When I graduated from RCN some 14 years ago I thought I‘d be coming back to Norway: perhaps to be an au pair (with no clue why I would want to look after kids); I thought maybe I‘d study Scandinavistics (with no clue why I would want that); and I thought one day I‘d come back to live in Flekke (again with no clue what I‘d be doing there).
Well, none of that happened. I soon found myself following my love, a fellow UWC graduate from Atlantic College, to St Petersburg – learning the language of the old people we cared for in their homes and setting the foundations for our still vivid relationship.
The RCN experiences found their way into my life in other ways than might have seemed most apparent to me at the age of 19. When our two girls were three and five years old we started living in an intentional community, and we are committing to striving to live a life that respects other beings and provides a worthwhile world to live in for the generations to come. Now these are great ideals and even in our active quest we can still be sure to be contributing our share to the destruction of this world we want to protect and refine. Despite, or even through, ambivalences like these we have found a home in a place far out in the northern German countryside with a group of 25 people with whom we share our everyday life. Finding a home was perhaps the most pressing desire of our recent years and we think we’ve found it. It was an RCN memory of being out in nature, a little bit isolated from the buzz of the world and yet protected by a caring community that marked the pivotal moment in the finding of this home.
Besides the close relationships at home, it is my profession as a physiotherapist that allows me to play an active role in our wider community. Again the Flekke experience has helped guide me along that path, too. The service at Haugland with the physiotherapists sparked my passion for working with human movement as a means of promoting health. As a therapist I try to enable people to understand and respect their bodies; I try to provide care and promote well-being through manual therapy and massages and push those who want to be pushed to their limits in Jympa-like courses where we laugh a lot.
I am extremely grateful for how life has taken its twists and turns since my time at RCN. Growing up feels better every day. For me it’s about learning to accept the uncertainty of where things are going next.
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