Vive la vie, la vie est belle

Yesterday I came home from a spiritual retreat with my school. We spent three days in a castle named the Diglette in the town of Saint Hubert Belgium. It is part of the required activities of the rhéto year. Every rhéto class in my school took a trip together to build and strengthen the relationship between the students and to uncover parts of yourself that we otherwise hidden. As I believe I have previously mentioned my school in Belgium is composed of several "classes" mine being 6B. At first I was extremely hesitant to embark on this "journey of discovery" due to my lack of connection to the students of my class and the complete three day period of isolation where I was told we would be doing a lot of praying. In reality it was a wonderful retreat and it succeeded in helping me personally to feel a stronger connection to the group of students I see every day.

There were several parts of this retreat that were particularly note worthy. The first would be the level of engagement that a large part of the class had in the discussions that we lead or proposed by the spiritual leader. It has been my experience in my own country that when the students are presented with situations like the one we were in, that they are much more resistant to expressing their true emotions and being frank and honest with the material. However, each time I engaged in a discussion with someone or simply listened to the conversations that were being held, I found that everyone was immensely reflective, thoughtful and honest with their responses despite the delicate nature of some of the topics. One instance in particular was when we divided into groups to talk about our families. I discovered that I am really fortunate to have the kind of family life that I do in the United States because almost everyone in my group had the exact opposite. While they were open amongst their peers, it appears that for the most part they are much more cautious with sharing information with their families. On the contrary I have the opposite and have a large number of American friends who have the same experience as myself. In addition I found that here I know many more people who have divorced parents. This came as a surprise to me because I know that the divorce statistic in America is 50% of all first marriages ends in divorce, whereas I was unaware that the statistic in Belgium was almost as high with 44% of first marriages ending in divorce. By these statistics one would assume that I know more people who are divorced, but I think that because the United States is so large and the number of people are divorced vary with regions and sizes of the cities, where as Belgium is smaller. The population simply lives closer together.
 

Overall it was a wonderful retreat where I was able to find the opportunity to speak to the students of my class that I had not dared to speak to before. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had an strong impact in a way that I didn't think that it could. Thanks to Père Gilson et la Diglette. Vive la vie, la vie est belle <3