I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
–Helen Keller
I had been warned, extensively, about reverse culture shock. I heard again and again that it would be harder to go back than I thought. When I had studied abroad in Mexico, I had heard the same warnings, but upon returning I found the main thing I had to adjust to was Indiana weather in December following the balmy Mexican climate where palm trees still flourished. This time, I thought, would be different; I had been living in much more challenging conditions in a less forgiving climate in rural Nicaragua; I felt more removed from America physically and mentally than I had in Mexico. Returning from my summer internship, I prepared myself for the crisis I had been warned would come with reentry.
But it didn’t come. The honeymoon phase (Hart, 8) started with the ice cream cone I bought in the Miami airport and hit me again when I flushed the toilet at night without having to strap on my headlamp, go outside, and fill up a bucket from the water cistern to do so (we only had running water in the mornings and every other night in the town where I lived in Nicaragua). I relished not shaking out my pillow to check for scorpions, and getting straight into bed without tucking in a mosquito net first. I slept until seven or eight o’clock the next morning with no crowing roosters to wake me. And I kept waiting for the guilt to hit me. Why did I have so much more than my family in Nicaragua? Why was my life so much easier in the U.S. than it had been there? But it didn’t come. Soon, I thought, it will hit me. Right now I’m just enjoying hot showers too much. But it didn’t hit me when I had yet more ice cream, or ate out at a nice restaurant with my family, or drove to Washington, D.C. in one of our family’s four cars when my host family in Nicaragua only had one motorcycle.
But it didn’t come. The honeymoon phase (Hart, 8) started with the ice cream cone I bought in the Miami airport and hit me again when I flushed the toilet at night without having to strap on my headlamp, go outside, and fill up a bucket from the water cistern to do so (we only had running water in the mornings and every other night in the town where I lived in Nicaragua). I relished not shaking out my pillow to check for scorpions, and getting straight into bed without tucking in a mosquito net first. I slept until seven or eight o’clock the next morning with no crowing roosters to wake me. And I kept waiting for the guilt to hit me. Why did I have so much more than my family in Nicaragua? Why was my life so much easier in the U.S. than it had been there? But it didn’t come. Soon, I thought, it will hit me. Right now I’m just enjoying hot showers too much. But it didn’t hit me when I had yet more ice cream, or ate out at a nice restaurant with my family, or drove to Washington, D.C. in one of our family’s four cars when my host family in Nicaragua only had one motorcycle.
I started to feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Had I not immersed myself enough? Was I just another voluntourist, going to a developing country to “make a difference” and then coming home to realize how lucky I was and cluck my tongue at the inequities I had now personally experienced? Had I helped anyone at all, or was I part of a neo-colonial system of oppression, doing work I wasn’t qualified to do in the U.S. to “help” Nicaraguans by making them more like Americans (Kascak and Dasgupta, 2; Banning-Lover, 1)?
And yet, some things had changed. The honeymoon didn’t last forever. I started to notice small things that hadn’t bothered me before: the air conditioning blasting out of open store doors onto hot July sidewalks (Laudato Si, 55); the sheer number of shoes on display in a window; the constant news cycle and continual buzzing of my phone. I missed my host family, and Spanish, and plantains and gallopinto (a dish of fried rice and beans). It was by no means a crisis (Hart, 8), but it was an adjustment. I held onto those feelings and tried to make sense of them, and there was one thought I kept coming back to, something I had come upon in Nicaragua and which helped explain what I sometimes felt was an inappropriate lack of guilt: there was nothing wrong with the way they lived. |
There was one thought I kept coming back to ... : there was nothing wrong with the way they lived. |
But I also believe in global development, in lessening the gap between the rich and the poor, and in healthcare equality for every person, regardless of where they were born. |
This idea caught me off guard. There was so much work to be done in Nicaragua, and so much good work being done, by the organization I was working with and by many others. There were people who wanted to help, and, sometimes, the Nicaraguans seemed receptive to what was being offered. But the fact remained that most Nicaraguan families, at least in the area where I lived, had enough to eat, even if it was only rice and beans and the occasional piece of meat. They had a clinic with a qualified doctor who provided free health care and most essential medicines within an hour’s travelling distance. They had enough shelter from the tropical elements, and many of them could purchase purified water to drink. Of course there was hunger and drought and parasites and disease; there is very real absolute poverty. There is much work to be done. But getting water from outside to flush the toilet isn’t really that hard, and cold showers are refreshing in the heat; clothes still get clean when they are washed by hand, and sometimes its nice to be woken by a rooster’s crow at the crack of dawn before the heat of the day begins. And so I kept coming back to it: there was nothing wrong with the way they lived, and with the way I had now lived for eight weeks.
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My Impact
But I also believe in global development, in lessening the gap between the rich and the poor, and in healthcare equality for every person, regardless of where they were born. Was I somehow justifying my own lifestyle (which in many ways perpetuated the inequalities I condemned (Laudato Si 22, 25)) through my experience, thinking that if I had lived it, how bad could it be, and so freeing myself of responsibility to make meaningful changes? And why had I gone there if it was only to come to this realization, when the money spent to get me there could have built a new house for someone in Nicaragua?
But within a week of being back at school, I got in touch with my boss from Nicaragua. From her, I found out that the exercise classes for diabetics I had implemented with my site partner were still being carried on weekly with the help of a local yoga instructor we had recruited, and that many of the women whom we had met and grown to love in those classes were still participating. I was incredibly excited and encouraged when I found this out, because it meant that in some small way, we actually had made a difference in the lives of those few women, and that my time there had been worth something to someone more than myself.
My reentry story is not finished yet; I’m not sure it ever will be. I am still processing so much, and I still have so many questions. Was my time there worth it, for me or for them? Was I in some way a voluntourist, and if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? Is there anything wrong with the way they live, and more importantly, with the way I live? These questions are in my mind as I apply for post-graduate service, and while I doubt I will find answers anytime soon, I hope they stay with me for a long time.
But within a week of being back at school, I got in touch with my boss from Nicaragua. From her, I found out that the exercise classes for diabetics I had implemented with my site partner were still being carried on weekly with the help of a local yoga instructor we had recruited, and that many of the women whom we had met and grown to love in those classes were still participating. I was incredibly excited and encouraged when I found this out, because it meant that in some small way, we actually had made a difference in the lives of those few women, and that my time there had been worth something to someone more than myself.
My reentry story is not finished yet; I’m not sure it ever will be. I am still processing so much, and I still have so many questions. Was my time there worth it, for me or for them? Was I in some way a voluntourist, and if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? Is there anything wrong with the way they live, and more importantly, with the way I live? These questions are in my mind as I apply for post-graduate service, and while I doubt I will find answers anytime soon, I hope they stay with me for a long time.
My reentry story is not finished yet; I’m not sure it ever will be. I am still processing so much, and I still have so many questions.