Homesickness

A lot of non-Volunteers ask me, "Do you ever get homesick?" when they find out that I am here for 27 months. I always want to reply with, "Do you ever poop?" because it seems to me to be appropriate response. I have not lost all of my tact however, and have not said that. Yet. We are Peace Corps Volunteers, not aliens. Of course we get homesick sometimes. If one goes away for a week on a business trip, a mission trip, or to summer camp, the stories about being homesick and missing one's family abound. Every year during the holiday season hundreds of commercials, movies, and advertisements flood the media with different variations of the same story: a homesick soldier overseas on Christmas Eve receiving whatever product they want you to buy in a care package from home. But PCV's? Nah, we don't get homesick.

This post goes out to all those aspiring Volunteers out there. You WILL be homesick. You are a heartless, unattached soul incapable of feeling emotion if you don't fall victim to it at least sometimes during your service. But if you want to beat it, you will. Unlike the common cold, chlamydia, or yellow fever, it is a sickness that you have some control over. You can decide to wallow or you can decide to get on with your life. Don't get me wrong, sometimes you will choose to wallow, and arguably sometimes wallowing needs to be done, but in the end, you will choose to get on with your life. (Or you won't, in which case you will choose to go home.)

Yes, I get homesick. Yes, I have cried. (Although I am not sure if it was because I was homesick or if it was because I was watching Harry Potter 7, part 2 and Snape had just died again.) What triggers it? Anything and everything. Nothing you expect to trigger it and everything you didn't. On Friday, March 1st, I suffered from a bout of said illness. I didn't want oatmeal again for breakfast and couldn't stop thinking about frosted shredded wheat with skim milk. A rat had eaten half of my tomato, and I saw 3 cockroaches. Nothing extreme or out of the ordinary. I was cranky and was just craving a break from anything and everything that is Peace Corps and Panama. I texted a couple fellow Volunteers to see if one of them could talk me out of my funk, but they were busy being the amazing PCVs they are and didn't answer. So I let myself mope for an hour or so longer then kicked myself out of the hut and sure enough, found myself enjoying my community and Panama before I knew it.

Being homesick is important. It reminds you that there are people and places and things you love back where you came from. Yet if you let it run your life, it will, and you are no longer capable of 'being present' here as a Volunteer. I have an acting professor from college who would lecture his actors, and the rest of us too, about the need to be mentally and physically engaged and here in the moment all the time and I find myself thinking about his words often. Yes, 27 months is a really long time today, but in the grand scheme of my life 2 years is an incredibly short timespan, and likelihood is that I won't find myself as a resident of the Darien ever again. I can't afford to be a space cadet and mentally live elsewhere, and I don't. I am here in Panama, 100%. Which makes those moments of homesickness such a shock to the system when they happen.

"27 months, huh? How do you do it?" Well, you just...do. I don't know. I am not doing 27 months today. Today I am just doing today. And I just do that over and over until all of a sudden I look up and realize somehow I have done that over 300 times here in Panama. It feels great, it feels like such an epic accomplishment, until I realize there are still more than 400 times left. I am not even halfway there yet. But I ignore that thought, because that thought does not fit into the plan of 'getting through today'.

In your service, time is a rubber band. Every day stretches out to be longer than imaginable and yet months disappear. I don't know how I do it, I just live. On March 2nd I woke up and part of the roof on my hut had collapsed and it was raining for the first time in months. I laughed, because of course both events would happen at the same time. One would expect a collapsed roof and getting rained on to be a tipping point, but instead it was the oatmeal 4 days in a row. The roof thing is just so...Panama. Overdosing on oatmeal just sucks.

No state of being is permanent. Sometimes it is really, really hot and kinda humid. Sometimes it is only kinda hot and really, really humid. Sometimes I have the best job in the world. Sometimes I have the worst job in the world. Sometimes I feel like I am making a difference.  Sometimes I just feel homesick.

Really though, I should probably just put a happier movie on my hard drive and be done with it.