How does one surmise the last week in a place that has become like a second home? A place where walking down the street to go to your spanish lessons or rummaging around to find some sort of sweets started to feel completely normal, when at one point it felts completely unfamiliar and somewhat scary. There is a certain price that one has to pay when they open themselves up to a new experience in a new place and that is at some point it has to come to an end. There will be a moment when you have to say goodbye to everything that you experienced and let yourself be open to. When you board the plane to leave it always feels somewhat unreal. It is the strangest thing to look out the window of a plane and see a city below that was your home for a glimmer of time that you don’t know if you will ever see again. You try to promise yourself that someday you will return because now that place has become a part of your world, a part of your reality, but the truth is that promises made to oneself especially while young are hard to keep. You have to come to terms with the fact that there may not be another time in your life that you will see that city or those people who became some of your closest friends in a short time period, but the beautiful thing about this is that you will most likely never forget them. That place with those people helped you grow more then you think and you will continue to grow because of them and because of you. You are you because of the experiences and openness of your soul to the crazy, the mad, the challenges, the adventures, and the hearts that you let in to your atmosphere. You are you because who you are is still becoming you. Obviously, this is a metaphor for the fact that from where I am typing these words upon my laptop screen, I am no longer in Bolivia. In fact none of our team is anymore because our project is over and this chapter in our lives has finished. It seems fairly abrupt, doesn’t it? We all felt a bit the same way. When the day came that we were all to go the airport I’m fairly positive most of us woke up not truly believing that it was our last day in Bolivia. It is honestly still hard to believe that the random remnants of our time in Bolivia are now things that are in the past, a part of our lives that we will talk about to other people, but never truly be able to describe to their fullest extent. We will all understand how strange and wonderful our experience living in Cochabamba and volunteering for CECAM were, but it will be hard to tell others about it when they were not with us. This is something that I have constantly struggled with when having elongated experiences in different parts of the world. When you come home everyone wants to know how your trip was. This may seem like a very easy question to answer, but for me it always seems like I don’t have an adequate enough answer. It is easy to say it was “amazing” because for all of us it was in different ways for each of us, but it was also trying and made us feel completely hopeless at times. Below,, I have devised a bit of a list to summarize our experience in Cochabamba, Bolivia representing Nourish International.
1. Completely rewarding
Coming in to it we had the full expectation that no matter what, we were going to grow from this experience. We had no idea in what way this would be, but I know that we can all say that we at least gained something from the experience. It may have been challenging and frustrating at points, but the fact that we came out of it has made us all better people (even in the smallest way possible).
2. A time of realizations
I think it is also fair to say that we learned a lot about ourselves on the trip. Some of us figured out that maybe working with NGOs in Latin America is not what we want to do the rest of lives, some of us became leaders, some of us better communicators, and some of us realized how very important coffee is to the core of our lives. Maybe we didn’t “change the world”, but we grew and learned. Frankly, that is really the most important part. You can strive to do everything you can possibly do, but to go in to something thinking you are going to be the one that becomes everyones hero or heroine is naive. Be the best version of you and everything else will follow in the way it is meant to.
3. A bonding experience
Don’t underestimate the power of breaking bones, getting sick, and snuggling on overnight busses together. We are all completely bonded by this experience (some more then others) and will probably know each other for the rest of our lives. Travel is a testing experience, especially when it is more then a vacation, it is a new way of living your life. When you share that experience with someone else you become linked. It is one of the more beautiful things that exists with in human nature.
4. Strange magic
I feel like these two words pretty much sum up the entirety of the trip. We often talked about how this is one of the strangest trips that we have ever been one, but how it was also weirdly magical. This thought may have been brought on by the fact that we ate SO many packets of Oreos in Bolivia, but either way it became the truth of our lives living in Bolivia…Oreos and all.
5. A constant self battle
This one is especially true for those of us who were constantly ill or broken. We literally were constantly fighting with our bodies to stay healthy and be able to be as productive as possible against a system that moves slowly by the very nature of the culture. I say a self battle because it was really all inside of our heads. Once we were at peace with the difference between what we knew and what was things became a lot easier. It is hard to explain, but if you have ever had an experience like this then you know exactly what I am talking about.
6. Whatever you thought this was going to be, you probably shouldn’t have
Expectations are silly. Don’t psyche yourself out with the thought that something is going to be a certain way. It is better to let yourself adapt to it rather then having to either raise or lower some predisposed opinion of a place and its people. It is easy to have a beautiful experience somewhere, don’t make it more complicated then it has to be.
7. Finally, don’t forget you’re great…even if sometimes people make you feel insufficient
Being in a new place with a new language is hard. There will be people who criticize you for not speaking correctly or being a typical “Gringa”, but the fact is that most of them wish they could be having the experience you’re having. Just smile at them and move forward. You will be a better person for it and they will stay the same. This may sound cryptic, but its true. People that criticize others aren’t growing as people by doing this, they are only holding back the people they could become by their own insecurities. Be bigger, become better.
As I stare out on the sun setting in Brasilia, Brazil I feel nothing but contentment with our time in Bolivia. Farewells are inevitable, but that statement does not make it easier to handle. None of us know when we will have ever return in Bolivia, if ever, but now we know that there will always be hearts ready to take us in upon our landing. This is not the end, this is just another step taken on the infinite climb that is our lives.
Ciao por ahora,
The BU/BC Nourish Bolivia Team (Pascale, Keara, Carrie, Andrea)
P.S.- We all agree that if we never see another empanada again, we will still be able to live completely content lives. Just saying.