One Year In

Well. We’re back to work now; not that we ever really stop working, but we just had three weeks of visiting with other volunteers and new trainees, followed by a week in the capital city for our midservice conference. It was great, and we enjoyed the month of hanging out with Americans… but we love the fact that we’re now back in our semi-secluded village. We started visiting around to local families again this week, attended Mandir (Hindu church) on Sunday, and are getting back into the thick of it. In the coming four weeks we’ll be running our summer holiday lesson, an expansion on last year’s “dip your toes in the water” session: 4 days a week, with reading and computer lessons, as well as sports and arts & crafts. We also managed to partner with a homegrown camp for the first week of it, so we’ll be fortunate enough to work with enterprising local professionals and see how we can help one another.

We’ve now been at our site for 1 year (not to mention the 2 months of pre-service training). 1 down, 1 remaining. We aren’t doing any sort of countdown to end-of-service, (that’s just not our style, although there are a few doing day-by-day counts) though as always we’re looking forward to the next several milemarkers. In this case, there’s a big regional festival in August, and we may make the trip out to see the sights.

Her family is visiting in November, so we’re planning the big excursions for that (there’s a certain large waterfall in the country we’ll probably fly in to see) and also planning our wish list for things they be so kind as to bring – for example, wine, pepperoni, and maybe some kind of cheese. There’s only one kind of cheese for sale in the country, so at this point the bloom is definitely off the rose with it.

Being here for a year… well let’s be honest: Being here 6 months can, well, alter your perspective on some things. Some things that used to (and probably still should) affect you, like hurtling down a terrible road in an old junker at 140kmph, don’t have the same impact they used to. Other things, things that are no big deal in the States, become huge. For example, we were recently watching a movie on our laptop (no, we don’t have blackouts ALL the time, as some have implied!) which took place during the holiday season. Don’t get me wrong: We had Christmas here. And it was festive; it just wasn’t festive in the traditional American style. Watching this movie, with the snow, the constant Christmas colors (and done far more beautifully and tastefully than Christmas ever really is in the States, since it was a movie), and everything else… well, it was overwhelming. We definitely became a bit emotional watching all of it. So, no more Christmas flicks for a while.

That’s not the only thing that’s been overwhelming for us, although it was the most emotional. The others, funnily enough, involve food. Of course, I (he) was more strongly affected by this. Back in December, a Volunteer’s family visited and took several of us to a lunch buffet at the posh hotel in the capital city (which, I believe, is about to get blown out of the water by the new Marriott going up). I took three steps into the buffet line and started crying. No joke. All that food, most of it American-style, was just too much.

More recently, we went to the 4th of July celebration at the Ambassador’s house, where food and drink were provided. The two of us were almost jumping up and down in line, pointing at all the food and drooling, when we realized that it was actually about on par with something any family a thousand miles north was eating right at that minute. There weren’t really any frills or bells & whistles – just straight-up 4th food, hot dogs and hamburgers and baked beans. Sad, you think? Well, just the other day we were watching Ratatouille, a movie about a chef pursuing his dream. Needless to say, all those shots in the kitchen, fresh and prepared foods, delicacies and staples, everything, we were drooling. It was a hard movie to watch.

Oh yeah. Did I mention that it’s a cartoon? And that the chef is a rat? Not like that changes the gastronomical delights we saw. The… cartoon… gastronomical delights. Which were delightful.

If this is what it’s like after one year…