A year in review

Today marks my one-year anniversary of arriving in Guatemala. It is like my own personal New Year’s—a time to take inventory of the past year’s accomplishments and failures, joys and frustrations, successes and disappointments, prudence and mistakes. These are all just a part of living, but the Peace Corps experience has a strange way of both magnifying and minimizing everything at the same time. Annoyances, matters of tardiness, and dealings with people that would have frustrated me beyond belief in the states are now simply the way things are, and minor things that I would have never considered an “accomplishment” are now the manner in which I measure steps in the right direction.

I can derive joy from finding a good head of cauliflower in the market, and I don’t even notice waiting lengthy amounts of time for service in a restaurant or comedor (that is unless I am with visitors from the states who do always notice). Something as simple as having a meeting start on time becomes a huge success, while traveling 8 hours and switching buses 4 times to cover only 200 miles is completely normal. Tigo triple phone minute days are like Christmas, and I am entirely accustomed to taking bucket baths.

But this said, however, my time in Guatemala has definitely not been an annoyance free smelling flowers simplistically blissful experience. There are things that frustrate me and I know will continue to frustrate me until the day I leave here. The little successes keep me going, but I want some of the big American-sized ones too. It is just such a hard balance sometimes—knowing which battles to chose and how long to fight them, knowing in what areas to work towards change and in what other ones to just resign to the way thing are, knowing when to hold fast to my standards and when to lower them.

I have lowered my standards with disastrous results. I have held to my standards and dealt with disappointment. I have put trust in people who didn’t deserve it. I have not trusted people who merited it. I have argued my point until I was blue in the face with no results. I have bit my tongue. I have given up on trying to change some things. I have beaten dead horses…I have overused cheesy idioms.

But through it all, the good and the bad, I am learning and growing. And I suppose that is all I can ask for. Sometimes I feel like the same 25-year-old that stepped off the plane one year ago today, but I know that I have changed. Although I can’t see it in myself, I know this Peace Corps experience has changed me and will continue to change me for the 442 days I have left (but who is counting).