We have survived one week at our site! This may be unimpressive to you, but to us it is a bit miraculous. I don’t think either of us expected such a difficult entry. After all, a lot of what we are facing here is familiar: we live with a mid-thirties couple of professionals; we have a nice room and regular hot meals and nice showers. There is TV in the house and we make our own breakfasts, which do not involve exotic new foods. There is a school and a highway and tourists. We know all these things, and should have some semblance of normalcy, right?
Yet here we are, wondering the following existential questions:
- just what the heck we are doing here?
- how in the world did our 3 months of training in any way prepare us for this?
- how can speaking Spanish (especially when we already spoke Spanish before) be so tiring?
- how do we deal with people who are shy and don’t want to talk to us without being insulted and then immediately depressed?
- how to re-focus a conversation with your first interviewee who has decided to tell you nothing but the local (bad) gossip about the family you are living with?
- how to feel good about 2 hours of work when you are used to an 8 - 10 hour work day (sure, things start slow, but...)?
- how to know more than 3 people in the village that you can greet by name?
- how to recall more of those deep-breathing-for-stress exercises you laughed at last year and now might scratch someone’s eyes out to remember how to do properly?
- how to enjoy being in your room, but not too much because you don’t want to be one of those shy or lazy volunteers but you also want to prove you can be alone but not too much or people (like your host family) will talk about solitary, individualistic Americans?
- how to get people to stop giving you that funny "you are a foreigner!?" look when you say "good morning" - in a culturally correct way - in the street?
- how to respond when someone says, "what projects do you want to do?" in a way other than "do you think i have any clue at this stage, jesus christ, I’ve only been here 4 days! i can barely find the corner store!" ?
- how to stop worrying about sweating? I mean constant sweating, the kind that makes it hard to be presentable at the local community meeting, the kind that requires the constant lady-like swipe of the handkerchief or unlady-like swipe of the shirt sleeve at the risk of being otherwise blinded by sweat in your eye?
- how to make things start to happen in a positive way?
- how to give yourself a break and realize this is only temporary?
- how to survive 103 more weeks?
I'm sure they told you during your training (unless PC has changed that much in the last 12 years) that you shouldn't hope to accomplish much in your first year. Remember it's only week 1 of 104 so take it easy on yourselves. It *is* exhausting to speak a foreign language all the time. Just think even if you were in a new town in a new job in the States you wouldn't know more than three people on the street to greet by now either. And training was like being a college student (okay I know more like a middle school student) and being at site is more like being a real adult in the real world, even if your real world right now feels kind of imaginary. Take it easy on yourselves and just take it one week at a time. Before you know it, it will be next summer and you will be hosting new trainees at your site and telling them all your war stories and laughing privately at their starry-eyed naivete.
ReplyDeleteLoved the post - one of the things I never got over was even after being in my community for almost 2 years, I always had people staring at the local gringa. Have fun and keep the posts coming!
ReplyDeleteout of all that, the sweating sounds the worst. :)
ReplyDelete