Two Years And Counting

Well. What to say. It’s been some time since I last wrote here, for myriad personal reasons that are too complex to really dive into at this point.

Suffice it to say, however, that it has been a tumultuous year thus far, though not a bad one by any means. The tumult, I’m coming to see, is perhaps a natural part of life … a part that one had better get used to embracing.

I am writing now because I feel as though I’ve just begin to emerge from an emotional fog that was making it very hard for me to gain any type of a big-picture ‘fix’ on anything—I was figuring things out, processing, probably, and I’ve come to realize that the complex set of emotions that I associate with a lack of clarity is usually just the state I revert to when there’s a lot on my heart and in my mind that remains unresolved.

But I feel as though I’ve resolved much of what was clouding me, or some of the big-picture issues at the very least. And, this time, it took a cathartic week in Lima amongst a group of Peace Corps friends whom I’ve grown very fond of, followed by one of the more incredible birthdays I’ve ever celebrated.

And though catharsis, I believe, comes at the most unexpected times and from the most unusual places, I’m going to attempt to describe at least the broad-brush outlines of what happened. The central piece of those two experiences—both the week in Lima and my birthday—was that they both drove home for me just what an inspiring and fun network of people I have stumbled my way into in this country.

That’s the paradoxical nature of the whole thing, I suppose: exactly two years ago I was just arriving in Lima, just getting my first sense of the quirkiness and disparity of our whole group of volunteers, the 14th such group to serve in Peru, and I was scared, I’ll admit that. I have a strong and abiding love for the cast of characters—both my incredible family and a small cadre of caring friends—that I have always counted on for support and guidance back in the US, and it was very, very difficult to separate myself from those people. In the first months here I found myself backing off from people more than I typically do, keeping quiet more than usual, keeping to myself. And while I opened up in degrees throughout our 10-week training process and those initial months in site, there are only a few volunteers that I ever really developed a close friendship with in the first year. A part of me, emotionally speaking, remained back in Pennsylvania, back amongst the love and support I’d come to trust. All of this, I’m sure, is typical of anyone leaving home and moving to a foreign country, though the level of reserved-ness, I would imagine, must vary vastly.

Anyway, as I said, I’m necessarily painting in broad brush strokes, because there’s obviously so much about each of our internal workings that we can never effectively communicate to another human soul. But fast-forward from that reserved ‘me’ of two years ago to the ‘me’ present at this computer, today, and the tables have flipped to a certain extent. I am now very, very reticent to leave behind the network of caring souls that people my days here, whether it be in Oidor, among the volunteers in Tumbes, or among the larger group of all 50 Peru 14 volunteers who have survived and thrived throughout these two years. I am not, by any means, close with all of them—not by a long shot. Yet this past week in Lima made me realize just how much I like even the ones I’ve barely had any contact with over the entire span, and just how very much I am going to miss the few kindred souls who have let me into their inner worlds as much as they possibly could. And from that experience I came directly back to a giant surprise birthday party in my town, replete with a piñata, several cakes, dinner, lots and lots of beer, and dancing with my friends and counterparts until the wee small hours of the morning. We volunteers, I believe, are always balancing on a fine line between indulging in the friendships we’ve made with other Americans while we’re here (and the subsequent guilt we feel at spending all of that time away from our towns)—or we feel like we’re drowning in the cultural differences and lack of deep connection with others that can result from several long weeks in site. Or maybe not all of us, who knows. But for me, it is a true joy to get to a point, two years in, where I finally feel as though some part of that balance I have been trying to strike has been real and true and good. As though some of the long periods of time in site, struggling through conversations in a language I’m not even close to fully understanding, have been recognized and heartily received. Because I DO feel that I have meaningful ties with both my host family and a small group of friends/co-workers in my site. I DO feel like part of the town’s structure, or as much a part of it as I could ever expect to be, given the circumstances. There is so much about the feel of the place—the particularities of the sights and sounds, the habitual occurrences, the tacit ‘stuff’ of the day that comforts you on some deeper, almost unconscious level. Maybe it’s just knowing that you’re now ‘home’ in a space where you used to feel so alien and different.

Anyway, maybe that’s enough exposition of what are, when all is said and done, heftier concepts that are, somewhat paradoxically, made somewhat cliché by virtue of their very oft-repeated status: the utter difficulty of full, heartfelt communication with others on the one hand, and the soul’s need for acceptance and community on the other. But that’s the catharsis, I believe, that has been taking place in these last weeks, as my system has been processing the impending end of this full, complex experience. As has often been the case in recent years, the words of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, have been helping me to move through some of these concepts, providing daily dosages of candor and eloquent heart at just the right times. In one beautiful short story I read some weeks ago, he fleshes out these very concepts in a way that cuts through so much of the artifice that strips the emotional weight off so many other writers’ words:

“ … it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or to speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.”

“With David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’'

(From the last page of the short story ‘Good Old Neon,’ in the story collection titled Oblivion)

A part of the reason I haven’t written for so long is that I’d been worrying too much about what everyone else would think about what it was I had to say—about whether people would think I was struggling for this effect or that effect, when in truth we all do that every minute of our waking lives … the only real difference is how much we allow the knowledge of that posturing to worry/define us. The truth is that it’s what we do as humans, and the only thing that really matters is the heart beneath it … the attempt at connection and decency. I want to write much, much more in this, the 28th year of my life, a year that promises to be rife with ever more changes. I want to write more, at least in these next months, because I want to tell people back home about the kindness and quirkiness that surrounds me in my site—and because I want to stop pretending I live in two worlds when the truth is that it’s just one big one that we’re all trying to find our ways through with some measure of dignity (whatever that means to each of us) and with as much good company as we can find along the way. I’ve found it here—both among the people who have welcomed me so well in Oidor and all the volunteers up and down the coast.

So to close I guess I’d just like to congratulate all the Peru 14ers for the myriad accomplishments you’ve all made in your communities, and, more than that, just for living and loving under difficult circumstances—so many of you do it with style and grace, even if you can’t always see it in yourselves. Maybe I kept referring to “two worlds” for so much of my service because I found myself in another piece of this world that, initially, just felt too far removed and foreign from the one I was used to—and, mentally, I segregated it off. Maybe part of being a decent citizen of this world, then, is trying as often as possible to collapse those mental barriers … trying always to see the common bonds in it all.