We are in the final crunch now. I can’t believe I leave in less than a week. It feels like just yesterday I arrived and did not know anyone that would be here with me, and now I am leaving with lifelong friends. I am very sad to leave, but the memories will be with me forever. The best thing to do is to enjoy the last few moments I have here and with them. Over the past week, we have done a lot. On Tuesday, it was our friend Ethan’s birthday. We went out on Monday and Tuesday for it. It is always a lot of fun to celebrate other people, and make them feel special. On Wednesday, we again went out to celebrate our dwindling time in Dublin. On Thursday, I was so exhausted that I went to sleep right after work, and slept until the next morning. Friday, most of our group went to Scotland, but two of my roommates and I went out that night. On Saturday morning, I took the bus up to Letterkenny, in County Donegal. This is because I have cousins by marriage that live up there. My great uncle is married to their great aunt, and when my mom was in high school she spent a summer living with them in Ireland. Visiting them was a lot of fun. I had lunch with the entire family on Saturday. Then, Saturday night, I went out with my cousins and their friends, which was a ton of fun. It was nice to have a night where I got to experience going out with just Irish people as opposed to my American friends, whom I do love. In Letterkenny as well, they do not get a lot of Americans, so my cousins’ friends were very excited to talk to an American. The next day on Sunday, we went out for coffee, and then in the afternoon, Donegal was playing in the semi-finals of the Gaelic Football tournament, which we went to the pub to watch. It was very exciting although ultimately they fell short to Galway. That night I took a bus back to Dublin and got myself ready for the final week.
In terms of communication, Ireland is a much lower context society than the USA is. This means that often, they do not provide the entire story with what they want you to do. This can lead to some miscommunications between myself and my supervisors. Often they would explain a task and I would begin on it, only to realize I was unsure of what to do for part of it. By the time I realized, they often were busy with something else, so I would lose time waiting for them to finish in order to ask what I should specifically do. In times like these, I would often shift to focus on other things that I did know how to do. I would never do something that I was not sure I was doing was correct. In government, it is very important to get things correctly or else people will have their lives affected. In some moments, I found myself wishing America was a bit of a lower context society, because it would have trained me to be ready to work in a low context society. But even so, I found that I am much more equipped to survive a low context society or job now that I have worked in Ireland.
