11 months ago I started Spanish immersion school. I stumbled through introducing myself in spanglish and proceeded to nervously stare at my teacher for the first week. 11 months later, today, I’m sitting on a train heading from Chicago to St. Louis, missing the daily challenge of using my second language.
It’s shocking how fast things go. My dad told me before I left, “Before you know it, you’ll be home,” how right he was.
There are so many emotions that go along with readjusting to stateside living. My heart has been broken, mended, transformed, and stretched in more ways than I thought to be possible. I spent my last month in Guatemala and the past week in Nicaragua trying to be truly present to each experience and live in the moment to the best of my abilities. As a result, I have a couple different blog post themes written down in my phone but haven’t had the time to expand on them yet. Therefore, these next few days and weeks as I have time to reflect and decompress, I’ll hopefully be able to compose some some new posts to finish up my Guatemala blog.
For now though, I’ll begin my closing posts with this: the biggest challenge of moving back to the United States isn’t going to be simply put. There are so many things I’ll miss, and obviously many things I’m excited to have back in my life such as the many people I’ve missed during this past year. However, perhaps the biggest challenge is going to be incorporating things I learned in San Lucas without being an extremist. It’s easy to be disgusted by the consumerism that is so clearly present here in the United States yet I need to remind myself that I've been exposed to poverty that a majority of the consumerist population has not seen. My perspective has been widened and so has my compassion. Therefore, I’m challenging myself to find a balance and recreate my life here so that I can maintain my Guatemalan way of life without ostracizing the way of life here in the States. My goal is to be a person of 150% - 75% Guatemalan and 75% American of the USA (because people from Central America/South America are also Americans). It’s a concept that involves not committing myself completely to one culture nor excluding the other. After all, there’s a reason humans are so complex, so why not make it a little more complicated?
Because a pictures says 1,000 words, here are a few thousand words about my past month:
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Well friends, that's all I've got for you at this moment. I'll send out a few last blog posts and reflections as I write them. Until then, take care & peace.