So, I feel like I'm living at least 2, maybe 3 or 4 different realities right now, so keeping a streamlined, technologically-friendly blog of a day in the 'life of Kristine' is a little more complicated at this point in time and space than previously expected.
If that doesn't adequately describe the basic symptoms of re-entry culture shock piled on top of moving anxiety, social anxiety, and economic foreboding as I stare down two years fraught with student loans I'm bound to be paying for the rest of my life, feel free to give me a phone call and we could probably thrash it out into some more expanded terms. But, for the sake of brevity in catching people up on the past month or so that I haven't uploaded anything to my blog, I'll save the details.
And, for the sake of archiving, I'm actually going to break up this post into a few posts--I know, unheard for me!
So, here goes!
Ending reality 1--here I am at the Asuncion airport, definitely anxious to leave the climatically capricious tropics of Paraguay though sincerely distraught knowing that that transition would be filled with quirky language trip-ups, returning to awkward re-relationship-building, not to mention the preparation for an all-important scholarship interview, moving cross-country, and starting grad school. But, more on that in the upcoming posts. Back to reality 1. Sinthia and Lourdes were so generous in offering to take me to the airport and see me off. I had stayed the night with the wonderful Rodriguez family because they had lent me a bed and, in returning it to them, I was left without anything but a suitcase to keep me off the floor. As I woke up and had my last wisdom-filled conversation with Cati while we shared the steaming cup of yerba mate, I watched out the door at the contradiction of the bright green palm trees outlined by dark rain clouds moving over the valley. David took me back to my apartment and to run a few errands before making our last goodbyes as it poured outside. I made my last rounds around Itaugua that stormy Thursday, trying to stop at key houses and give my good wishes to the weavers, the friends, the town officials, and even the landlord that supported my stay in Itaugua. I was noticeably emotional but with the more than a week of goodbyes that I had been making as well as the process of selling my furniture, distributing the published books, and signing the donated books for the local schools, I was a little more put-together than I might have expected. The weather calmed just long enough to get me about 8 blocks from my house on various visits before it started pouring again. I was so anxious and afraid that I would miss my ride that I braved running through the rain and made it back to my apartment SOAKING wet and miserably cold. I couldn't put my wet clothes into the suitcase and opted to pull out a portable blow dryer that I used to somewhat warm me up and dry me off. Cati had come down so that I wouldn't have to carry my stuff on my own and it was a huge comfort to have her by my side.
Which takes us to the airport. I had a surprise visit by the Aldama family including Karen who donned her Havanna uniform to sneak into the waiting room with me until I got on the plane. It was hard to give my goodbye hugs and try to act like my normal self, but I did it. Once inside the waiting room, I thought it would be quick, but the flight ended up getting delayed and I started worrying about my connecting flight. I finally made it on and said goodbye to Karen and headed out, alone.
After short of running across the Buenos Aires airport to make it for the last boarding call for the red-eye to Houston, I finally started to feel dry though my clothes were disgustingly wrinkled and I was desparate for a shower. Approximately 11 hours later, I touched down on American soil and was welcomed back into my country of origin. A few more hours later, I made it to Salt Lake City, travel-worn, tired, shocked at the visual blur of highways, mountains, SUVs, traffic lights, and billboards lining the track back to Bountiful and the luxurious homes of the comfortable American middle class. I was "home" from another "adventure" as many would call it or an "experience" as others would cite. Whatever you call that chunk of life spent out of your comfort zone building new comfort zones, testing your horizons, breaking your spirit and teaching you to make yourself a new one...it had "ended" and now I was supposed to "go back to real life."
As I contemplate on those first few hours back in the States, all I can envision is the literal closing of one reality as it attempted to blend into another, an older, a more distant one that somehow could never really exist again because, with that attempt to blend, actually stops, shifts, and actually transforms in a permament bend in order to accommodate the new person returning the old reality. Then, as time goes on, that transformation acts more like a fault line under a volcano chain. It's always there though you don't always see it. But, every so often, things spark a forgotten memory, a friend left behind under the construction and uplift of the new mountains shaping the countryside...typically not one of those huge composite eruptions that blows its top, but the slow, somewhat constant flow of lava spurting up from the hidden abyss of the past and carving a small trail across the outer crust of the present. Sometimes there big eruptions spurting large flows that cover the entire construction...but those too die down and cool in the surrounding atmosphere and just become another layer in the constantly changing terrain.
OK, I don't know if that analogy really means anything to anyone but me, but it's my attempt to communicate what culture shock and its accompanying cultural growth mean to me. So, here's to you--realities 1 and 2 (but really, both were made of the millions of previous realities so the numbers don't really make sense either...), may you rest in peace under the upcoming lava flows.
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