Nothing came out how I thought it would.
At the moment, I feel fine. Not too stressed or overwhelmed, but I am aware that the events of this week were all at stormy sea.

Week Six ran the gamut.

Trump won the election, to my chagrin and the devastation of my cohorts and the rest of Central America I would imagine (minus my host brother, somehow), and the terror of a lot of US Americans and much of the world.

I met a kick-ass lady who used to be a PCV. She works at an NGO called Common Hope. We got to tour the facility and learn what they do. She has lived here for 18 years. Her story and her persona got all my wheels spinning: what is next for me? Could I stay indefinitely, too? Continue to help people, work for a non-profit? What kind of work do I want to do after this? How does her experience in Peace Corps compare to mine now?

I learned a quivering history of a friend. I heard echoes of my own youth in the composition of hers. It was sad, relatable, poignant, troubled and triumphant. As we go deeper and deeper into this two+ year commitment, the 27 of us will reveal more of our own hovering identities plunged and deposited in far-off zip codes. S’pose this comes as part of the process of working with your fellow paisanos.

I doubted my ability to adjust here, I doubted the process of training, I doubted my professional future and lamented the floundering search of my 20s. Hard not to look back from the place I stand and feel it was a waste.

I went to a Guatemalan wedding that was triple fancy and it blew me away.

My cousin’s cancer returned.

My spirits were all shades of shocked, calm, bored, extremely frustrated, sad, aware, heightened, and changing. I am changing. This process is changing me.

My privilege clangs louder than ever before. My ears have been retuned to listen.
This experience has flung up so much “self” and my context has changed. Some of the “self” I’m seeing, smelling, isn’t what I thought now that my thoughts have been reset. I learned I’m not as racially aware as I want to be. I should be a better ally to the LGBTQ community. And I see that I’m still STILL holding on to the identity of my parents, my family of origin, and hoping to come to terms with our differences.

And I can’t find half and half in this country. It’s black coffee with weird milk and sugar or no coffee at all. What’s worse is that GUATEMALA SERVES INSTANT COFFEE. INSTANT COFFEE MAKES ME SO SAD. We’re in Central America and hand to God, instant coffee is what the vast majority of households make. Riddle me that.

We had a session on Guatemalan gestures. Some of the gestures are exactly the same as what I know, some are tweaked, some are the brass opposite of what they mean in the States, and the rest are straight up foreign. It pulled me even further out of my head. Gestures don’t make any sense out of context, though they seem to stand alone whenever you use them in day-to-day. But suddenly you’re the foreigner and gestures don’t make sense, bodies are unusual and so are their movements.

Until site placement (Thanksgiving) and Practicum AKA the Big Dance next week, I will continue to ebb and flow through training with my Rubik’s cube Identity. I thought I knew myself before I came here. Even though I think I did know myself, the sands have shifted and the process starts again.

Thankfully my ‘self-discovery’ is not the focus of Peace Corps. I need to focus on the work and the rest will fall in line. There are going to be a lot of slow, challenging or frustrating times, but I hope that I can resolve them and press on..