Lately I’ve got a song stuck in my head.
(this one, to be exact: )
It’s catchy, and it’s by my favorite band I’ve come to
discover here (when besties Ale Sergi and Julieta Venegas team up to form an
Argento-Mexican supergroup, you know you can’t go wrong), but it’s the lyrics
that are currently relevant to me.
O-o-o-o-o-oh! Me falta
más tiempo. O-o-o-o-o-oh! Ya está amaneciendo…
(I need more time. The dawn’s already breaking.)
Here’s a quick breakdown of my life this last month.
Early July: Total
boredom. Nothing is new in La Plata, I’m in a rut of a routine, and walking
around town to have something to do doesn’t even appeal. I’ve walked every
block too many times to count.
The rest of July:
Traveling! What a fantastic interlude! I really can’t overstate what a great
time I had. In terms of planning, the way I spent all the resources at my
disposal (time, money, energy), and smoothness of execution, it couldn’t have
gone better. I did a great job on all those counts, which is satisfying in and
of itself. But I also just had a really good time. I met lots of great people,
saw some great things, and above all really enjoyed my own company. I never
felt either alone nor lonely, and spent my days invigorated with a sense of
adventure and pure freedom, balanced perfectly with a feeling of purpose. I
confirmed my faith in my own ability to travel—everything that goes along with
that. It was revitalizing, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
First week of August:
I return to La Plata after a much-needed vacation, full of energy and promise
and ready to double down and be purposeful again: start projects, pick up those
threads of possible leads I left dangling before, actually go to bed at a
reasonable hour every night. And then (literally that same night) I get sick.
And sicker. And sicker. I wound up having to spend the whole week either in my
bed or in its immediate periphery. (The exception was one day when I went to
Buenos Aires in the morning for an embassy appointment I’d had scheduled for a
month, with a half-inch stack of completed paperwork I was ready to turn in,
only to be completely turned away for something I couldn’t have anticipated. A
bummer, and then I came back to La Plata and devolved into wretched sickness.)
I was recovered by the end of the week, and went to Buenos
Aires at night with friends for another friend’s birthday party, but I couldn’t
shake the disappointing feeling that all the anticipatory momentum I’d been
building up during my trip had abruptly come to a halt.
Today, happily, I recuperated it!
Not long ago I was contacted by a young woman here in La
Plata who is going to be a Fulbright Spanish language assistant at Williams
(what a lucky placement!) starting in a couple weeks. She’s a primary school
teacher, and she wanted to know if I was interested in meeting her students.
Rather than a strict presentation format, she wanted to have her students write
questions to ask me about myself and the U.S., and to have me ask them about
Argentina in kind.
Well, of course I was so delighted that she had contacted
me! I only started working with kids when I was in college, through
Spanish-bilingual volunteer programs and abroad, in Granada, teaching middle
schoolers English in Spanish. Before those experiences I assumed I didn’t do well
with children, but I’ve come to find I really love working with kids, and
really appreciate my time with them. I realized today, being with the kids,
it’s something I’ve actually really missed since graduating from Whitman and
leaving the volunteer scene in Walla Walla.
The school happens to be only two blocks from my apartment,
and it’s run by a Jewish organization. (It’s a private school, but the morning
primary school is totally secular. Then in the afternoon they have Jewish
religious schooling, and the school also functions at a synagogue, since there
aren’t any otherwise-designated synagogues in the city.) It looked very similar
to the Catholic school I taught at in Spain. (Good times!)
Pía, the teacher who’d contacted me, was absolutely lovely. I
sat in a large circle of maybe twenty-five kids, ten- and eleven year-olds, in
a multi-purpose room. The kids had prepared lists of questions for me, and at
first they went around clockwise asking them, and then of course, they quickly
lost their shyness and got more and more eager and talkative, until it was
everyone clamoring excitedly at once to ask questions. (Pía had to quickly
restore order.)
The kids were so great. Most of the questions were of the
“Do you like—“ or “What is your favorite—“ variety (Do you like Messi, Do you
like Ronaldo, What is your favorite music, What is your favorite holiday), but
there was also one about the differences between the American and Argentine
educational systems (precocious!), and an inquiry as to which American university
was the very best (shoot for the moon, kids). It was a lot of fun. At the
beginning I would answer a question and then tack on a question of my own for
the questioner to answer. (I always enjoy myself. To the boy who asked me, “Why
are you here?”, after explaining I was teaching English, I asked, “And why are you here?” He replied, good-naturedly,
“I live here.”) But soon the energy got so high that there was no time for me
to interject a question before the next person was asking me their own burning
question. Still, they definitely got speaking practice, and had a great time.
At the end, we went into the adjoining room for a quick
presentation from me. I’d prepared a dozen photo slides of different parts of
the U.S.: a map, picturesque snapshots of the mountains-coast-forests
Washington-state trifectorate, and then West Coast, East Coast, Southwest and
Midwest regional highlights. The kids loved this, oohing and ahhing with wide
eyes at every picture. Then, to finish, we took some pictures together as a
group. I felt like such a celebrity! They were all fighting over who got to
stand next to me, and then afterwards everyone wanted to have individual
pictures taken with me. Gotta love kids. A really nice group. Such a fun
morning with them!
Afterwards, I went out with Pía and her friend, another
English teacher at the school who’s shipping off in a couple weeks to be a
language assistant in Ireland, to a nearby café. They were wonderful and we had
a great time. Both promised to put me in contact with their friends and
contacts at local schools so I can give more presentations like this, which I
would absolutely love.
So, today was a good day, and I did other fun and good
things in it besides, but to return to the way I started this piece…
With the return of my feeling of vigor and purpose, I’ve
suddenly realized time is passing really, really fast. That’s always how it
goes, of course. March and April stretched for forever (not in a bad way, just
in a full way), but suddenly I feel like September is going to gallop up on me.
I only have three more months here, which feels like nothing. (Okay, I have
four more months, but the last month I’m planning to spend traveling Chile, and
travel-time runs on its own alternate-universe timeline.)
Siento que el tiempo se va perdiendo,
desaparece ya/
Es como arena entre mis dedos que siempre se me va
(I feel like
I’m losing time, it’s already disappearing/It’s like sand slipping through my
fingers…)
I think this feeling is really setting in suddenly for a few
important reasons.
1) I tipped over the halfway mark while I was traveling. Now
I’m over halfway and I’ve realized counting to late-December is a
misconception. (Again, traveling in Chile doesn’t count.) Three months is
nothing.
2) Argentina is really normal to me. It’s been this way for
quite a while now, but I think I only started noting it consciously recently.
My life in Argentina is not a parenthesis within my broader,
necessarily-American, life. It is my
life. I know how things work and feel equanimous towards them. There isn’t this
grating, oppressive feeling of being in the wrong country, which I definitely
spent a large part of my long, long winter in Slovakia bowed under. It’s not a
sense that you dislike where you are (though it definitely can manifest in the
form of petty resentments towards your immediate surroundings); rather, it’s a
sense that you’ve been somewhere else for
too long.
The metaphor I always thought about in Slovakia comes from The Subtle Knife by Phillip Pullman, one
of my favorite books. In it, there are untold multitudes of alternate universes
that one can access through portals. One man unknowingly steps through one of
these, and then gets lost and can never find his way back to his own world. He
flourishes in the new world he finds himself in, but bodily there’s a toll for
spending too long in another world—all such travelers eventually die.
Whew. Not to get dramatic on that front, but that’s how I
felt in Slovakia: an almost bodily unease that had built up the longer I spent
away. I knew it was one of the later stages of “culture shock,” which far from
the acuteness suggested by the “shock” part of the phrase, is much more pernicious
in its chronic stages; but there was nothing I could do about it.
I expected the same in Argentina, since this is only the
first time since then that I’ll be spending a year out of the country. But it
hasn’t happened. I’ve had to contend with the inevitable lows of boredom and
listlessness, but that general malaise of “wrongness” isn’t here.
And I don’t think it’s going to suddenly rear its head,
either. In terms of cultural adjustment, everything has only gotten easier and
easier over time. As I’ve said, I understand how the country and the culture
works; I navigate it all smoothly, unconsciously. I can (and often do) enjoy
taking a moment to step back outside of myself for a moment to say, “Look at
you! You’re in Argentina, you’ve normalized all of this. Wow, how and when did
that happen? Good for you!” But outside of these conscious impositions, it’s
just my life that I’m living.
All the language hurdles have been jumped. I’m
even—finally!—crossing into that territory, the final frontier of the standards
I set for myself for satisfaction with my language skills, where my mouth
speaks before I can think. It can be an unnerving feeling, to have my mouth
think faster than my brain, but it’s always something I’ve aimed for. My Slovak
skills were so far below where my Spanish is, but that was something I had in
Slovak that I never had in Spanish before, and something therefore I’ve always
known was lacking. I’m sure it comes from the difference in the way I learned
the two languages: Slovak, primarily through speaking and listening; and Spanish,
through reading and writing, with a distinct lack of native-speaker-access and
opportunities to practice speaking.
(This same skill in Slovak, by the way, was what got me in
somewhat-hilarious and also cringe-worthy trouble when I got back to the
States. Taking Spanish classes my freshman year of college, for months every
time I opened my mouth to participate in class, Slovak would come out. Even
when I consciously tried to guard against the impulse, I couldn’t prevent it. My
mouth was programmed so that when I opened it to speak a foreign language,
Slovak was going to be tripping off my tongue. Strangely, and kind of
hilariously, my classmates absolutely never commented on this or even seemed to
notice. Thank goodness I only had –one- run-in with accidentally saying the
Slovak word for “yes” [“áno”] in a Spanish-speaking context… )
Back to the point of all this, I think because Argentina is
my normal, time is really going to slip by at this point. Time drags when you
feel like you’re living between parentheses. Time flies when you feel totally
unburdened, and full of energy to boot.
3) I got in to the Peace Corps! I actually got in to the
Peace Corps over a month ago, but I actually hardly thought about it at all
during the nearly three weeks I was on the road. (Too busy living in the
moment!) I got back to La Plata and suddenly it became very real. It’s so exciting.
I’m not just daydreaming of tropical fantasies; I’ve been thinking about it as
realistically and holistically as I can. But despite many fears and dreads, the
excitement outweighs it all. As always, I’m also just so glad to have it
settled, and I won’t have to spend months in limbo worrying about what else I
might do if I don’t get in. I got in! I’m going! (Insh’Allah.) I’m going to a
place that actually says insh’Allah! Alhamdulillah to that! (And they say that
one, too.)
I think it’s the suddenly-actualized prospect of Peace Corps
Indonesia that’s affected my feelings on time here more than anything else.
Above all, three months is nothing next to the idea of 27. That’s just Pre-Service
Training—you have to go three months before you even get sworn in as a
Volunteer to start the two years that actually count as your service.
With all my sudden excitement at my new horizons, I’ve felt
myself shift focus. I’ve loved throwing myself into studying Indonesian. And
I’ve already begun to mourn my Spanish. There’s no way to predict these things
to a science, but losing years’ worth of language while I’m immersed in
Indonesia is just an inevitability. I’m always learning new words in Spanish,
and looking up words I don’t know is a reflex I couldn’t turn off if I wanted
to. But I suddenly don’t see a need to buckle down on my Spanish and
deliberately study more specialized vocabulary anymore, either. (Not that I’ve
done much studying of that sort, but I have felt guilty at times that I haven’t.)
What do you do when you know you’re going to lose so much of it so soon anyway?
My general language goal here remains the same that it always was, to be able
to speak at a rate and with a depth of quality that I consider “fluent,” to
satisfy the incredibly exacting standards that I set for myself. I’m getting
there; at times (more and more these days) I realize that I am there. There is
so much intrinsic value for me in getting there.
And, in the face of losing so much of this soon enough, I
find myself appreciating Spanish with a fullness, tinged with a
lightly-desperate sadness, that can only be described as a nostalgia for my
current situation. (This happens to me a lot, actually. That’s what I get for
living in the future rather than the present.) I know I’m going to miss this
all so soon: Argentina, which I’ve never stopped enjoying; my language
abilities (sure, I’ll learn Indonesian, but never to the level of Spanish, and
I’ll always love Spanish for that); Spanish itself.
To return to the three-months-compared-to-twenty-seven
theme: talk about needing to aprovechar!*
* (I’m not a huge Spanglish person, but whenever I’m
speaking English with someone who knows Spanish, I always leave this verb as-is.
It basically means “to take advantage of” [in a benevolent sense, as in “I want
to make the most of this experience!”], but it’s just superior in Spanish.)
I’m going to be missing this country and everything about my
life here all too soon. But luckily I’m not missing them yet. So while I’m
still here, I need to make the most of it. Three months—let’s go!
Love,
