Just over a year ago, I packed up my life in Chicago to come to Montana, moving to a state I’d never been, to live with people I’d never met, and to serve in a capacity I had never before. Having just recently graduated from Villanova University, I was so ready to let my post-grad life begin. Serving as an AmeriCorps member through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest (JVCNW), I was placed at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and St. Francis Xavier church (SFX) in Missoula, MT.

At the IRC in Missoula, I served with the Housing and Logistics caseworker to secure and set up housing for newly arriving refugees. I also helped support families in learning to pay rent, communicate with landlords, navigate public transit, and a host of other resettlement needs. During my time serving there, I learned so much about the legal and logistical details of being a refugee, found myself behind the wheel of giant U-Haul trucks, learned just a little Swahili, and made personal connections with so many of Missoula’s newest community members.

At St. Francis Xavier church, I served as a family assistance coordinator, helping to connect folks to available financial and community resources. My role at SFX felt so complementary to my position at IRC. Both refugees and longtime Missoula residents can need assistance in one form or another, and I felt uniquely placed to be able to offer what was available to varied populations.

Part of serving through JVCNW means a commitment to community and simple living. Having a community to grow in and with was so critical to my experience. I lived with four other woman serving in non-profits here in Missoula, and one of my favorite aspects of the year was seeing all the ways our services linked and intertwined. Missoula is unique in its size and make up, making social services necessarily more collaborative than in other places I’ve lived, and it was such a joy to see how we could support each other personally and professionally!

The year was meeting and exceeding my expectations of a term of service all through fall and winter, but right when it looked like we were getting out of the darkness of winter, Coronavirus hit. In mid-March, my day-to-day drastically changed with the rest of the world’s when serving from home became necessary for everyone’s safety. Personally, my 4 roommates and I had to figure out how we’d navigate isolating together, had to set up wifi in our house that until then did not have any, had to learn how to re-budget to pay for new and higher grocery and electric bills, and had to sit with the tragedy that was engulfing communities everywhere. Professionally, the service I was doing was very relational and hands on, so adjusting to 100% remote service seemed initially impossible. However, after the initial shock of having to transition to Zoom calls and extensive email communication, we jumped into adapting services to be assist our clients. For me, this meant navigating getting Wifi set up in client homes, a lot of time spent on the Montana Public Assistance website, and in depth reads of details of the CARES act. Sometimes it felt like running a marathon at a sprinting pace, on a course without any markers, with millions of other confused runners. With the privilege to look back on the experience, though, I see intense collaboration and impressive adaptation that I am proud to have served in.

We served fully remotely for about three and half months, then semi-remotely for another two. That time honestly feels like a blur to me. My community and I tried to make the most of our isolated time together – hosting a virtual trivia night, running a DIY half marathon to replace the one that was cancelled, creating outdoor movie nights, and becoming really invested in our garden. I can’t look back on our time without also acknowledging the very privileged position we were in. Though we received a small service stipend, the stipend was reliable and consistent – we were never worried when or if our next paycheck would come. We also felt a lot of community support from alumni of our program, and were able to lean on their generosity. All five of us were hundreds of miles from our families in the Midwest, which was absolutely an added stress, but in a lot of other ways we had privileges that many of our clients and friends did not.

Though my year looked different from what I had expected in so many ways, the 12 months flew by and had to come to an end. We always knew our term was 1 year, but coming to a close still felt abrupt and startling.

Leaving my JV life was a truly heartbreaking experience for me. Having to say goodbye to a service placement I had learned so much from and become attached to, to roommates who knew me like no one else and brought out the best in me, to the small house that had become such a life-giving home, to a lifestyle I become so comfortable in – it was crushing. Leaving my social support network, my service site, and my home all at once was emotionally chaotic and draining.

But honestly, I hope every MTCC AmeriCorps Leader and VISTA feels a little emotional chaos at the close of their year, too. Though it was painful in the moment, I look now and see how truly lucky I am to have had something so good that it made saying goodbye so hard. I hope everyone can find their place in this year where they feel they are truly making an impact, creating relationships, feeling seen, and growing.

My year was stressful, fun, full of opportunity, not how I expected, chaotic, grace filled, challenging, and life-giving. And I hope your year is some of those things, too.