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Kathryn Grant: PYM intern 2005

I’ve had heaps of opportunities to meet new people this year. For most of the experiences, I’ve been in my comfort zone - people have visited me, or if I was the one visiting I was with Mo. Recently though, I had two experiences of being the ‘newbie’.

One was going to an event in Wellington by myself. Arriving a little early, I was greeted at the door, and walked into a room of unfamiliar faces, all standing in closed circles. I hung out at the food table for a while, and then moved on to the brochures table. As I did, I thought to myself ‘am I not screaming out for someone to talk to me?’ I would’ve even been happy with an opening in a circle so that I could join in. I had read every brochure on the table by the time I found an opening – a girl who had visited my church a year ago whose name I remembered. The event itself was fine – good even, but what I took away from that day was the ‘character building’ experience of being the loner on the fringe who didn’t belong.

The other was a trip to Matau Marae with 30 Praxis students. As I arrived, I clung to one of the girls who I had briefly talked to the week before, but I didn’t have to cling for very long. Several of them came up and talked to me, and this continued throughout my stay, almost all of them coming up to me at some point and initiating a conversation. Whenever you’re new in a context where the others know each other, it takes a day or two to work out whose friends with whom, who the groups and cliques are. After a couple of days there, a realization dawned on me: here there was only one group, and everyone belonged to it. Even me.

I went home from that weekend with questions: Why was the culture created by the Praxis team so special? Shouldn’t that be the way it always is? But mostly, what sort of vibe do I give others – do I stay in my own safe place with people I know? How much do I include people…? These two contrasting experiences encouraged me to try harder to create a culture like the one I experienced with Praxis at Matau Marae in my youth group.