Appreciating the Changes

“Without the bitter, baby, the sweet ain’t as sweet” ~ Vanilla Sky

Never has the pace of Peace Corps felt more apparent to me than when I returned home from a vacation in the states.  I can’t believe as I look at my calendar and see that I have ten months and change left in my service, and true to what many PCVs and RPCVs have sagely advised me, I feel like I am just now starting to pick up steam.  While I am very proud of the accomplishments my community has achieved with my support (increased financial sustainability, true profitability, a new bridge and a better understanding of project management), I feel like I spent the past 16-ish months learning how to be a Peace Corps Volunteer.  I feel now that I have the capabilities, knowledge and temperament to handle life in my village, which, while beautiful and as accommodating as necessary, is certainly different and more challenging to live in than my wonderful home in Washington. 

It was a great experience to travel home and see family and friends (including my dear friends at Starbucks and The Fishbowl), and to pace around my alma mater with a dear colleague for hours before heading back to stay at my parents’ wonderfully maintained, washing-machine owning house (I did laundry every night I was there, just to watch it work).  It was especially wonderful to see some of the immediate impact that my Peace Corps experience has instilled in me.  Between helping the older Mexican woman I sat next to on the plane order her coffee because the flight attendant didn’t speak Spanish, to waiting patiently in Houston (all three times) to herd us through customs after waiting in line for an hour and a half, I noticed my patience and desire to help people having a difficult time increase manyfold.  I was so appreciative of the things I used to take for granted, from having clean clothes to fresh salad vegetables to not sweatingthat I could not help myself from thinking about how everyone should, at some time in their lives for an appreciable amount of time, live in a country besides the United States.  Not because I think people from the U.S. Are “out of touch” or “don’t have any idea how great you have it” (well, not everyone), but just so that they could experience the same unmitigated glee I had the first time I drove a car in a year, or got to have a phone call that didn’t cut out five times in twelve minutes, or to have the opportunity to eat anything you want anytime of day or night.  It was indescribable.  Oh, and the internet worked like, all the time.  

It was sad, yet somewhat serendipitous, to have lost my grandfather during the two-week period that we went home.  My Grandpa Ted taught me many things, including how to fish and appreciate baseball, but also how to add value to every interaction with life that we get.  It was my grandfather that introduced me to writer Norman McAllen's A River Runs Through It, who taught us that it is possible to “love completely, even without complete understanding.”  We shared a love of technology and philosophy, which meant that he taught me many lessons in morality while he witnessed my first Mortal Kombat match at an electronics store in Olympia when I was eight.  My grandfather led a remarkable life, valued compassion, humanity, and knowledge, and touched many lives in his time on the Earth.  He will be missed.

All in all it was a great trip home, and a much needed break from the “toughest job I’ll ever love.”  We got to see so many special people (although not as many as we wanted), ate far too much good food, and regained our energy and focus to finish out the second half of our service.  Emblematic of this attitude was when we had our flight from Houston to Belize cancelled, take many hours and multiple days of bus riding from the airport to our village, only to find that our well pump is broken (again), someone had consumed all of our drinking water (without asking or replacing it), an entire wardrobe with a fresh coat of mold on it, and that termites had destroyed our ceiling.  After we calmly went about securing more water, filling the well tank, and cleaning the unbelievable amounts of termite excrement from our ceiling, I couldn’t help but laugh as I thought to myself that the termites probably regretted eating as much of my ceiling as I did eating all the junk food I had in the states.  This is not the laugh of the person that came to Belize, but the laugh of the Peace Corps Volunteer that will eventually leave it.

Those laughs come a bit more easily than they once did, as does the appreciation I have for the changes that I know I am experiencing in my life.  That is what life is about these days as I live in this beautiful, swampy little village where I do battle with the termites far more frequently than I get to consult people on business matters, where I spend more time waiting for buses and empty pick-up truck beds to get me where I need to go than waiting for football season (ahem, “American” football) to start, and more time trying to speak an unwritten, undocumented Maya language than trying to see what’s showing at the movies.  This won’t be our life for very much longer, but even as we transition to whatever new adventure we find, I will know that forever and always, no matter where we live our lives, a river runs through it.