Here

You can’t know what this experience will mean to future you until you are future you. – John Green

These days, while I eat breakfast, I look over at the calendar hanging on the wall and play games with the numbers. 7 days until I turn in my research project. 20 days since I arrived in Chapod. 14 days until I leave for home.

           

            It’s not to say that I’m not happy here. It took me this long to write a blog post because I figured you were all tired of hearing about how much I like playing games with kids and drinking mate. So I’ve finally decided the other side deserves some space as well, because it is a true and present part of my experience.

            The truth is I want to come home. Home is in reach now, but it’s true too that I’ve been ready to come home since about a month into the trip. And I do feel a little guilty about that. I know that when I’m sitting in a Spanish class in the Martha Miller Center at Hope College – an image that feels like a dream now – I will miss this. And maybe I will think why didn’t I appreciate all that while I had it?

            Maybe. But it’s also probable that months from now, when the emotions I am feeling right now have been recollected in tranquility (to borrow a favorite concept from William Wordsworth) I will understand them better; I will know some, though not all, of what I have learned and I will be grateful for it.

            So what about now? How to keep from feeling sad when there are only a few days left to enjoy this part? Or maybe not. Maybe the sadness is okay, not because it will be better soon, but because it has its own value right now.

            One of Daniela’s favorite activities in the evenings is looking at the photos I have on my computer. Cuddled up with me on the couch, she’ll leave fingerprints on my computer screen as she finds me in every photo. “Aquí estais tu,” she says over and over, using the Chilean verb form for familiars and loved ones: Here you are.

But me, I’m looking at the backgrounds. Its something I learned to do the first time I left home. We always look at the focus of a picture: the person or the action that was worth capturing. But photos (especially ones taken with point-and-shoot cameras without focusing capabilities) capture more than that. There’s the moment, and then there’s the world behind it.

I notice that in a photo of a sandcastle at the lake, the rowing shell is rigged on the shore: someone went rowing that day. In a picture of my sisters and I decorating the Christmas tree, there’s a can of Diet Coke on the table. My sister Katie’s, because she’s always drinking Diet Coke.

They’re silly, these little details. But right now they’re everything. They’re my world. And I don’t mind longing for them. “To look at seeds and believe He will feed us?” Ann Voskamp asks. To be satisfied by future hope? To be content with photographs, weariness and counting days.

It aches like sore muscles, painful but satisfying. I have accomplished something: I have made it this far. These new places, people, routines and surprises. They have become reality. But I am dreaming again; I am always dreaming. I am dreaming now of home.

Temuco

If joy were a color it would be purple pastel pretty. Like old women and young children both wear on Easter, smiling while having deviled eggs and drinking kool-aid, chasing blown bubbles in the backyard. - Bradley Hathaway

I am sitting at the table, sipping mate with Miriam, when their little round faces appear in the window. Daniela, Fernanda, Mati, Diego and Hernando. They beckon me to come and play. I go out the back door, pulling on my knit hat because even though it’s technically summer, the air still hangs chill and misty here in the south. My friends come darting around the corner of the house, their hands hidden behind their backs. I hold out my arms and they fill them flowers. Empty-handed, they are beaming and I am laughing out of pure joy.

I sort of feel as if this is all like that. Like my arms have been filled with this unexpected, simple, beautiful gift. There are limits to this place, but everything that I experience here in this house is so full and I am undeserving but so grateful.

Tossing petals 

My mind keeps returning to the morning not so long ago when the rest were here too – and we gathered around a campfire to share the things we learned here. And those too were gifts.

How Ali talked about how she could measure the hours by the arrival of the bus that comes to bring the country to the city. Now, in the mornings I board that bus, and the driver greets me in English and it makes the other passengers laugh. I watch them greet each other, reaching down from the aisle to kiss cheeks.

I arrive in Temuco and spend my mornings at the university. And then I catch the bus again with the mothers returning with their shopping bags and the students in their uniforms. An old woman with gray hair pulled elegantly back from her wrinkles says, “Parece que va a llover,” and it strikes me as an universal sentiment. Yes, I think so too. It looks like it’s going to rain. 

The nights when we play outside with all those neighborhood kids, I remember how Lane saw that family here is something different. And children are raised by the village, given work and responsibility but loved and cared for, precious to everyone. I think it must be lovely to grow up here, where it is still safe to run free.

Inside we watch telenovelas and Roshard’s words cross my mind. How here the life we are living is not the same as what we see on TV. So we do not try to reproduce that image. We just live. He spoke too about how we must learn to value the things we have been given.

So often, when we go somewhere new, and meet people who are happy with so much less than we have, I hear the response of surprise and discomfort. And I think it’s easy to turn that knowledge into bitterness. But I don’t think that’s the right response. Soon, I will go back to a world of constant internet access and hot running water and a car to take myself to whatever I need whenever I need it.

And that’s where I live. It’s where I learned to play and to work, where I watch TV and look for flowers and where it rains too. And back there is the family I am counting down the days until I see again.

So instead of bitter, I think I’ll choose grateful. So when this place and these days become memories, they will be flowers still.

What to do with all those flowers? Stick them in my hat, of course. 

Chapod Again

Changing your mind is one of the best ways of figuring out whether or not you still have one. - Taylor Mali

You all thought I was going to Valparaiso for my research project, didn’t you? Well, so did I.

But then, of course, if you read my post about Chapod, you’d know that in the words of my host mom in Santiago: I fell in love. I’ve known for a few weeks now that I wanted to come back to the campo, and a lot of thinking, project proposal tweaking and some stressful conversations with my academic director and my poor mother finally got me back here.

House and Home!

It was, at first, a strange decision, if in truth not a hard one. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to stop constructing images of what I think my life is supposed to look like, and I had a pretty strong picture of this month, and more generally, of study abroad.

I saw myself traveling, exploring cities, and in general having a grand experience. But the more I experienced that reality, the more I realized that I don’t like big cities. They overwhelm me. I don’t like the constant pressure to take advantage of where I am, see everything and go everywhere.

I realize now that my passion for travel is different. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve known on a small scale. I’ve seen Ukraine from English camp, El Salvador from the barrio and Malaysia from the campus of my boarding school. And even though those experiences were limited, they were precious and worldview-altering.

I would rather see the world like that. I don’t care if I never see the Pyramids or the Great Wall or for that matter Machu Pichu or Easter Island. I’m content with the view from this little house at the bottom of hill, surrounded by the piglets and the rooster crowing and the smell of the bread baking.

It may not be as wide an experience as I might have had amidst the colors next to the sea. But it will be a deep one. And if it is culture I seek to learn, haven’t I said before that culture exists in its simplest form within families?

This one, for now, is mine. We’ve spent our first day here (and by we, I mean Amanda and me. She couldn’t escape the pull back here either) drinking mate, taking naps in a bedroom that feels like our own, showing off photos of our faraway homes and taking new ones in photo booth (that’s a pleasure I haven’t experienced in a while). And we’re ready to study the reality of education in this place, that is, if we ever take a break from playing ninja.