here and there

Since last post I have gone home and back. I bought my ticket back in September while feeling particularly ambivalent about my being here. It instantly made me feel better. For years now I have had the habit of planning trips while I am feeling down. It gives me something to look forward to. It might also sometimes just be a form of running away, but that’s not really the point. Any way, by the time came to actually go home, I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to cash in on all the anticipation. I was overwhelmingly excited to see family and friends and gourmet food, but nervous that it would be, like they all say: hard to come back.

I had a host of activities planned. Among them: making turkey dinner with mom for gramps, seeing the little sis-es, spending qt time with the two coolest friends a person could ever hope for, gathering up clothes for the children of women in the group, having a yard sale, and some ambiguous art-like day spent at a studio-space-shop. Needless to say, It was the busiest two weeks I have had since joining peace corps.

Being home was overwhelming. I was paralyzed with choices I hadn’t faced in 9 months… more than one choice of beer, cake flour vs. all-purpose flour, Mexican food vs. sushi, pecans AND pistachios, clothes I hadn’t seen or worn approximately 400 times since February, places to go, more than one way to get there, etc. At the grocery store my mom kept asking, very concerned, what was wrong with me as I stood holding my face in my hand in disbelief. After the shock of the choices wore off, I started to get really bummed out about it. At home we have thousands of choices that don’t exist in other places. Food makes a good example, but really just hint at a larger global inequality. It’s one thing to be able to buy hundreds of different kinds of cereal in all it’s useless and environmentally careless packaging, and while that disgusts me its not nearly as repulsive as the fact that we can choose life and career paths that nobody in my community here can.

There is far too much to be done in this world to take for granted the opportunities, choices and privilege we have simply by virtue of having been born in the States. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of problems at home and plenty of people that go without, but the opportunities are still vastly different. Not to get all libertarian or anything but the streets of the US are lined with ways to make money. Ways that people here couldn’t even imagine. I know making money is not the be-all end-all and I have vowed never again to work just to make it, but for so many people, just a little bit more of it would completely change their lives.