Espera.

I heard this poem on a podcast that I’ve been listening to lately, and I kinda liked it:

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

  -- David Whyte
      from Everything is Waiting for You 
     ©2003 Many Rivers Press

Here was the explanation the author gave in the podcast interview--

"...and that would be written in the form of myself giving myself a good telling-off. And reminding yourself what is first order, and reminding yourself how much energy you waste at the periphery, which disappears into nothingness, you know? And how much energy which is given at the center turns into this beautiful, surprising somethingness, which is inviting you on and bringing in all kinds of other people into your life to share the adventure at the same time."

Maybe you'd have to hear the whole podcast episode to really grasp what he was talking about there, but I took this poem, and the explanation that came with it, as a reminder to shut off my inner monologue every now and then and pay attention, be more present in my surroundings, and appreciate everything more. I just want to be here in this place, and to try experience everything that it is without having to add in any judgment of my own ability to function within it, or my personal impressions of other people within it. And to let go of any feelings of loneliness that may occur from episodes of cultural miscommunication. It’s all just stuff that’s in my head. And as we all have probably found at some point in our lives, our personal feelings and impressions about places and people and ourselves don’t always correspond to reality. In fact, most of the time it doesn’t. There’s always some distortion. And those distorted perceptions that come from being inside your head too much are often what hold us back from great experiences.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense. But I heard this poem and thought it was a good reminder to get out of my head and let go of the things that don't matter. And I thought maybe some of you out there might resonate with it too.

Thank you for entertaining my more abstract thoughts. I’ll now move on to more normal sounding blog-post type updates.

Not too much has been happening lately—just enjoying the nice weather we’ve had lately. Despite the rainy season being practically here, it hasn’t been too cloudy or rainy in the last week or so, and there were a couple days where we actually had a few good sunsets, which I either enjoy by taking the extra-long way home along the lake after work, or I head straight home to watch it from the solitude of my rooftop.

I finally started taking Spanish lessons. It’s just one-on-one tutoring basically, and I’ve decided to go twice a week, just to brush up on my grammar. To be honest, I don’t think the lessons will help improve my fluency much because it’s a very slow and methodical teaching style. I was a little impatient with that at first, but I think it will help me improve at learning the grammatically correct and incorrect ways of saying things, and then having conversations with people helps me with everything else. So I think it’ll be worth it in the end.

I spent some time with a bunch of Spaniards yesterday though, and oh my god, their Spanish is so different. My friend Karyn, the other intern at MG, has roommates who have friends who live in this really pretty area near the lake, and they were having a lunch party thing on Saturday so she invited me along. The people who live in the house are from Spain and invited a bunch of other Spaniards, and then there were a few Americans, and a few Guatemalans. I realized that I cannot understand Spanish from Spain to save my life. Maybe I could figure it out if I spent some time in Spain, but I’m so used to Guatemalan Spanish now that it was all nearly unintelligible to me. When Guatemalans speak, it’s very clear and every syllable is pronounced and it’s much easier for me to understand what’s going on around me. With the Spaniards, and my coworker Laura from Venezuela, everything sounds much faster, more mumbled, and they don’t always pronounce every syllable so it’s hard for me to distinguish words from one another. I’ll admit it sounds really pretty to hear them speak, but as far as trying to understand them, I gave up after about an hour. Instead of hanging out with the adults, I hung out with the Guatemalan children that were there, because they were adorable and I feel like our levels of vocabulary and conversation skills were similar. So I had a little more fun with that. They were telling me jokes and riddles in Spanish and I tried to guess the answers, and I learned a few fun Spanish puns and then they taught me how to dance. It was fun, and educational. And I had a lot of Sangria and delicious food, so I was content with my day.

Riddle time:

Q: ¿Qué es una comida que espera?

A: Es pera.

Lolz. They had tons of those, but right now that’s the only one I can remember. I probably wrote that incorrectly. I don't know.

Other happenings--I don’t know if I mentioned this yet, since I haven’t posted in a while, but a little over a week ago I got to visit another one of MG’s cooperatives. It was in a really beautiful area, near a city called Nahuala, about an hour and a half by bus from Panajachel. The purpose of the meeting was to get a new community to join Mercado Global. Once again, the whole meeting was in an indigenous language, so I didn’t understand anything that was going on until later when we left and it all was explained to me, but it’s always interesting for me to observe these meetings anyway. I like seeing how things are done out in the communities where all the magic happens, rather in the office, where all I see is donations coming in. When I go out on these visits, I get to see what those donations can make happen, and it’s quite a bit more interesting to me than what I do in the office.

Other than that, right now we’re doing a lot of planning for an organized donor trip to come down for a week at the end of June with their daughters who are in high school. A “mother-daughter trip”, which is pretty cute. I don’t know how much of that trip I’ll be tagging along on, and how much I’ll be in the office that week. I hope I don’t have to spend every waking minute with them, but I’m kind of crossing my fingers for a free trip to Antigua out of the deal, because any activities I attend will be reimbursed. Plus, I was the one who organized the Antigua tour and scored us an awesome deal+discount, and on a Sunday to boot, so I hope I get to go. It’ll be a busy week though, but it should be fun.

But before any of that, my parents are visiting, which I’m very excited about! We’re going to Tikal, an area with a lot of ancient Mayan ruins, for two days, the 28^th and 29^th of this month, and then spending a few days here in Panajachel. I can’t wait.

It’s crazy that I’ve now been here over a month! It went by so fast, as things like this tend to. I miss everyone back home, and hope you’re all doing well. Congrats to everyone who just graduated! Good luck landing full time jobs or grad schools or med schools or whatever’s next—I’m definitely still in that boat with you. And good luck to everyone who still has a semester or two left, hope you all enjoy the summer!

Much love.

Rompiendo la cáscara

I feel really good after this weekend. I had a friend come stay with me for a couple of days, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Her name is Maggie and she was in town visiting so she could renew her visa because she’s currently living in Mexico. While I don’t actually know her very well (we have mutual friends from Madison, but had only met a couple of times,) it was nice having someone around who also really wants to learn and experience things in a new culture—rather than just the expat culture, which is kind of its own little world around here. She was really fun to have around to go exploring with me for the weekend, because she’s a lot more outgoing than I am, which helped me to realize that it’s okay to get out of my shell a little bit and stop being so fearful of talking to people. 

For the past few weeks, as much as I have been enjoying Guatemala so far, I’ve felt kind of in a funk because I’ve been trying and failing to establish connections and acquaintances in the area here who are from Guatemala—not just fellow foreigners. It’s been kind of hard for me. For those of you who know me really well, you know that I can be really shy and I really have trouble taking initiative in social situations and being the first one to reach out and make a connection. Since I’ve been here, this has definitely been a hindrance to me as far as meeting local people because not only are they strangers, but there’s also the chance that they might judge me for my Spanish skills. It was nice having Maggie around because she’s been living in Mexico for a few months now, and seems almost fearless and very willing to embrace the culture of whatever place she finds herself in—more so than some of the Americans that I know here. I share that same desire to just dive in, but sometimes I get so caught up in my head worrying about how I’m perceived by Guatemalans, that it’s easy for me to forget that despite the difference in culture, in many ways, people are really the same everywhere, and all you have to do to make connections with people is to say hello and ask them a question. About anything, really. And as much as I get hung up on my language skills, I’m really trying to let go of the fact that my Spanish isn’t perfect. Of course, if I don’t practice, I’ll never get better. And if I put myself in their shoes, I can realize that if a foreigner in the US was trying to talk to me in broken English and said something incorrectly, I would never judge them for it because they’re trying their best. All I can do is hope that people are patient with me, and if that’s not the case, then I have to let it go and forget about it.

So anyway, Maggie and I spent the weekend just hanging out around Pana, mostly just eating and people-watching and exploring. On Saturday, we went across the lake to Santiago. It’s another town about the size of Pana, and it was pretty cool. There was this statue to a Mayan deity called Maximón there, and when you first get off the boat in Santiago, a bunch of kids and teenagers kind of swarm around you wanting to take you there for 5 quetzales, and we wanted to go looking for it on our own so we wouldn’t have to pay, but after a while we gave up and found a little kid who we paid to take us. It was kind of awesome, because it’s a saint that drinks hard liquor and smokes cigars, and while they were performing a ceremony, they were lighting cigars in its mouth and drinking beer and jack daniel’s. Pretty sure all of the Shamans there were drunk. But it was a pretty cool little ceremony to watch.

The rest of the day we just wandered around and hung out in Santiago, eating things like patín, which is like meat smothered in tomato salsa wrapped in a banana leaf, and ice cream that tasted like horchata, and whatever else we could find. Then we went back to Pana and walked around near the lake, sort of near my neighborhood. We found a family playing basketball and soccer and they invited us to join, so we did and it was really fun! The only time I ever enjoy sports is if I’m playing with people who aren’t competitive and either don’t care if you suck, or are also not that good at sports. It was just like their family fun day, and it was really nice of them to let us join. We made friends with them, and have been seeing them around town since then. Actually, a couple of hours after we played basketball with them, we walked into an empanada shop and saw one of them there—turns out his mother owns it. The empanadas were amazing, and now that I sort of know the people that own it, I will probably soon be a regular there.

And that’s what I’m talking about when I say it's easier to meet new people and make connections when you’re not all by yourself. For me, it takes the pressure off when talking to people for the first time. By myself, I maybe wouldn’t have accepted an invitation to play sports with a bunch of strangers. But now that Maggie left to go back to Mexico, I’m going to try to keep up the momentum from the weekend and keep trying to get out there and keep talking to the people we met and talked to for a while—like Maria and Maria, the two ladies who make tortillas across the street from my house every day. I might just go buy tortillas every day even if I don’t need them. It’s just nice to have acquaintances around town, so that you can start to feel some sense of belonging, and some sense of feeling at home. Even though I’m not going to be here all that long, it’s important to me to have that feeling so that I don’t get as upset when I have those experiences that remind me that I’m a foreigner.

Anyway, so there’s kind of the run-down on my emotional state since I’ve been here. Long story short, I’m going to try to get past the fear of people judging me as I’m trying to live in a new place. I went through this same process when I was in Ghana, and I guess I mistakenly thought because I went through it once, I could bypass it this time. Or maybe I just forgot what it feels like. But I’m learning that it’s always going to be a new process because I’m in a completely new and different place. But it helped to have someone here for the weekend to hang out with me and also serve as an example of how to break out of one’s shell in a new culture. If I try a little harder, I think that things will start to get a little better from here on out.