A room with a view

Let yourself go.

Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand,

 and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

- E.M.Forester

Before coming here I often thought about what was going to be the hardest thing and what terrified me. A friend told me it didn’t matter and I shouldn’t waste my time doing that because once I got here it would end up being something that I never even thought of, which is absolutely true.

I thought I would have a lot more trouble being the only white person and being stared at all the time. And while I do not like it at all, it doesn’t really bother me. I don’t miss movies as much as I thought I would. But oh man do I miss food, something that I never considered. My first two months in country almost every night I would dream about food and I would wake up so grumpy to only have bread for breakfast. Now I never think about it, because what’s the point? I’m not going to get it and it just makes me sad. But I do get so excited when I can go into town and eat a hamburger or a pizza and while I’m eating discuss what pizza is best in America or how I would love a strawberry lemonade, fries and a giant hamburger from Red Robin right now instead of this pathetic imitation.

The most challenging thing has been working on changing my perspective about what matters. It’s really funny they way fellow volunteers talk about things. In training we just talked about what we did in America, why we came here, what we hope to do afterwards and weird things that have happened to us since we’d arrived. When we meet volunteers who have been here for six months, they talk about their village and what life is like there (it’s incredible how different each experience is), those who have been here for a year just want to talk about America and what’s going on over there, and did you bring any new music or movies, or what happened in these tv shows and when you’d ask them how they felt about being half way done and what they were going to do at the end, they’d get quiet and a little sad and suddenly looked stressed out, because who knows? That’s a terribly difficult decision and they’d always talk about how they didn’t know if they’d be able to make it back in America, obviously they were so excited and could name exactly what they would eat and who they would see and what they would do the first weekend, but everyone is rude there and no one knows what it’s like here or can comprehend their experiences.

But gradually things change, slip out of focus and seem to not matter.

And as I sit in my courtyard, marveling yet again at the simple life children lead as they run barefoot kicking a tattered soccer ball, saying hi to my neighbor, asking if they slept alright and if everything is going well with their family, I receive a little shock when I think about the lives people are living halfway around the world. And I hope that if they knew what it was like here, people would behave so much differently, and surely if they saw what I saw or heard what I heard they couldn’t sit in their houses and only think about their day, or the things that annoy them or avoid listening to the news. Surely they would feel compelled to do something. How could you not? When you have so much and people here have so little and it’s so easy, so incredibly easy to change a life or at least make a life a little easier.

And then I’m troubled as I struggle to forget about they way I lived in America and try to adopt the lifestyle here and try to be friendly and open and loving, hoping that one day I won’t have to try. But it’s hard. I want to sit in my house alone and read a book and not talk to anyone. It’s so much easier that way. Being outside requires me to give so much more. And that’s it, that’s the thing that’s the hardest. It’s working against 23 spoiled years growing up in America, where you have the luxury to be self possessed and self centered, where everyone can think only about themselves and turn the phone off and watch tv all day if they want to and live only for yourself. And then I’m terrified that if I do figure out how to love people and really care, that once I leave it’ll evaporate and I’ll go back to living a carefree, selfish life never thinking that other people live differently then me.