recovering and reflecting

Being sick away from home is never fun, especially when you are in a foreign country and far away from your family. Last week I got a bad stomach flu and/or food poisoning and lets just say I couldn't eat anything for a day. I recovered pretty quickly, but I got my week started on the wrong foot and it has taken a while for me to completely gain my energy back. Anyways, I'm better now, but I definitely was feeling homesick and drained last week. After sustaining so much momentum and enthusiasm for being here (and adapting to this new and challenging world pretty quickly if I do say so myself) I suddenly felt a little bit lost and began missing the comforts of home (mostly the people, the food and my bed!) From past experiences, I have realized that homesickness always hits you when you find yourself bored and unable to keep busy and distracted experiencing new things and spending time with your friends. Anyways, I am now back to teaching classes, spending time with our Peruvian friends and eating delicious Peruvian fruit and cake and I am once again feeling very grateful to be here and have this experience. However, sometimes low points can be really helpful for reflecting and perspective. Over the past almost two months that I have been here, I have been in constant dialogue with myself and with others about this experience and what I am learning. Of course, I usually develop more questions that answers, but that's the beauty of curiosity and learning. I once read a Buddhist quotation that explained that confusion can be a positive thing, because it means that your previous assumptions about the world are being questioned and expanded. I can definitely say that I am still even questioning the fact that I am teaching English here and whether is having any kind of positive "impact" on the community here. However, I am realizing more and more that "understanding" what people are thinking and experiencing here is impossible. Furthermore, like any non-profit organization, its hard to know if we are helping or just assuming that we are helping. We can never, ever escape from the fact that we are privileged westerners and our perspective on life has been molded in a very different way and everything we see and experience is sifted through this lens. However, I believe there is incredible value in the fact that we are living in this community and forming relationships with all kinds of people around us. I was talking to one of the other volunteers about this yesterday and the way I explained it is that I think that when you form relationships with people from other cultures and backgrounds, in many ways they act almost as a mirror, helping you to understand your own culture. While we can never understand what it is like to really live in Huaycán, we can learn to understand ourselves and our culture better. When I see Peruvians here find joy in simple things, never waste food, find incredible ways to be resourceful, appreciate family, play and feel pride for their country among many other things, it causes me to realize the things that I appreciate or that I believe are lacking from American culture and my own life. For example, the amount of risk and danger that people here face daily from an American perspective is kind of terrifying. People trust crazy bus drivers, cross the dangerous streets, eat all kind of crazy food, children play on extremely unsafe playground equipment and ride the bus alone. All of this definitely freaked me out when I first got here (and still does sometimes) but I quickly realized that life filled with risk is also more exciting, feels more real and really makes you feel grateful for the incredible perseverance of the human spirit and body to continue in the face of challenge and danger. However, for Peruvians, all of this is "normal" (they actually say this all the time!) There isn't anything particularly remarkable about surviving their daily bus ride swerving in and out of traffic. However, for me, when I arrive safely I feel extra grateful to be alive and I'm once again reminded of how our ideas in the US about safety and life are culturally constructed to be hyper- sensitive. So basically the point of this long winded blog post is to say that I hope that if nothing else, we (the volunteers here) can also provide a mirror for the students and Peruvians we meet here. We can't change a system that is clearly classist, racist and unjust, and therefore provides less economic opportunities to the people living in Huaycan. However, we are forming meaningful and positive relationships with the people living here, that hopefully help them to learn about themselves and their own country and ways that they can appreciate or change their own lives. We are not in a place to judge what is "good" or "bad" about life here and Peruvian culture in general (the practice of non-judgement observation is definitely a challenge!) but we can maybe learn from it and bring this expanded understanding of the world along with us when we return to our own countries or travel to new places. More thoughts on this to come...