The last month has been mildly busy with lots of paperwork, grant writing, and curriculum planning that you all really don’t want to read about.
My new place finally feels like a home after my roommate and I decorated it, added curtains, planted a garden, and have done our best to make it not feel like a prison cell of blue cinder blocks. We live on a little compound with four flats…and our neighbors just had a baby! I’m really excited to hold the little bundle of joy often, and I’m trying to re-learn the Hindi I haven’t really been using since moving to the city so I can make friends with the mother who speaks very little English.
The new group of volunteers comes in less than a month. It’s feeling very surreal knowing that a year ago I was in a similar place of frantic packing, a whirlwind of activities trying to fit everyone into my every-waning schedule, constant confusion & questions about what Fiji would be like, and attempting to prepare myself for the two years that lie ahead of me. If I could go back in time I would only pack half of what I did and fill the rest of the space with good tea & coffee, graham crackers, fruit leather, and a coffee press. I would have quit work more than a few weeks in advance to spend adequate time with all the people whose lives I would not be a direct part of in the two years to come, gone to a few more Cubs games, and taken more photos that would soon plaster the cinder blocks I have for walls. I would have written down my questions instead of letting them whirl like a cyclone through my head, and I would have stopped trying to prepare myself and focused on the here & now because no one can adequately prepare themselves for two years of Peace Corps service. Even though the available work goes in waves here, and occasionally I’ve been ready to throw in the towel and jump on the next plane to America, a year in I can recognize that I have done a lot of growing in my personal life, become much more capable of entertaining myself without tv, friends in the room next door, or constant internet access, learned how to cook with limited resources (you all would be wow-ed at my ability to cook sans-microwave), gained more patience than I ever thought possible, and taken my spirituality out of the western box it was wrapped in.
This next year might fly by…part of me hopes it does because I really miss the company of close friends, working in non-profits who really have their stuff together, and tacos. On the other hand, I hope to soak in every moment—every mundane detail of life here—knowing that when I arrive home the slow pace I once complained about, the simplicity I moaned about, and the hot weather I curse daily as I sweat on my way to work—will be things I wish I could return to after experiencing American life once again.
If you were wondering what type of challenges both local stakeholders as well as foreign volunteers face when approaching HIV/AIDS awareness....this would be a big one.
Posts
