Questions/Doubts/Complaints

At the end of each session, without fail, we are asked “Preguntas? Dudas? Quejas?”

And without fail, there are preguntas. Sometimes dudas. Often quejas disguised as preguntas or simply statements in the form of questions. You know the kind: “Why aren’t we leaving tomorrow at 9am instead of 8?” isn’t a question at all.

During the hamster wheel of training I’ve become intimately acquainted with the perfunctory cap at the end of each schpiel: “Preguntas? Dudas? Comentarios? Quejas? Sugerencias?” But the people who are opening the floor for questions aren’t the people who can give me answers. Sure sometimes I ask a logistical clarification or I offer suggestions or I vent my frustrations but the person I want to pose questions to doesn’t exist in real time: it’s my future self. In fact, we were charged to write letters to ourselves during swear-in to become volunteers. These are the letters we will open and read when we COS (close of service) in two years. Instead of a letter I filled the green construction paper with questions: What did you service end up like? What was your new host mom like? Did you go to Semuc Champay? I folded and deposited the inquiries in an envelope. If nothing else, they clearly communicate and remind my future self of everything I did not know when I started out taking stabs in the dark. For 2 years the inked letters will shimmy against each other as the file cabinet opens and closes opens and closes, until I open the letter at close of service. What happens if there is an office fire? I won’t remember what I asked myself in December 2016.

I want to ask myself if I found happiness or if I managed to be present and what I did wrong that I wish I could change if I could go back and just how many tortillas I ate in the course of two years. Is 1,229 a reasonable estimate? Nope more like 4,000 or more because I eat between 6-8 a day so the 4,000 figure is modest.

You know what’s going to be hard for me about service? It’s not going to be service. That’s going to be tough at times but it isn’t going to be hard like the kind of rock that gets stuck in your throat when you say something about someone and they are right behind you or when someone picks on your little sister. That kind of ‘duro’ feeling has and will erupt from cobwebbed anxieties and demons that have built up over the years, especially in my 20s, and will topple over like poorly-planned jenga blocks when the days pool together and the circumstance of distance and the cycle of change overcomes my thoughts to the point of tumultuous introspection and I tumble into a panic-filled search for a jar of peanut butter. Man’s Search for Meaning, My Search for Peanut Butter: semantics.

The struggle of identity is just as it was before: HARD. And if it wasn’t hard Florence and the Machine and Ingrid Michaelson and fuckin’ Cirque de Soleil would be out of a job. But you know what I’ve learned in being here. My struggles with identity are in a different category than my counterparts here in country. They don’t sit on hammocks and ask questions like: How do I find my value? In my observation they work hard and pray a lot and they don’t eat alone and they don’t look at their phones all day and they don’t wonder about leveraging their next annual review for a promotion. They don’t think about it. They don’t think about it like I think about it. They don’t lay in bed and watch Netflix and worry. Maybe they worry when they cut coffee or drive their cars to Guaté or visit their Grandmothers who live down the street or maybe they worry about how they haven’t finished school or they’re repeating the same grade or if their dad will hit their mom or if they will be able to go to university or what will happen if someone asks them to read a sign and they don’t know how to read. Sure they worry, I bet we both worry. But I worry about if I will be single until I’m 45 or if it’s okay if I disappoint my parents or if I will find a job I like? Meanwhile my host mom will be worrying if her aguacates will get stolen from her land or if her mother will lose a tooth and swallow it on accident. Really I don’t know.

But I worry about my future career, my future personal life and the series of question marks that cloud my mind. It’s because I’m greedy for certainty and envious of luxury and desperate for recognition some days or to be told that I am simply amazing, look no further, I am a whole being. Could anyone else be as whole as me? I’m SO WHOLE that ORGANIC RESTAURANTS PINE OVER MY VERY EXISTENCE.

Or love. Just love. When will that dandy knot of a heart inside my chest unravel into the arms of an amorous winning figure in the distance? Or will it ever. Will I be locked up and find some cats to surfeit my isolation and pad around my feet meowing for nurturing when all I want is to be nurtured, loved and prized?

I got “saved” at age 5 listening to a Psalty tape. Along the way I either lost my faith or my faith lost me or I simply opened my eyes and saw that clouds aren’t angel’s rugs, they’re clouds. If I used to be saved, how would I describe myself now? Recycled? Not only am I ‘lost’ according to my past life, I’m directionless. If I stepped off the beaten path and into a new direction, that would be one thing. But PC wasn’t my dream as a child. It was one option and so I am trying it. But the same questions will hover over my head like those cartoon birds when someone faints- will that last throughout service, my youth, my questions, doubts, complaints, preguntas, dudes, quejas?

Do you have any questions, doubts or complaints for me? Chances are I can’t help but maybe I can relate.