Where Everybody Knows Your Name

My time in Peru was divided into one month of Spanish school, for four hours a day, followed by one month of volunteer work with children, for three hours a day. Pretty simple. It delivered on its promise to be very different from the 40+ hours a week I was logging at my desk in Chicago for the past three straight years (mostly spent alternating between staring out at my view of downtown or down at my laptop's excel file jungle), trying to fix complex problems (ranging from an ex-boyfriend's commitment/identity issues to holes in corporate sales commission plans).

So before the South American trip of mine was even half over, I had a conversation with the volunteer program's coordinator, a skinny Dutch guy, and I told him that I would be happy with the project he had assigned me -- playing games with kids from messed up families in a fun after-school environment -- so long as I felt that my time and money were being put to good use, and that I wasn’t bored.

He said to me, “Well, it is what you make of it. You’re not going to change the world or anything, but hopefully you like it.”

I turned my head like I was looking out the window, and rolled my eyes. It felt like I had all the time in the world left to prove him wrong, and I was smug in my Supergirl ambitions.

Now I’m back.

Time is funny like that -- you're just as easily here as you are there. In the Now, my wanderlust is locked up inside me somewhere, and I’m locked up inside my house with a mild case of Howard Hughes agoraphobia. (Which is unfortunate, because my mother is home from school on Christmas break and hasn’t stopped asking me 101 questions about what my friends, acquaintances, ex-boyfriends, semi-friends, non-friends and celebrities and I are doing that day, tonight, with life, for lunch, for a workout, for a date, for a job, for an apartment…)

And I don’t know if I like it or not? I like having a refrigerator, I like seeing my friends, but I don’t know. I feel different, older, like when I decided I just didn’t feel like playing with dolls anymore but I still had them everywhere and they made me feel guilty so I played with them anyway. Having all these personal items, a whole storage unit full of them to sort through, a whole bedroom that used to be mine but is now decorated like a guest suite at Mandalay Bay or something that’s overflowing with random, useless, accumulated, expensive STUFF that I can’t be bothered to acknowledge.

Maybe it’s culture shock.

Maybe it’s going to the ballet tonight in a fur coat with a hickey on my neck.

Maybe it’s being 25 years old and single and unemployed, which is a mighty different thing in Las Vegas than it is in Peru. Especially when half your friends have a bobblehead of your father at their office.

Maybe it’s being back in your parents’ house, after the specialness of hearth-and-home wears off, and they start to annoy you. Really bad. So bad you want to give someone a wedgie or sniff nail polish or keep laying on the couch and never get up.

Maybe it’s that no one is speaking Dutch or German or Spanish to me.

Maybe the money is too boring, the food is too available, the TV is too close, the President is too stupid, the language too ugly, the life is too easy.

Maybe I’m being dramatic and should stop feeling sorry for myself.

Maybe I should get back on a plane.

Four airports and 24 hours away, it might as well have been another world -- but it didn't stop turning when I left. The kids have a new Profe' to bug them about their homework and lose at Chess, there are new tourists at the mercy of their high school spanish (and their bowels!), my friends there are taking shots of pisco sours right now without me.

I DIDN'T change the world.

My last day at the project, half the kids didn’t even say goodbye to me before they left with their new toys and blood sugar racing with animal crackers and Inca Kola. But that’s ok. Right before the ungrateful little brats (JOKE) left we got to have a party with a musician buddy of mine, and he asked if any of the kids wanted to say something to me before I left. A couple little girls sashayed into the center of the room, where we were all sitting in a circle, and did a little song and dance routine in my honor. And this one girl, she had Winona Ryder eyes, got up and thanked me for everything. And it clicked:

While I won’t miss the constant drinking that I did every night, I already miss those conversations I had while doing so, hearing about the world from someone who grew up on the other side of it than me. I don’t miss losing my breath every time I walked anywhere in that altitude, but I miss all the time I had to stare at cobblestone after cobblestone, the Jesus on top of the mountain, the faces of travelers and beggars, and think. And I don’t miss those kids coughing in my face, I miss their hugs and kisses at the beginning and end of the day, I miss them fighting over who got to sit on my lap, holding my hands and playing with my hair.

I'll remember it, all of it, especially the thing I miss the most. I felt like I belonged, even if it was somewhere that I clearly didn't belong. 

...No, I definitely didn't change the world.  It seems the world, in this instance, changed me.

Comments

[brian ronan]

sounds great..except you missed the part where the kids will remember you. I don't know what changing the world means, but someone who was new and interesting played a part in their lives and that kind of thing sticks- you might not see it, but it does. I guarantee that you impacted their lives more than you ever will know.