I am breaking through the surface of this experience to write you a love letter. You, someone I knew since before Peace Corps. 

It is almost May and I have (por lo menos/at least) 7 months to go. 7 months is a long time but at the start it was 27. That means 18 months of life are under my belt in rural Guatemala plus 2 of training in Ciudad Vieja. I could have grown two babies in my womb in 18 months (you know, consecutively) or finished a graduate program or walked across the United States (is that true? I’m making that up. I’d have to give it a google).

It is about to be that home stretch where one starts to think “Why was it such a struggle before and now I am on the clouds?” just because the end is in sight. I am starting to (among looking forward to ready access to cheese again) add things up, to consider what I have accomplished and what I have not.

When I come home, if I come home, I have to decide what posture I want to assume looking back on this chunk of life and referring to it at parties, over coffee and between funerals (I mean that facetiously). Before I left Alaska, I remember the eyes that widened when I said “I’m doing Peace Corps” and what often followed were people’s own projections. “I always wanted to do that..” “You are so inspiring for doing that..” or just “Wow.” But the truth is, most people either don’t really know anything about Peace Corps, or have heard one or two stories and stretched it over the expanse of the whole multi-national organization.

But now it’s time for me to get real with you (as real as one can over social media, heartbeat to heartbeat would be better if we can arrange it).

You may have an image in your mind of me living in a hut huddled over a wood-burning stove learning a Mayan language by tireless repetition over my 70th plate of eggs and see that as inherently honorable and think: “That Natalie. What a gal.” And yeah, I am quite a gal. I learned Spanish and K’iche’ (some of it), cut my hair off by myself in my apartment, hand-washed my clothes for two years and went on three tinder first dates- no small feat when you live hours from a city (update: single). But honorable? If you think so, I want to respond.

Peace Corps is just as much for the benefit and personal expansion of the volunteer as the service. I didn’t save anyone, or really ‘help’ anyone in the immediate sense or fix any waning system. I spent a lot of nights by myself reading, painting my nails, watching Veronica Mars, wishing I had internet and listening to the rain. I spent a lot of days lightly pinching the cheeks of babies, grasping their hands if they’d accept or even holding them long enough to get a selfie and kiss their face. If you are a person who goes out of your way to help people in your own country, chances are you will do the same thing here. But if you are a person who does not go out of their own way to help people in your own context/country, you probably won’t do so here. Neither one is right or wrong, but it’s an important distinction to make. Peace Corps volunteer is a job, it is not synonymous with ‘hero.’

I work in middle schools and (at this very moment) am teaching about sexual health and drug education (if you need to learn “hallucinogen” and “prostate” in Spanish, I’m your gal). Working with teenagers is really hard, and doing it in a second language steepens the incline. Beautiful, fun, bizarre, lonely, tiring, and still I can think of a lot more noble things.

I picked Peace Corps because I wanted to live abroad, nail down a second language and go far, far away. At the start of the year I taught my students about their Identity Tree: their roots (where they come from), their values (the trunk), and their dreams and accomplishments (branches and leaves). This exercise had me reviewing my Identity Tree. The US is the land of opportunity, depending on how you define opportunity, but now I see the chinks in the armor of my own value structure. The societal pressures of having and advancing are real and, to me, pallid. They inform our existence as a collective society and, while it is certain that my generation has not had to fight like the generations before us, in our material success as a society we have forgotten about what simple hard work looks like (yo: myself being the first). When people complain about having to do laundry on social media, my eyes roll into the way back of my head. There are 2 big-ass machines for that. You know what you have to do with laundry? You have to put it in and take it out and put it away. OH, THE TRIBULATION.

I look to 90 year-old Abuelita who never stepped foot in a school but who doesn’t feel sorry for herself except in that she has gotten too old to work like she used to. She still wants to go to the field, cut firewood and carry it home on her back. It’s humbling to sleep in and wake up to a woman triple your age heaving an axe to a chunk of wood and laughing afterwards. In the US we see what we don’t have like our ‘without’ is bigger than our ‘with’ and takes up actual, physical space. Maybe we can thank the commercialism around us for this perspective, but Santa Clara sees the US as the land of having. And yet I keep leaving it because of what I don’t have and don’t readily find there.

Guatemala has given me so much. They’ve taught me about hard work without complaining, giving without expecting in return and how to sit and listen.

And for that reason I am nervous at the thought of returning to the land of punctual appointments, going unrecognized and where waiting more than 2 minutes in line is inherently wrong. But what I am most afraid of leaving behind is eating slowly and laughing long. We don’t sit still, unstimulated, and listen in my country. The TV is on, the tablets are out or you are washing dishes while your loved one tells you about their day. Why listen when you can be DOING SOMETHING AT THE SAME TIME? In the campo they listen with complete concentration and no itch to move because there is not always internet on phones or somewhere else to be. I have had to learn to calm the itching inside of me that says I need to hurry up to go. Go where? Go be alone? Flip through instagram? Buy something?

It’s hard not to drag my culture because I see what it’s missing so clearly, but there’s no one to blame. No one is responsible for culture by themselves.

After this experience my priorities have shifted. Now I just want to be with my tribe and seek what I need to seek: work, health, love. But along the way cultivate gratitude for a full plate of food (not thinking about my waistline), for my education, access to opportunity, four walls and a mattress. Sleep is peace. Food is a provision. Laughing with my people is a triumph over hard moments. I want to seek wholeness instead of moreness. This will be the biggest challenge for me.

And so, I hope to keep doing that. But not without first recognizing what this experience has given me which is a chance to be foreign and spectacular (in the sense that I am a spectacle) and to learn from everything foreign around me. Family, hard work and faith are the three most important things in (my experience of) Guatemala. I know that these two years have changed me because I think of the world in terms of power structures, privilege and economic advantage/disadvantage. I don’t see ‘poverty’ as a thing, instead I see faces and I hear stories and I recognize the fight. And that is thanks to Peace Corps. And I hope that as I keep living and making mistakes that I can keep learning how to be better. But if I am grateful, I am doing it right. XOXO