Where in the World?

Wondering where all this went down? Click on the following link to see a map. It seems to work best on Internet Explorer.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=110835804222918428459.00045e5639df088e4e973&ll=33.811102,-112.07428&spn=1.006373,1.73584&z=9

Monday, February 16, 2009

Aversion therapy for a control freak

Ok, maybe I`m not a control FREAK, but I am very aware of how all this traveling has stretched my understanding of what I am capable of controlling.

Now why, all of a sudden am I getting all reflective? Partially because the end of our travelling is drawing near, and mostly because I've got lots of time on my hands. Idle time to read, write in my journal, play a bunch of new songs I've learned on the guitar. Mark is in Michigan for a grad school interview and will be back in a week. Meanwhile, I'm camping on the back porch of a whitewashed farm house on a cooperative coffee farm on an island in the big lake in Nicaragua. It sounds so ridiculous to write it out, but it's true. The staff here are already so accustomed to my presence that my salad at dinner last night arrived with beets on it selectively arranged to spell my name. Many people come here to only stay a few nights. Anyways, I apologize if I address stories and thoughts that have already appeared in other entries- this process is very cyclic and spiraling all over in my brain. Mark is lucky he's not here or he'd get quite an earful of all this. Better to just write it down than to corner some poor stranger staying here who probably just wants to relax.


So all this time, especially without Mark, is giving me some space and time, like a retreat, to reflect on the last two years and transition into the next big adventure- coming home. Something that I've really noticed about myself is this almost neurotic focus on controlling, or at least having the illusion of controlling, my life. A large portion of my life before leaving for the Peace Corps was centered around on my ability to make lists, plan efficient errand trips, and generally know the expected outcome or consequence of my actions. And man, was I good at all that. I love to compartmentalize things, both physically in my environment and mentally. The simple action of crossing something off of a list dramatically and positively affects my brain chemistry. It sounds a little robot-like now that I write about it. Still, it felt safe and lowered my anxiety about not really knowing the future. It certainly helped that the US is set up in a way that you do have a fighting chance of knowing when a bus might be leaving for somewhere, whether or not a meeting is really going to occur the day that it was scheduled, and there's the underrated assumption that there will be electricity and running water ALL DAY.


Little did I know when we left the United States that I would be relinquishing most of my well-established structure for maintaining my perceived control over life.


It became clear to me early in our service, even during training, how accustomed I was to running my own life. Mark and I shared a single room in a host family's house and attending training sessions 5 days a week and rarely got to pick what we were eating. Meanwhile, we didn't know where we'd be placed for the remaining 24 months of our service until about 2 weeks before we went there. Of course, I couldn't have really comprehended what we were in for, even if I had found out the name of our town at the beginning of our training.


That all feels like it happened an era ago, and I guess that's an interesting way to put it. Perhaps the era of me needing to be in control all the time has passed. Sure, every once in a while when I'm tired, hungry, or seasick I may get angry about things not going as I planned. But for the most part it's become almost comical how often things don't unravel the way I imagine they will. What a joke that I really thought I could do anything about the future. And I don't mean that in a helpless, sad way. It's like the illusion is revealed and I think it's funny how gullible I was for believing in it.


Some of the more recent events have given me opportunities to let go. I'm not going to claim that these things didn't stress me out, but that I was able to function without these things being resolved immediately. The first one that comes to mind is the whole Roque drama, which ensued relatively soon after we got him. He came to us within two weeks of the official disappearance of Salta, and two weeks later, Mark was flown to Panama for his knee surgery. We took care of ourselves by defiantly smuggling him into the resort where our first consolidation took place because we couldn't imagine abandoning him and just couldn't comply with Peace Corps rule that animals weren't evacuatable. We also brought him along to Cochabamba on our final trip as Volunteers only to have to leave him with a PC employee. It's a little cloudy in my memory at this point, because plans were changing almost hourly, but I think we left for Peru thinking that Roque would be brought to the US by that employee. Unfortunately the veterinary paperwork didn't come through in time, and we were forced to come up with another plan. We picked him up and brought him to Tarija, and then made the grand plan to take him home ourselves after another courier plan fell through. Two years ago, the making and breaking of so many plans in a short amount of time would have been devastating. But it just felt so typical of our experience at that point that it wouldn't work out as planned. So of course, I never expected his story with us to end as it did. Looking at some pictures and videos of Roque recently while visiting with my parents, I found that I still have some raw emotions about losing him at the airport. Rationally I know that I did everything I could to find him, but there's a mean little voice in the back of my head that says it was my fault for not putting cable ties on the door of his crate. Hindsight is a jerk, ¿no ve?


The next ongoing drama was with our passports. Where to start? I guess it all began when we visited the US Embassy in Lima, Peru to submit our personal passports for renewal. We were told it would take about 6 days, but we didn´t like the feel of Lima enough to stick around, and it was SO obvious at the time that we would pass through there again, it being a major airline travel hub in South America. If only we'd just waited to pick them up, or waited to renew them in Argentina where we spent almost 3 months?! There`s that jerk again. Of course, it all worked out. The passports didn`t arrive in Buenos Aires in time for us to use them to get to Costa Rica, so we had to apply for emergency passports at the BA Embassy. Mercifully, we were not charged for them because we had waited patiently for the diplomatic pouch to make it`s expected trip from Lima to Buenos Aires. When they DO arrive in Buenos Aires, the Vice Consul will forward them to our home address.

The newest and currently unresolved test is this whole "Where are we going to live?" thing. Mostly out of our hands at this point. Waiting to hear back from grad schools, for Mark to study Counseling Psychology. The options are Western Michigan University, Boston College, and NYU. We should hear from these schools by April 15, so in the meantime I get to practice letting go of my somewhat neurotic need to make plans.

Posted by at

1 comments:

Alizet said...

Hey you guys!

Wow cannot believe how fast time has flown by. I've only just discovered this blog page you guys have had all this time. Looking through it, it looks like you two have had the time of your life. Didn't see an email anywhere so I hope you'll get this comment. I would love to hear from you! My email is: azepeda1989@gmail.com
Take good care!
Alizet

March 20, 2009 11:31 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)