Guatemala
Full Circle!
The first blog post that I wrote for Global Citizen Year was one that I thought about for a long time before writing. It was maybe the hardest post that I ever had to write because I wasn’t yet even out of the gate, and it was difficult for me to figure out how to relate Global Citizen Year to my life when I was still waiting on it to overtake and transform me.
Then it did.
And now here I am, back at my grandmother’s house in the Poconos, back where the tangible counterpart of the metaphorical basis for that first blog post actually stands: a stacked stone wall situated in front of her geraniums and hibiscuses.
Today, instead of trying to imagine what my home in Guatemala will look like, I am trying to adjust to the idea of a newly heightened presence of the color teal in my wardrobe, and how it will be to live in a world of thousands of other people my own age who are all doing the same thing that I’m doing (such as wearing teal on tuesdays, go Seahawks.)
The approach of my immediate future today versus the approach of my immediate future last July feels like the difference between floating in a lazy river versus barreling down Niagara Falls. (But please note that I’m not feeling lazy, just serene, and I wasn’t feeling terrified but something more akin to moving briskly towards the precipice of the unknown.) (Alright… I was a little terrified too.)
But in terms of further comparison:
Today: About to change my preferred mascot from the Phoenix to the Seahawk.
Last July: About to change the language of my everyday communication from English to Spanish.
…
Today: About to move 100 miles away from home.
Last July: About to move roughly 1,600 miles as the crow flies (which I do not).
…
Today: The prospect of my birthday+ Thanksgiving+Christmas+New Year+Easter (and more) with my family of 18 years.
Last July: The prospect of my birthday+Thanksgiving+Christmas+New Year+Easter (y mas) with my family of 18 weeks.
…
The comparison is pretty extreme. In fact, the idea of college now seems ridiculously simple! I know exactly where I’m going to live, I know my class schedule, I have a campus map, the buses run at scheduled times on scheduled routes (Unbelievable! There are maximum capacity regulations! They are observed!) and what’s more, MILLIONS of other people have done this before me! My parents, my sister, my friends have all been there and gosh, with their advice, support, and general knowledge, this feels like such a breeze.
What’s great is that it could one day be this breezy to take a gap year.
Each year and with every group of fellows it will become a more widely considered and better understood option. I believe my GCY gap year gave me things that 20 years of college couldn’t give me. A Guatemalan family. Full-time volunteer experience. Appreciation and understanding of a foreign culture. (To name a few.)
So even though I cringed at the cheesiness of my first blog post about 2 milliseconds post pressing “submit”– there is truth in it. I feel like I’ve done something to build this movement, and I’ll keep helping because it was everything I needed and more and everything I want the rest of my world to have and experience.
What will you do?
Old School Google (Pronounced “Goo-Glay”)
On Wednesday afternoon my sister left North Carolina headed for Germany, and on Thursday I read about the cloud of volcanic ash that a certain volcano in the land of Ice is spewing out, wreaking havoc on air travel in Europe. As it turns out, my sister is now stranded in London, but is taking the train to Brussels tomorrow and then another 2 after that in order to make her way to Germany.
Telling Omar and Josefina about this over dinner, Omar remarked, “Wow! She’s going to travel underneath the ocean then!” Oh, uh, yeah I guess so. I hadn’t thought about that whole English Channel thing.
“How!” exclaimed a disbelieving Josefina.
“Well London is in England and Brussels is in Belgium which is in mainland Europe. So they go through a subterranean tunnel beneath the English Channel, it’s like 80 kilometers!” › Continue reading
On things I will miss and things I won’t
As my time in Nebaj quickly comes to an end – just 4 short days until I leave – I’m left forced to think about the upcoming transition back into my old life. Call it reverse culture-shock or what you will, many basic things will be substantially different that what I’ve grown accustomed to.
So I’ve been reminiscing about my Guatemalan life, the positives and negatives – those things I’ve enjoyed and those I haven’t. I think I can do my best to distill the differences that exist between my lives in Guatemala and New Hampshire into three main categories: things I will definitely miss about Nebaj/Guatemala, things that I will be more than happy to do without, and things that I am still unsure about. Without further ado, I present my list.
Things I will miss: Corn tortillas – Without having spent time in Central America, I don’t think that it’s possible to grasp how much a part of the diet tortillas are. I eat probably 5 per day, but god, they’re so good. And it’s a safe bet that the flour tortillas of the pseudo-Mexican restaurants of Keene, New Hampshire (sorry Armadillo’s, Margarita’s) will not be able to fill the corn tortillas void sure to exist in my stomach and heart.
Things I will miss: My Guatemalan family – As an only child, it remained something of a personal test to see if I could successfully assimilate into a family of 8. Resoundingly, I can. Hands down, there is nothing in this country that I could possibly miss more than Helen, Fredi, Jacinto, Vicente, Maria, Rosa, Catarina, and Elena. › Continue reading
Looking Forward
Josefina and Omar never cease to amaze me. Tonight at dinner while eating carrot cake that I made with Fina, she told Omar:
“Hey listen, I said to Laura the other day, I said: Don’t be jealous of the students that are coming for the summer program, even though they’re going to be staying in your room. They are coming for two weeks and you’ve been here 7 months. And you will always, always have a place to stay here.”
I said, “I’m not jealous, I’m just, you know, envious.”
“That’’s true, Laura, (‘La-oorah’, he says) you’ve robbed my heart, although that might make you laugh.”
I laughed, but mostly because my eyes were accumulating water…
“See– you’re laughing. And now you’re crying!”
“There’s dust in my eye. Cinnamon dust. From the cake.”
“Yeah, cinnamon dust, same with me.” Josefina says.
First two tears of departure.
The View
The fellows now have just 2 short weeks left in-country. It seems unreal, because before I began my Global Citizen Year, my longest-ever vacation hadn’t even been that long. (It clocked in at 12 days.) Strange to think of my “closing time” as longer than any previous beginning, middle, AND end of a trip combined. It seems like now my eyes should be starting to look at things in the way I want to remember them–to paraphrase Vladmir Nabokov. But the truth is that until yesterday, everything was clouded by my desperate desire to be on a plane to San Francisco.
I was embarrassed to admit it even to myself, that I was simply ready to be home. Though I have lived here for 7 months, I also miss “my life.” I think I was embarrassed because I felt that I should be so in love with this place, so in love with the exotic and adventurous nature of what I’m doing here. I felt pretty bored and uninspired with myself. I was depending on my April 30th flight to carry me back into the arms of the 6 Senegalese fellows, to re-energize my spirit by listening to their stories and triumphs and successes. I’ve come to think it’s fair to be ready to go home after 7 months, and I also realized that a lot of my anxiety was coming from the monotonous pattern my days had taken on after the vacations for Holy Week.
So yesterday, I broke the pattern and went on a publicity campaign with Yoly & Clara- just like I had done so often in November and December. › Continue reading
BROWSE BY FELLOW
BROWSE BY COUNTRY
TAGS
- RT @MiddlesexSchool: Meaghan MX'10 begins her Global Citizen Year n a few weeks. Want to learn more abt her gap year? http://bit.ly/9pp8qs
