Arriving Home

Well, I´ve finally arrived in Peru, after a few slight complications. The first setback was that I accidentally bought my flight for October 26 instead of December 26. No wonder it was so cheap, haha. No comments on my idiocy. Anyway that was quite a fiasco but eventually it was solved and I was all set to get to Lima the night of the 30th. Well, then my connecting flight to Atlanta arrived an hour late and I missed the connection to Lima, had to stay in a hotel and leave the next day at 5.15, so i finally arrived in Lima last night and was waiting to grab my luggage off the conveyor belt when 2008 arrived and everyone clapped, cheered weakly and shook each other´s hands. So much for celebrating. But by that time I was just thankful that I had finally arrived.

Last night I stayed at the house of a middle-aged woman named Cecilia, who is the founder of the NGO I´ll be working for in Mancora, and turns out to be really friendly and a great person to talk to. Her husband is from the United States and hardly speaks any spanish even though he´s lived here for awhile. He used to be a stock broker on Wall Street, but then met Cecilia in Florida, fell in love, came to Peru, and stayed here. He and Cecilia are currently caring for two grandchildren because Cecilia´s daughter died of cancer a year ago and her husband was abusive. They are incredibly nice people and Cecilia told me all about how she and her husband founded the NGO, their mission, and basically her whole life story. She told me she always likes to meet volunteers before they go to Mancora to see what makes them tick and give them advice, and she said she thinks I need to relax and that I am too impatient. She commented that from my very anxious, indecisive emails to her in the last few weeks she could tell I was someone ´special.´ I think she meant it as a compliment though. Haha.

It´s been great just walking around Lima and being happy about the fact that I´m here. Even though I am not all that fond of Lima-- it´s mostly just a huge, crowded, unnatractive city with too much pollution and humidity-- still there is enough familiarity that I have the sensation of having finally arrived home after spending a long time away. Is that ironic, or what? Or maybe it´s not. Maybe this country really is my other home. I´m realizing that I´ve come to think of Middlebury as a prison. Some might say that is a strong word. I don´t think so. As histrionic as it may be, it´s how I feel. Coming here I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted off my chest, it´s just an incredible sense of liberation.

One more interesting anecdote--on the airplane here I was sitting next to a missionary girl who was about to embark on a 3-year assdignment to the Peruvian jungle and hardly spoke Spanish. On the other side of me was a Peruvian guy who now lives in the United States and was going to Lima to visit his family for the holidays. We were chatting a little and I was telling him about the time I spent in Peru and my travels. I asked him what other places he had been to in Latin America. He said he´d been to Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and all of Central America. I was impressed. ´Wow! Which place did you enjoy the most?´

´Well, I didn´s see much of any of those places. I was just passing through. On my way to the United States.´

´Wow! You came all that way by land??´ He said yes. I didn´t want to ask him directly if he had come illegally, so I just said, ´And was it hard to get a visa?´

´When I came I didn´t have one.´

So yes, just by chance I was sitting next to this guy who actually hired a coyote to take him all the way from Peru to the United States, just like the Mexican migrants do, just so he could get a job. He said he prefers Peru to the United States, but he has work in the United States, so he stays. Now he has a green card, an iPod and a spiffy cell phone, and flies to Lima every holiday season to visit his family.

It is a strange world we live in.