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Midpoint Reflection: What You Expected

What you want

is romance.

unpretentious country folk with toothless grins and simple dreams of owning a washer

and my 10,000 watt, bicultural,

hot-off-the-college-prep-academy grill complexity quieting to a dull 

ommmmm 

Eat, Pray, Love style.

What you expected were children

and my 19 year old, non-Ecuadorian hands molding them like clay into my idea of

model citizens.

No, Carlos.  Your dreams are wrong.  

Don’t be a farmer.

Be a vet, since you like animals.

In 3 months time,

I’m on a plane, though

and Carlos, here, with his uncle’s cows and the dreams I planted and

abandoned.

I know that “Third World”

had you thinking lack,

had you thinking charity,

but I’m the sponge here, soaking-

my body bloated off Ecua-love and potatoes.

And when I wear the pink parka you packed me,

-which I assume you assumed you’d see in pensive photos overlooking majestic snow-capped mountaintops-

I paint 19 blocks of Riobamba pavement

a rosy shade of standard adolescence, instead.

You thought extraordinary would change me.

Turns out, extraordinary is ordinary in a foreign language,

well-traveled is well-funded and curious

and my quest to “change to world” should start where I started,

in my own community.

So,

perhaps I didn’t need to leave in search of myself, after all

but perhaps, I did-

to realize it was there all along.

Emily Hwang

About Emily Hwang


An active member of her community, Emily has worked with such organizations as Girls Inc., NEDA, and Girls Helping Girls in an effort to empower young women to become confident, effective agents of social change. She was an involved and dedicated leader in her high school, where she gave much of her time to a student-run Peer Support group as well as to the Drama Department. Her passions include theatre, women's empowerment, literature, and psychology.

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