Expanding the Comfort Zone: What I Learned at Heifer Ranch
* Written for the RanchHands volunteer newsletter *
A few hours after arriving in El Salvador, I found myself looking at a familiar sight just outside the house I would be living in for the next two years: a composting toilet. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ve used a squatty potty on multiple occasions.” The sight of cows, pigs, chickens, and ducks wandering down the road and through my host family’s yard didn’t faze me – we’d had plenty of those at Heifer Ranch. I wasn’t shocked to see houses built with sheets of corrugated metal and pieces of cardboard, as they reminded me of the Urban Slums houses in GV1. I was already familiar with the fundamentals of tortilla-making, thanks to Ken Herren’s “People, Land, and Livestock” class. I didn’t panic at the prospect of living in a tropical environment without air conditioning – I had survived an Arkansas summer, after all.
The very fact that I’ve ended up in El Salvador at all is, in many ways, directly related to the time I spent at Heifer Ranch. Not knowing what to do with myself after graduating from college and having always wanted to be a “farm girl” while growing up in the suburbs, I thought spending a summer at a ranch operated by a non-profit sounded like a pretty fun thing to do. I was right. I enjoyed that summer so much that I ended up staying for a year.
We played a simple game during that first volunteer orientation where we laid out three concentric circles on the floor and moved back and forth between the central Comfort Zone, the intermediate Learning Zone, and the outermost Anxiety Zone according to how comfortable we felt with a given situation (public speaking, seeing a snake, using the aforementioned squatty potty). At the time, I thought it just was a nice icebreaker, but as time went on I kept coming back to the game’s message – that you can only expand your comfort zone by stepping outside of it – as a framework for how I wanted to spend my time on the Ranch and, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, as a guiding principle for how I wanted to live my life upon leaving.
One of the things I loved the most about my time at the Ranch was that I had so many opportunities to step into that learning zone. Some things did make me legitimately uncomfortable at first (chicken chopping, trying out the new challenge course) while others were purely new and fun (milking the goats, driving the tractor), but I know that my comfort zone was much wider when I left the Ranch than when I arrived. At the same time it was expanding, however, my future was coming into sharper focus. Instead of becoming disillusioned with my “employer” and its mission as often happens with other jobs, I realized I felt passionate enough about sustainable/ international development to pursue it as a career. And I met plenty of amazing people who had started out by working with communities in developing countries, which, it just so happens, is another good way to expand your comfort zone. So after reading through some of the project descriptions in the Brethren Volunteer Service booklet I found upstairs in Valleyview, I decided to sign up. I spent six months working in a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. before finally making it to El Salvador in early February. Since then I’ve been working with a network of small community stores and a cashew plant run by a women’s cooperative. And while I don’t know if the local organization here will ever become a Project Partner, I’m hoping to at least introduce them to Heifer International.
Despite all the ways that my time at the Ranch prepared me for this experience, there are still plenty of things that I could learn only after coming here – Spanish, for instance, is much more widely spoken than in Perryville, the ladies here make much better tortillas than Ken, and it is important not to dump ashes indiscriminately into a composting toilet that is separated into sections for “liquids” and “solids,” as it is quite likely you will clog the pee-tube, and then your host family will think you are stupid. In all seriousness, there have been a few times when I have found myself in the dreaded Anxiety Zone, but with a few deep breaths and a bit of patience I am usually able to work my way back to something more manageable. One of the strangest things about being here is that, in addition to missing my family and friends, I also feel quite homesick for Heifer Ranch from time to time. I know that most of the people I met have moved on, but I remain convinced that there is something woven deeply into the place that makes it special. Although I have plenty of time and learning left in El Salvador, I am hoping to make it back to the Ranch someday so that I can continue to challenge myself from a place that just feels like home.
