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.
1 comments:
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
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