Haircut

When you are getting used to being in a foreign country I find its the little things that tip the scale and set you off, allowing you to release the tension that builds up from not being able to communicate like you want to and not understanding everything going on around you. When I spent two weeks living with a family in Guatemala, it was the front door and not being able to open it and having to get the son in the family to explain it to me, and him not being willing to do it until he corrected my pronunciation of the verb abrir to his satisfaction.

In Cuenca, it was the haircut.

Despite how exciting the work that my organization does is, it remains to be come exciting for me. So there are several days when I have showed up at the office and done email all day or worse yet, waited for the one computer with internet to become free all day. Everytime I think that I have gotten settled into a project or a responsibility, it evaporates into nothing, so Monday when I got to office to find no one but the secretary there, I decided to walk up the street to get a haircut. The guy was remarkably unfriendly, and didn´t take my requests well. I jumped out of the chair as he was about to blow dry into some sort of dreadful puff on top of my head. The truth is, its not a terrible haircut, but it isn´t quite what I wanted. But I didn´t have that perspective walking back to the office. I just kept tearing up at the frustration of not being able to communicate, not knowing what on earth I was doing here. For the first time, earlier this week, I thought about what it would be like to just go home.

Now despite the fact that work has not taken off, I am lucky to be working with very sweet people. Two of the lovely young women that work in the office saw that I was upset about something and locked themselves in with me and asked me what was wrong. Without me even being very specific about what was making me upset, they guessed the gist and they promised me that I was not inutil, on the contrary I was very util, and said I should think of them like sisters and we would all go out to lunch on Wednesday. (When Wednesday came it was evident that one of them had forgotten and the other was nowhere to be found, but by then I had recovered my equanimity, and it didn´t matter so much whether we had lunch or not.)

It turns out that I am going to help give a workshop on Saturday, so that has had me feeling better all week. Plus its still beautiful here. I sit on the bus and look at the sunset behind the mountains and how the light falls on the river and I think - I live here. I live in this beautiful place.

(Yes Sarah I will get some pictures up soon)