Two Years

I’ve been here for four and a half months now, and I still can’t decide how to feel about the idea of ‘two years.’ That amount of time didn’t scare me at all when I signed up. “It’ll allow me to really learn the language, build lasting relationships, and sink my teeth into the culture enough to get some real work done,” I thought. Indeed, anything less than that would be mere tourism. And then I arrived. And two years seemed like an endless road, stretched out straight before me and disappearing far over the horizon. My goal was just to make it through the week. I suddenly remembered that my program had bought me a roundtrip ticket – if I really couldn’t take it, I only had to survive until Feb. 28. As it turned out, I did end up going to the airport that day, but with a couple members of the delegation that I had been accompanying for the past week, and I didn’t even remember my return ticket until later. When I made it to the one-month mark a few days later, I thought, “Wow, I’ve still got 23 more of those to go. That is a long time. It will be 2010 when I get home, and I will be an ancient 27 years old.” Still, I thought it might be a good idea to look into the possibility of getting a temporary residency, as the idea of it didn’t scare the bejeesus out of me as much as it had the first day I’d arrived. Not having much work to do, I spent the next several weeks fairly obsessing about what I was going to do with my life when I got back to the States, knowing full well that it was pretty futile trying to figure that out so far in advance. I would also think once in a while, “Four months is a perfectly respectable amount of time, isn’t it? Or six months. Six months is certainly nothing to sneeze at. I won’t speak fluent Spanish, but I’ll be able to get on with my life.” It wasn’t that I was homesick as much as that I didn’t know what I was really doing here. When you tell people you’re going to volunteer in a third-world country for two years, they say “Oh, good for you. You’re so brave. There’s such a need.” And they assume you’ll be doing something cool and inspiring like nursing orphans back to health or handing out emergency food rations to women in brightly-colored traditional clothing, or hugging lepers… And even though I’d been warned that there would be a long adjustment period, I also pictured something like that, and was surprised to still be sitting around not really knowing what to do with myself after three months. But it was long enough to get over a lot of initial fears (namely, of anything that went in my mouth), to learn the basics of making tortillas and washing clothes by hand. Long enough to establish routines – for sleeping, eating, exercising. And long enough to improve my Spanish enough to not feel so excruciatingly isolated all the time. There are people that I’ve been saying “hi” to for four months now that I’m just starting to get to know.

Little by little, things have been falling into place with my project as well. I even know what I’m doing enough to train the new employee (who just happens to be my host mom) after my co-worker got transferred. I still don’t have a bullet-pointed job description, but I also don’t feel like I need one as much as I did a few weeks ago. I’m sure I’ll continue to get pangs of homesickness every now and then (for a sweat-free day, for decent music on the radio, for the Sunday funnies, for world cuisine, for my family and friends) and 2010 still seems like a long way away, and 27 still seems old. But “two years” seems less scary again, seems like a good amount of time. Indeed, anything less would be mere tourism.