner or later.

I worry for some of my housemates, if they will ever be able to look our coordinators in the eyes for the rest of our stay here. As for myself, I hope that they really were acting out of the best knowledge that they had, and that through our discussions that will happen over the next few weeks they are open and try to understand our position and admit that they were wrong on some things if it comes to that. If they don't end up being open in that way, I have to say I would struggle with how I viewed them.

The next few weeks... months... the rest of the program really... is going to be really rough. If you pray, please pray for us, for Nick for our coordinators... for the situation.

This also really saddens me, because up to this point, I was recommending this program to some of my friends. I still think it's an amazing program, and I hope I can confidently recommend it, but it all depends on how this is handled from now on.

I'm sure I will post more as time goes on.

Peace everyone.