this post is for me

Posted by Glenn Lauren Love on January 10, 2012 · 6 Comments 

This post is for me.  It’s cathartic to write it all out sometimes.

I went to Doña Gloria’s house for dinner tonight since I have no real food in my own house.  (Why buy food with only 5 days left?  Plus I’ve already given away all my cookware.)  I took Monica—our budding baker—all of my baking supplies and told her I’d better get to see photos of whatever she bakes with them.  I also took a bag of clothes I won’t have room to bring home, and Maybel went through them piece by piece while we talked around the table after dinner.   “So you’re really leaving?,” she turns to me and says.  “There’s no chance they’ll change their minds?”  I’m really leaving.  Then she told me, smirking a little,  that while her boyfriend was here visiting for Christmas, they decided they’d get married this November.  Were I not leaving, I would have been here for that.  “Could you come back?” she asks.  I can’t see my future past January 16^th—the day I fly back to the States.  I have no idea where I’ll be in November.

Doña Gloria, her oldest son, and three of the kids walked me home tonight—one arm-in-arm with me, one piggy back on her dad, and the third driving in out-of-control Z’s down the road in front of us on his plastic, easy-rider, pedal bike, perfect for four year olds.  “No se vaya, Glenn.”  Monica wouldn’t let go of my waist when we got to the door of my house.  I don’t want you to go.  “Let her go into the house, Monica,” and Doña Gloria tried half-heartedly to get her to let go of me, then flashed me a knowing look.  Poor Monica.  She had a big sister for a while.

It’s become a running theme that people gift me whatever random thing they have on them at the time that we say our goodbyes or talk about me leaving.  Monica handed me a Nike bracelet she was wearing.  My counterpart at the office gave me the apple off her desk.  Marvin, at the orphanage, gave me a purple mardi gras necklace.  Ceylin, a little statuette of some bears in a sleigh.

When I get into the house after saying goodnight, Fenley all but tackles my legs.  He doesn’t like letting me out of his eyesight now and complains loudly if he can’t find me.  I was a bad mom.  I left him too long over Christmas.  He doesn’t know (or does he?) that he’s about to go a lot longer than that without his mom.

In seven days I am disassembling the life I’ve diligently create for myself for the past ten months.  It’s harder than I thought it would be.  Each file of papers I have represents months of work and physical pains in my head from going back and forth between languages at the same time.  Every linen I own shows how I learned which second-hand shops sell sheets, and which blankets, and how much I ought to pay for them, and how to negotiate it in Spanish.  My potted plants outside, once just dirt, are now full of rich smelling basil.  There are children’s hand-drawn pictures, dedicated to me, hanging on my walls.  The kitten I kept in a plastic chicken crate and fed milk to from a dropper is now full grown, robust and the most amicable cat in all of Honduras.  I guess I didn’t realize how much of myself I’d truly invested in things here.  I like to think I keep a lot of things at a distance, at an arm’s-length from my heart—leave it at que será será.  But then we get to goodbye and I turn into a weeping mess and wonder where it’s coming from.   Who am I kidding?  I might be tough, but I still care a lot.  And caring is what makes the letting go so hard.

Maribel wept in the kitchen at the orphanage yesterday.  I took over the suitcase full of presents I brought for the kids and wore my Santa hat as I passed out the presents to eager, but polite little hands.  They each got a pair of slippers (little red cars, from the movie Cars, for the little boys, and pink slippers with a princess on them for the girls) along with some new movies, inflatable punching bags, toy cars, new hair clips adorned with brightly colored flowers, and tiny bottles of BonBon nail polish.  When I went back this morning, Anael ran over to show me he was still wearing his slippers.  “They slept in them,” Sister Edith informed me.  I got to play Santa for a day, and I totally delighted in it—fitting for a girl who believed in Santa until way too mature of an age.  Maribel told them I was Santa’s girlfriend and that’s why he left the presents with me instead of bringing them right to them on Christmas day…to which I replied, Heh, he’s too old for me!  I’m just his helper.  To which Celia (who is 5) rather matter-of-factly replied, surveying my face and nodding her head, “Yup, I could see that.  She has a nose just like an elf, doesn’t she?”  Nancy considers for a second and then says, “Yup, she does.”  So I guess that settled it.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to each of you that contributed to those presents.  I’m also going to leave $200.00 with Sister Edith to put towards her pupusa business…since I won’t be around to help her start it.

I went to my last meeting with the Pregnant Women’s Club today.  Tomorrow I’ll continue packing up and gifting out the things from my house.  My fridge is going to Renato at the alcoholics’ house, as are all of my cleaning supplies and some brand new shower curtains my sister Sam sent him from Hilton Head.  Extra kitchen supplies, bedding, and a donated printer I hauled down here are going to the orphanage, along with my pots of herbs.  I took a bag of old clothes to the orphanage along with Santa’s gifts yesterday and was touched to see this morning that Sister Edith had traded out the old, rainbow-colored, cloth belt she’s always worn around the middle of her beige nun’s habit for a wide, brown, latticed belt I’d brought.  As the only one in the house who’s my shoe size, she’s also inherited a few new pairs of heels.

These are all band-aid things though.   It feels good to give stuff away, but I’ll tell you it felt even better doing the work I was doing—helping people help themselves, and letting them see that someone else cares as much as they do about them achieving those goals; actually working beside people to realize their own dreams…  That’s why people get so attached to us, I think.  Not that we aren’t just good people, us Peace Corps Volunteers.  But to have someone literally just show up in your life and say, “I’m here, and I care.  What can I do to help?”  I think it makes an impression. Not to mention the very real necessity for a lot of the work we do (health education, building water systems, training teachers, helping a small organization get up and running).  I’m tooting our collective horn here for a minute, not to brag, but rather because I’m trying to figure out how to share with you what it feels like to do this job.

Part of me feels like a fake speaking so impassionedly about a Peace Corps service that I barely got to start, let alone complete.  There’s a pride to finishing your tour of duty (if only among volunteers).  But it was long enough for this to actually feel like home.  It wasn’t that long ago I was writing that I didn’t think this place would ever, really, feel like home.  And yet I kept calling it “home” while I was home for the holidays.

I’m sitting on my back porch now, enjoying the cool, night breeze, the crickets, and the lazy sound of palm fronds rustling against each other.  In the dark, Fenley is chasing our possum over the pick-nick tables and into the corner of the yard.

In a week and a half Honduras will be over for us.  I’m so grateful for the past year and every new person it’s brought into my life.  Sad as I am to leave them all behind, distraught, lost, and melancholy is no way to start a new year.  I’m going to try hard to see this as a year of absolute opportunity.  It could either be exciting or terrifying to have no plan for your life past two weeks from today, so let’s shoot for exciting.  I wonder where I’ll be in six months…

Here’s to hoping the new year will bring new and wondrous things for us all.  Happy New Year to each of you; may it be full of love.  Enjoy the photos of the kids! (Okay, there are some photos of Fenley in this slideshow that I can’t get rid of because the internet is giving me a hard time today.  So enjoy those too, lol. )

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