There’s a Fundamental Misunderstanding Here

It begins, as it usually does, with a question – an innocuous one at that.  People have asked me a dozen, a hundred times in the 6 weeks I’ve been home, a few thousand before I left, and nowadays it usually comes after I’ve told them some crazy story of my adventures, a love story or an escape, a hike into the jungle or a profound truth revealed to me by dire straits.

“That’s really cool man – I’m happy for you… (pregnant pause) so what are you going to do with your future?”

It’s an awful question.  It’s a terrible question.  Most of all it’s a loaded question, one where nothing I say can be both true on the one hand, and accepted well on the other.  It doesn’t even matter who asks – the answer isn’t going to satisfy you unless you’re the sort of person who would know better than to ask.  Still, I like to think I’m a pretty honest guy, and if someone goes through the motions of asking me a question, I’ll do my best to answer it.  So here’s that – my best answer to that apparently burning question of what the hell I’m doing with my life.

I do whatever feels right at the time.

That’s seriously it – I just do whatever I judge to be the best possible action at any given junction.  No grand scheme, no hopes of running the world, no desire to micromanage the universe – I’ve seen and tried enough of that to know it doesn’t work well at accomplishing what I want out of life, because all I really want is to feel happy, fulfilled, and like I’m making a positive difference in the world I inhabit.  This isn’t something I came to out of choice – it just happens that whenever I try to make plans they blow up in my face and leave me worse off than before I started.  This is my reaction, my defense against the great unknown and the greater known – I observe the world, learn what I can, and act as I believe is in my best interest – there’s no end goal aside from doing my best to be my best wherever and whenever the universe throws me.  I mean, so many people are terrified of what they can’t control or foresee, and a lot of that comes from these intricate, well-intentioned plans that people build up.  They don’t work because we can’t possibly plan for every unknown, and when things go wrong and work against our best intentions we have to work harder just to get back to where we wanted to be.   Given enough hurt, enough bad juju, and a long enough timespan, it becomes a colossal effort just striving toward equilibrium.  Thus, the fear – change means adapting the plan, and think of how much effort has gone into that brilliant shining hope!  Keeping the perfect lie alive has become more important than finding satisfaction in reality!

I don’t even want equilibrium.   I equate that with stasis, with decay and with death.  The only way I’ve ever found to keep living is to keep mobile, roll with the punches, enjoy every drop, every instant of my life without getting so attached that I’m unable to function when it comes down on my head.  It’s survival – basic evolution – as life changes we must adapt along with it or perish as we’re left behind.   Every form of life, every idea, everything  that exists must adapt to stay relevant to the matrix of reality that envelops us.  To stop is to become irrelevant, to be cast aside in favor of another who keeps adapting.  A few hundred years it was kosher to duel to the death over an insult, a generation ago it was acceptable to test nuclear weapons in the open atmosphere, a century ago we were overwhelmingly a planet of farmers, twenty years ago the coolest kids around had pagers or car phones – everything changes, and that change is accelerating.  The faster it spins, mutates, evolves, the less stock I put into making any sort of plan – where’s the relevancy?

How many times have you seen someone clearly left behind by the world around them?  A person tied emotionally, financially, or otherwise to a reality that no longer exists isn’t uncommon – I think that most people upon reaching a certain age lose their ability to adapt, settle for whatever satisfies that them in that moment, and spend the rest of their existence fighting against the irresistible current of change to hold onto their past joys.  It doesn’t matter if their chosen path becomes untenable, self-destructive, or even impossible, these people will forever fight to grasp onto that which once fulfilled them.  They’ll die before they change.  The old woman who refuses to drive because that just isn’t done can survive just fine so long as she has a child, husband, or neighbor around to help her or her mobility is good enough.  The same woman, if she loses these advantages, must adapt or starve to death in her house.  Likewise fucked is the holdout against a government Eminent Domain plan to build another bloody bypass – sure, the world has a whole lot of bypasses, sure I can lie down in front of the bulldozers all day, but when it comes down to the wire you’ll get stuck in the mud and run over one day, and even if you don’t the goddam Vogons will just blow up the whole planet to build an interplanetary bypass anyway, so why not grab your towel, fire up the sub-etha Sens-o-matic and just hitch a ride into the stars – it sure beats extinction.  That which does not adapt, which does not change, will find itself outdated, useless, and dead before its time.

Let’s bring it back to the question at hand – what am I going to do with my future?

The way I see it we balance on the precipice, a cliff down into the mist on one side, a jagged body-strewn drop-off on the other.  There’s so much changing, so much shifting and sliding, exploding, rebuilding, dying, reviving, that I’m going to do the only thing that makes any sense at all to me – I’ll walk the razor’s edge, between unknown danger on the one hand and the known I consider worse on the other.  I’ll keep my footing solid, my spirits high, and try to recruit the best companions I can along the way, but as far as where I’m going… well, that’s a question best answered by the path I travel.  I don’t know what comes next, but so long as I keep doing my best along the way, staying happy, smart, flexible, strong, then I’ll find myself where I was supposed to be all along.

It has worked out pretty damn well so far, and I see little chance of that changing in the future.  With the world changing as fast as it is, it’s really a matter of choosing which potential future you want to prepare for, and while I’m not ready to throw my hat in with the canned-food and ammo collectors yet, I do think they have a better grasp on reality than the dumbfucks going into finance degrees hoping to make a fortune screwing the rest of us out of our inheritance.  It’s a matter of faith more than anything else – why invest so much effort into the ether?  Please, don’t ask me what my plans are for the future, because if I’ve learned one thing it’s that anything I promise gets wrecked up real fast.  I work better without the self-imposed chains, have enough of those anyway, and I don’t know what tomorrow holds.  You don’t either, and I reckon I’m better at living on the road, on the ground, in the shit than most of you are.

It’s evolution, dear Watson – why do you think there are so many rats and roaches and so few cute fuzzy panda bears?  You can have you high-falutin’ life map, your 5-year plan, your career and your mortgage and pension.  I’ll keep my eyes and mind open, my baggage minimal, and take whatever I can scrape by on.  Call it a waste of life, but don’t get offended when I laugh at those dull echoing words, and don’t be afraid either – living in the moment is as easy as saying “yes” to the next unexpected idea, starting a conversation with the next interesting stranger.  It’s quitting a job you hate but are working because the money is good, it’s not settling for the things you’re expected to have that don’t make you happy.

What will I do with my life?  Whatever works in the moment, because you never know which moment will be your last.

Make every moment count.

I Still Love You

In moments of weakness,
the moments like these –
I find
that you’re still in my heart.

I miss you beside me,
and wish you were here –
Kid myself
that you still feel the same.

I haven’t the will now
to banish these thoughts,
Give it all
to be with you again.

There’s a rip in my soul
from where I tore you out.
No patchwork
can fill that hole in.

What wouldn’t I give?
for a taste of your lips –
Nose to nose.
Eyes to eyes. Chin to chin.

To lie here forever,
Share eternity with you.
To be happy,
content in every way.

Then I remember –
how bitterly we fought!
And I know
that we’ll never see the day.

What is a New Year?

What is a new year, anyway, but another day?

I know that everyone is has been getting excited about the whole New Year’s celebration, end of the decade, holy-shit-2009-sucked-eggs thing, but I just can’t get so worked up about it myself. It might be because I woke up this morning with some awesome stomach ailment, necessarily tying me to a toilet by a “oh god oh shit oh fuck runrunrunRUN!” 2 minute leash, or it might come down to my whole New Year’s plans falling into the toilet, but I think that it’s quite likely because people use New Years as an opportunity to start over fresh, to throw old emotional baggage in the back of the closet – a year’s end enema, if I must be so crude – and yes, yes I must! The difference is, I imagine, that I’ve been trying to use every day in much the same fashion as most people use Dec 31st – to get shitfaced and wake up the next morning with a clean slate. More seriously, I have been trying for months now to get better at getting over my own past – analyzing my mistakes, learning what I can from them, then tossing them to the wayside so that the next day may start off fresh.

It doesn’t always work, because there are of course necessary connections between yesterday and today. The reason I am here and not hanging out getting hammered with my friends in Los Angeles can be traced to a whole line of yesterdays and a pile of decisions, each running linear into the next. I cannot help but for some of my options, some of my opportunities to be constrained by what happened before. Still, I have choice – the freedom to do what I will of the options presented, and to live my life as I want within the constraints that exist. I could hang around, let emotional baggage drown me, mourn the loss of Peace Corps, friends, money, love, the bad decisions, the injuries real and imagined, and just sit paralyzed, but what good is it? What will that get me, what do I gain from focusing on what I cannot change? It’s a recipe for a sad life, lived poorly, and I refuse to take any part in it. Yes, I fucked up – quite a lot in fact – but I just can’t bring myself to waste energy caring about all that. I try to cut my emotional chains every day, and while the first time is so damn hard that it makes you dizzy and leaves you crying in a pile, it gets easier. Now, doing it so often, I feel liberated by the very act of consigning my past to crazy stories and the mental shitcan.

That said, it’s the last day of the darkest decade I’ve lived through – not for me, for everyone – from the United States’ turn to tyranny and warfare to my family’s personal struggle against demons, bureaucratic idiots, hormone imbalances, mental illness, disease, cancers, and what-have-you, to my friends and their fights for control of their own lives, to the basic battle of humanity at large, to eat, sleep, live, and maybe smile every once in a while. The aughts will not be remembered kindly, I wager. You can feel it in the air, here in Nicaragua, but from all the way back home as well, via the internet. Witness the struggles in Iran for self-determination to see that the hope of this time of year can reach ahistorical proportions. All of us, it seems, are ready for something new, for a breath of fresh air, for a chance to let this all go and move on to another life.

And it certainly is possible – we’ve the means to start living anew tomorrow – if we can find the will, then we can create the universe again on January 1st. I’m interested to see where it all ends up – what changes, what remains, who ends up where. I feel a strong current of rebirth in the air, not just for tonight, but for the coming years and months and [time period here] – it’s not like I’m Nostrafuckindamus – everything is in flux, constantly, from the quarks on up. No, predicting change is like predicting that the Earth will keep turning and rotating the Sun – a winning bet damn near never day. What I see more than that however, is the exciting proposition of people actually wanting things to change, drastically, and working toward it. Perhaps it is my imagination, or my position in a community of travelers, artists, writers, and ex-workers, but the atmosphere is electric, palpable excitement oozes from the walls like that pink shit in Ghostbusters 2, but instead of turning the baby into a demon child, it leaves us all feeling refreshed, excited, ready to set out for unknowns and great adventures. I hope it is not constrained to just my own peers, because the effect on all of us rejuvenating – the 75 year-old backpackers, jaded old hippies, nihilist gen-Xers, all the way down to the idiots like me. We’re ready for something big, and so as I set out to the unknown – a new continent, a new country, another transformation, flying high above Columbia – not a coke reference! – as I set out for whatever waits, I hope that everyone else is as excited about, and ready for, the new world that awakens with us tomorrow.

Drink some water, wear a condom, don’t believe anyone who benefits from what they are telling you, and for fuck’s sake – Smile! You’re alive, now act like it! Love -k

PS. As for a New Year’s Resolution(TM) I’m going to spend the next month and a while, until I care to, completely substance-free. Pot was easy to drop, I’m down to 1-3 cigarettes a day, but the boozing is something I’d like to cut away from for a bit, so for Columbia, I’m going straight-edge. Inappropriate location for it? Perhaps, but cocaine is not my drug anyway, so I think I’ll be alright.

I Wrote This For You

I write this not for you, though there is a chance that you will understand what I write, that it will help you in some way. I do not write it because I want you to do anything, to help me in any way, to respond, or even to read it. I write it because it makes me happy to write, and well, what is more important then to spend life doing those things which make you happy?

I hope that you still have your open mind, for what I write here is strange, alien, uncomfortable to many. What I have here is an idea, a song, and the most rebellious suggestion in the world, perhaps. You might already have had it – I hope dearly that you have – because this is the sort of idea that betters everything it touches. I get ahead of myself – let me start where I really started, where my fingers began:

I worry that now, when torture and murder, aggressive world war, have become commonplace, accepted actions of the country I grew up in, that there isn’t a place there left for me. I’m scared, because I refuse to compromise my values just to live in a geographical region, and yet most of the people I love are right there. I wonder – what can I do, if they won’t leave, and I won’t come back, to ever see my family and friends again?

What scares me most of all is that they don’t even see the problems, so busy are they with the trivialities of each day. They just know I’m off “having a good time” in another world, “being young,” in the “time of my life,” before I settle down to “real life.” I am having fun, and that is good, but to them it is impermanent, irresponsible, and one day must be ended for me to live as a “normal” person – to live as they do.

It isn’t like that – this isn’t a vacation, this is a series of actions taken toward a goal of escaping the crushing, consuming prison of modern American life. I want out, need it, because everything I see outside is alive, and when I was in, all I saw was death – it almost killed me too. I broke out of that life and of that place, and in that I was transformed. I am not who I was, I cannot ever be that me again. I cannot come back.

This isn’t to say I won’t come visit – there are people there that I can help, dying slowly among the already dead – waking zombies, lifeless breathers, the ones too far gone. People too tired, too sick, too beaten and scared to cry out for it, but craving life still. I was one of those, and I can help those still in need. I may return to that place, but I cannot ever return to that life. If I do return, it will be as a free man, and it will not be to stay.

Still – pulling people out of a killing world isn’t good enough – no one should have to live like domesticated animals, like tools. No one should spend their life’s blood, energy, time in unhappiness, in pursuit of goals not their own. No one should, yet almost everyone does, and I can’t save them, because no one can save anyone else – they might be happier, but the problem is just transferred – now they would serve my goal.

I hope you understand what I write here, but I know that mostly you won’t. How could you? Words are an imperfect means of communication, and communication is a dream – we can only hope to spread what makes sense to us, and let everyone else interpret it as they may. I will say only this – modern life, with its obligations, debts, necessities, is not as joyous, or as fulfilling, or as happy, as it could be, and that is our fault. We are slaves by choice before we are slaves out of necessity.

It could be better, happier, richer for all if we simply let it, if we said “no” when we meant it, if we refused completely to be used by others for their ends, if we each did what made us happy. We aren’t required to accept a certain level of misery to live – we can change that through a simple refusal to work, live, or exist in any way that we do not enjoy.

Your goals are all attainable, if you would only stop sabotaging them. “Well that sounds good for other people,” goes the standard reply, “but I have an x and a y and a z, and so I can’t be irresponsible and run off like you.” Irresponsible! Obligations! You build those for yourself, then use them as the reasons for you imprisonment.

Yes, you do have to take care of certain things, you cannot drop your baby on the street and run off to India, but look around you, at the supposed restrictions on your life – who put them there? Whose choices led to their existence? We all create our own reality. You create yours. Those chains which hold you back from your dreams are of your own making, and came from your own choices and actions.

This is a good thing. A joyous thing. For if you created your own chains, then surely you have the power to break them as well. It does not matter how deeply you are indebted, how consumed you are by your job or unhappiness or obligations – all is removable if you desire. If you desire it! – this is key. Freedom is not license, but choice. It is not a belief system, only a simple question – “Am I happy?” – fueled by a raging desire for joy.

It’s true! People the world over have learned this, figured out what I write here of their own accord, and resolved to pursue their own ends forever more. I meet them, we cross paths every day, share stories, lives, hot meals, beds. I know who they are because they are the only happy people I see, the only happy people in the world. It is indisguisable, if you know what to look for. I can tell you what to look for, if you like.

These people are the ones doing nothing, drawing, painting, kissing strangers and running in the rain. They are the ones with holes in their shoes, with beautiful poetry at their lips. They laugh at God, because they have become God. If they discuss politics, theology, philosophy, they do even that joyously, turn handstands in the park, paint on the walls without permission. They are the ones who make living their art.

Make no mistake friend, there is a better way to live your life then the way you live it. There is a more joyous way for me to exist, for him with the guitar, for her with the curly hair and the frown. That better way is whatever makes you happier, allows you to feel and spread more love through the universe. If you want it, it is possible. If you seek it, you will find it all around you.

Courage is needed, great strength of will, an unquenchable lust for life and joy and love. Those things exist inside us all, untapped by most, unknown by many, but there nonetheless, ready to explode outward if and when we call upon them. You do not have to trust me, you certainly don’t have to thank me – this is not my idea, I simply found it lying in the road one day, picked it up, and found it fit me. We can share it – it will grow to accommodate us both, and more beside.

Really, it affects me not at all if you are happy, if you are enjoying your life to the fullest. It shouldn’t hurt me to see you so unhappy, and so unaware of your unhappiness. It is your life to live, but I love you, and I can’t bear to see you hurt as you do. I will help if you want, or leave you be if not, I just felt I had to try. I release you – go free, be who you wish, go fuck, go fight, go sing and dance, go learn, go teach, go travel, go do what you have always desired. Just go.

I love you always. Yours in freedom -k

What I’m Thankful For

I started this on Thanksgiving, but some old friends came into town yesterday and decided I needed a Thanksgiving party, so Mexican food, tequila and mezcal, dancing all night, and the drunkest acapella Elvis cover band in the world substituted for family togetherness and turkey. Kind of. Anyway, here’s what I started yesterday and neglected to finish until this morning:

I’m sitting on the hard tile floor in a mildewed dark room next to the only working outlet in this hostel that is also within range of wifi. My family and friends are several countries away, and on this day of family togetherness and giving thanks, I’m nursing a head cold and surrounded by strangers. Nobody aside from Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, so as you might guess I’m a bit out of my element today.

Making things harder is the fact that I’ve drifted far enough away from everyone I love that they aren’t really able or willing to contact me any longer. The last time someone outside of my family called me or emailed from back home was weeks ago. It’s not them – I don’t usually have a phone, and I’m far from the most communicative person anyway. Still, it hurts a bit when your good friend sends you an email and you realize you can’t remember the last time that happened.

It’s my fault – I’m the one who left, I’m the one who isn’t close, or a part of your day to day life, and I like to think that people do still think about me from time to time. Even if they don’t, I still have things to be thankful for, and this seems like a good day to reflect on them a bit.

First, the stupid material shit – I’m thankful for my little laptop, the eee I’ve had traveling with me all over Central America. Sure, she’s been more weight in the bag, but I couldn’t write or blog at all without her. Plus, it’s always nice to have a lifeline back home. Likewise, I really appreciate every single thing I still own, and that isn’t a lot. I’ve given away everything that doesn’t fit into my backpack or messenger bag, and as I do so every thing I still have becomes all the more precious. My 4 changes of clothes, 5 pairs of underwear, 6 pairs of socks are each valuable to me, each special in a way that I never understood before they were all I had. My mementos of this life, coins, bits of wood, shells, twisted metal parts are all imbued with memories. Really, if you carry everything you own around on your back all day, each thing takes on significance – this is my machete, it keeps me warm in the woods – this is my sleeping bag, it lets me sleep anywhere I choose – this is my headlamp, it lets me see, and so on. I’m thankful for everything I have.

Even more, I’m thankful for what I don’t have – my lack of a career, steady housing, a life plan, a car have all become precious gems, points of pride, and signposts that give evidence that I’m moving toward something better then what I had before. I take ridiculous pride in how much I don’t have, don’t need, don’t want even. I’ve found joy in not having, in giving away, in doing without the unnecessary. The other week I gave away almost 50 pounds of gear – clothing mainly, but also boots, a backpack, gloves, hats, books, everything. I haven’t bought anything I didn’t need for a while now, and I’m thankful that I’ve come to this realization of how little I truly need so early in my life. It would be much more difficult to live my life if I’d gotten deeper into the consumption game before I got out.

That’s what I’m most thankful for today – I’ve gotten out, torn myself free of a life I was terribly miserable in, and found a way of living that makes me truly joyous. I smile all the time, laugh genuinely, give hugs and kisses to people I don’t even know. I make friends every day, some of them for life, and get to experience a world completely alien to most of the people I know. I’m thankful for my Spanish – I can communicate with people I would never have otherwise met, learn about their lives, beliefs, hopes, dreams. I’m so thankful that I was right, that people everywhere are the same, all wanting and needing the same things – it’s one of the bases of my whole world, and sometimes it is quite nice just to be correct for once! I’m so incredibly happy to be living here, in this strange yet welcoming land, in another language, another culture, and still share moments of deep understanding with people of all stripes. From crossing cultural barriers I never knew existed before finding them to meeting, befriending, and sometimes dating people of very different worlds then my own, I’ve done a whole lot of growing lately – a trend I’m happy to be pursuing further.

Lastly, well, no, not lastly but lastly for now, I’m thankful to everyone who has made my adventures possible – from Sjoerd, Dan, Becky, Seth, Veronique, Marc, Matt, Karina, Vish and all of my traveling companions to the countless friends I’ve made, there are so many people who have made my life the better simply by touching it. The people I’ve left at home have been so good as well, especially my mother, who lives the most hectic life yet still manages to send me touching emails, and my father, a man who has fought so long to live life on his terms and is beginning to see the returns he deserves. I owe my existence to them, and am so lucky that they raised me in a way that has allowed me to become the person I am – did an excellent job too, I should add. Then there are my brothers, K2 and 3, who I see growing up and developing into themselves. It was incredible to call my family on Skype and see a DIY halfpipe in the backyard, then to realize that my youngest brother is taller then I am! Without the support of all of them, and my good friends too, I’d be so much lonelier out here. I’m thankful too that I can call home and everyone I know seems to be doing well, or at least, putting on a good show of it. Sure, I come off as crazy to most, but just having you there makes a hell of a difference.

So that’s it I guess – it’s been a tough year, but I’m better for it, and falling into this strange and wonderful life seems to be the reward. I don’t know how long I can keep it up, or how things will go tomorrow even, but in the present moment I’m fulfilled, lacking nothing essential, happy in every way, and in love with the world I inhabit. How can I not be thankful for all of that? Happy Thanksgiving to you all stateside – a day late and probably more then a dollar short, but I wish everyone the best anyway. Ciao! -k

I’m Happy

I wrote this in my journal yesterday, and filled the last 5 pages.  As such, I thought I might as well share what’s on my mind these days.  I’m leaving it as unedited as possible, as it was a very stream-of-consciousness piece, and I think it’s more authentic like this.  Cheers.

10-18-09: 5 Days. I came to León 5 days ago to spend the night, and I’ve been unable to leave since.  The night of the 13^th I went out with the Sonati family (the hostel I’m at) for Neil’s going away party, and instead of dropping dead from exhaustion I instead went home with a very pretty canadian girl I met.  Had sex for the first time since December – sad – and didn’t suck at it.  She kicked me out at 5am so as not to cause an awkward scene with the Nica family she’s staying with, and I went home laughing at the ridiculousness of it all – what a life!

Every day since has been fantastic – this group I fell into is just so friendly, genuine, good.  We came together like old friends, sing without shame, share ourselves openly, talk love, life, gods without fear.  As one who tries always to be open and honest with the entire world, it is one of the greatest experiences in my life to meet people of like mind – when we’re all together here I feel as if my whole lifestyle is justified and right – no, more then that – I know that I’ve made the right choices in coming here, and that continuing this life is the absolute most important thing I can do.  To go back is impossible – not physically of course, but I CAN’T – philosophically, spiritually, for my own development’s sake, cannot return home, perhaps not ever.  Perhaps not ever – such a scary yet liberating thought – to live like this would be heaven indeed.  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know anything except that in not knowing, in drifting, I am happy, and that to be happy is everything.

To be happy is such a wild experience – I thought that I had been!  All my life, I thought I’d had happiness, but really I had just been accepting, resigning myself to a life of lows and mediums – never even knowing highs. Finding this new, true happiness has been looking out the window one day and instead of staring at the same blank brick wall, finding that the building opposite is gone and finally seeing the world outside – mountains and rain, with a beautiful sunset beyond.  How could I not want to explore this new world, especially when I like it so much better?  It’s like the first time I heard a love song and truly understood – just as intense, just as life-changing.  I can’t go back because that old world doesn’t even exist any longer – torn down, burnt to the ground by the intensity of the new life ahead of me.  I’m not me, not who I was before.  Even if I wanted to, I can never go back to be who I was, live how I did.  The very thought makes me smile, or I would if I wasn’t already.  I’ve finally found what I want, and that is the most beautiful feeling of my life.  I only hope that everyone I care about and love can do the same one day. -k

I wrote that first part sitting in an ice cream parlor, watching kids run and yell in the park across the street.  Later I came back and wrote this next bit – connected albeit loosely to the first.

So what is it then?  What is the thing, feeling, thought, action, the truth I’ve found that sends me through life as a happy, grinning idiot, what is it that I want for the rest of my life?  What is going on that makes the new life new, separates my now from the unreachable then and what do I want to extend into the onrushing future to come?  In short, what changed?

8 months ago I started this journal as a scared, frequently depressed, often confused, perpetually lonely young man, unable to see what kept me feeling so trapped, isolated.  I begged for change, begged for a different life.  The Peace Corps, running away to Honduras, starting over – all this was a reaction to my unhappiness and desire for a new life, a different me.  Now I finish it, fill the last dirty pages with scrawled blue ink, as a still-young man, in a wholey different world, in a vastly changed life.  The confusion, fear, depression is all still here – I can hardly claim to be perfectly happy – but they’re all so much less significant to me now.  I’m in control, not my emotions.  I don’t hate myself, on the contrary I love who I’ve become.  I love my life – truly, completely.  So I must ask again – what changed?  Why am I now who I am, and not who I was?

What didn’t? – that might be a better question if I was looking to make a list – but no, that isn’t what I mean.  I’m looking for a shift, a difference in how I act, interact, react that changes everything else – a trigger – and it might be best summed up best as this – on the edge of a great black unknown, faced with the choice between stepping back, being safe, or just throwing myself into the world, I leapt – jumped into a life I knew nothing about.  On April 21^st I was given a mandate – get out of the Peace Corps, take a plane home, rebuild, and find another route to making myself happy in their world – “they” being of course the people who influence, shape, lead our society – and I almost took it as a given that that was what I needed to do.  I just didn’t see another option – there’s only one world right?  One society, one way to fit in.  I didn’t know I had another choice.

It wasn’t until that night, tossing sleepless in my hotel bed, that I asked myself the most obvious question in the universe – why?  Why am I actually trying to fit myself into a role I don’t want, as a member of a society completely at odds with the way I view life?  What stops me from changing that, from living as I wish to?  I thought long and hard, and the only answer I came to was me.  I’m doing it – I’m keeping myself here, making myself unhappy, trapping myself in this life.  No one else could – no one save me controls me or my life.  So what then stops me from changing, from going another direction, from searching out happiness by me instead of as defined by them?  I fell asleep smiling because I knew the answer to that one – it was only me, and if I’m the only thing standing in my way, well, I know how to fix that.

I jumped the next day – ran away, and in doing so, dropped into wild, miserable limbo.  As it turns out, being happy on your terms is impossible when you don’t know them, when you’ve never tried and don’t even know how.  My initial excitement was blunted quickly, early, brutally against the reality of life in Honduras without money, at my awful job at the Casa Kiwi.  After June, July – miserable, drunk, without purpose or path – it almost broke me.  I nearly gave up altogether, came within days of going back home, buying a plane ticket back to their life, not mine.

I didn’t though – realized that life in another place is not all it takes, that living by someone else’s rules is diametrically opposed to what I wanted, and so again I leapt.  Quit my job without plans and set out afresh – no job, home, nothing we’re taught to view as a safety net – you can’t have safety and start over – so I took a go into the unknown once again.

This clean break from everything familiar, from even the structure – job, house, social network, routine – the formula of life I’d always assumed to be natural, turned out to be what I needed to find my own goals, my own terms.  These past months adventuring, hitchhiking, running, making friends, traveling, have caused me to change so much that I scarcely recognize who I was before – the new me forged is forged by the new life – open, spontaneous, driven only to be happy, and without the self-limitationsand doubts that crippled me before.

So to answer the question – what changed? – I dove headfirst into the great unknown, shed the bonds of what I thought I knew, of social convention, of my own expectations – this has made all the difference.  All that which comes from here stems back to that. -k

I left it here, out of space, but I’m still not completely satisfied with what I’ve written – there’s more that must be said, I haven’t yet said what it is that I’ve found, and so I’ll try and put that next.

10-19-09: I don’t have all the answers, and I know that I can’t live entirely outside of society – at least, I personally can’t, because there are so many things I need from others, from the world.  Companionship for starters – I’m a very social person, and one of my greatest joys is in meeting others, picking their minds, finding others in the world who know what I don’t and can teach me that which I haven’t yet learned.  I’ve always been like this, but now I know that there is nothing to fear in the new, the unknown, in walking right up to the most beautiful woman I’ve seen and starting a conversation, or in joining a group of people and making friends with them.  I depend on the world for food, for a roof over my head, for a ride down the highway even – I’ve never been so dependant on others then I am in this new life, and so I can’t pretend to be living outside of society.

Still, I’ve found a way to live my terms because I’ve found a new way to interact with the world – instead of settling down, instead of searching for some place or that ephemeral “something” that will make me feel less alone or unhappy, I know now that I am in control of how I fit into this crazy thing called life – if I’m not happy, then nobody can make me stay that way except for myself.  If I don’t like how my day is going, I can change it – I think I knew this before, but I was just too afraid to act on it.  The first leap was terrifying, but once I saw the beauty in it, felt the sting, experienced failure and got over it, then every leap since has been easier – fun even.  The trick – for me, since I can’t speak for anyone else – is in summing the courage to just go, and in maintaining myself in a state – emotionally, but also in terms of possessions and physical condition – from which I can take these leaps whenever the need or desire strikes me.

This necesitates a certain sacrifice – I’m limited to a handful of belongings, whatever I can carry with me, and I can’t ever get too attached to any of them.  I don’t have a house, won’t let myself get into a career, can’t go buy a new car or even a new cell phone.  It’s the antithesis of what I’ve been taught by society to want – no stability, nothing long-term, little in the way of protection – but it’s become blindingly obvious to me that those things, supposedly good, are what has kept me from being truly free, able to make my own decisions, and thus unhappy, for my entire life.  If I wish to continue living like this, I will have to accept that I won’t ever be the one with the cool new car, the new clothes, the house to come back to.  I wonder still if I’ll be content as a traveler, as a bum, living without anything of material value for the rest of my life.

Then I remember two things that make me not worry about that.  First, I’m not locked into this life – if it ever becomes unfun to live as I do, if the hassles of my existence outweigh the benefits, if love fades to leave just a bitter taste in the back of my mouth, I am in no way obligated to do this forever.  Unlike the sedentary life of those with toys and belongings, I can always come back to it.  The opposite isn’t true – if I have a lease, a mortgage, and a contracted job, how on earth can I flee?  This freedom thing does have its benefits.  The 2nd thing I remember when I’m doubting myself is that I did have a car, piles of possessions, and a roof to call my own, and I was a truly miserable person, self-medicating on marijuana, alcohol, buying stupid shit to bring a spark of interest into my monotonous days.  I can still get a job, I can find a place to live, and hitchhiking is more fun then driving any day – I’m still able to settle down a bit, as I’ll be doing in the next few days, work, build up the funds to travel again.  I have options available to me that no one on the other side can understand unless they’ve been standing where I am now.  I’m not claiming to have found the key to all happiness, but at least for now I’ve created a life I am content with, one where I go through my days smiling, one that lets me be myself without fear of the reprecussions.  If that means I’ll never have “made it” by societal standards, then I can only reply “fuck it, I’m happy” because I know that in life, being happy is all that counts.  I’m happy.

Response to the UCSB Alumni Survey

I wrote this in response to an email I got from my old university, and liked it enough to post it on a website nobody visits. Enjoy?

Dear Maria,

I wish I could take your survey, but the fact is that ever since I escaped UCSB with my near-worthless BA in Philosophy, paid off my debts working jobs that required no semblance of a college degree, and fled to Central America, I have found myself utterly unable to do, or even imagine doing, anything that comes in a standardized form, which unfortunately includes the Undergraduate Alumni Survey. I apologize profusely, but as I sit here at 11am in a surfing town in Nicaragua, sipping delicious coffee between breakfast and whatever I might end up doing this afternoon, debating the merits of heading a few hundred miles north to visit a friend at her beautiful slice of beachside paradise or go instead to Guatemala chasing girls, I really just boggle at the idea of sitting down and filling out a survey about how post-UCSB life is treating me – instead, I’ll take the same 15 minutes and happily write this email, and probably better explain how my life has changed then I could in any survey. Plus, my internet connection is god-awful, and loading another page just doesn’t appeal to me. So sorry.

Here’s how my life has changed from UCSB to now – at UCSB I took a lot of classes that I found uninteresting, rote, and useless to my life. I wanted to take a lot of classes, don’t get me wrong,, but the ones I found interesting and useful all seemed to be parts of majors and tracks I couldn’t be a part of because I was busy getting terrible grades in History of Islamic Art and Architecture, or maybe Special Issues in Women’s Literature, which was really just 4 hours a week of some angry old crone raging against everything and anything with a Y-chromosome and a dick – I never thought I could hate attending a class of 40 girls and me, but that happened. Meanwhile in evolutionary theory classes, graduate PoliSci and chemistry, engineering, the classes I couldn’t be a part of and had to instead sneak into after the first few days of class, I learned all sorts of fascinating things – useful ones too – and did it all without ever receiving credit. I got shit for grades in my classes because I hated them, because I couldn’t get into the ones that were interesting, because I got shit grades. You see the circle here, don’t you Maria? Catch-22 in action, and I was stuck in the middle.

So that was UCSB, that and binge drinking, empty sex, a lot of hungover mornings, a list of jobs I didn’t like, and a lot of drunkenness. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t completely unhappy – I made friends, I had a lot of fun, and I grew up a lot – all parts of going off to college. Still, a year and quarter later, sitting here, I’m only glad I went to your college because of the value other people put on that stupid fucking piece of paper, the one I only like because it has Arnold the Governator’s signature, and I can one day show my kids Terminator then tell them that the evil robot from the future later got to run our whole state into the ground face first, just shitbagged us all. It’ll be worth a laugh when they don’t believe me, and then I go get my degree to show them his signature. Really, that’s the only reason I care about my degree at all – because other people act as if I’ve accomplished something when really I just threw money into the fireplace, jumped through a very expensive hoop, got my pat on the head, got my biscuit, and now I’m magically qualified to work other jobs.

UCSB is too expensive, top-heavy with asshole business school graduates posing as administrators, raising their own ridiculous salaries while furloughing workers, busting unions, throwing poor workers the scraps and gorging themselves on the obscene student fees and dues, extorting kids who just don’t want to be poor and working a shit job their whole life. Here boy, good boy, lookie what I got here – a diploma. You want a diploma, don’t you boy? A nice little diploma, you can work as a manager instead of a warehouse handler, you can afford the things that we pretend in the USA make you happy. Just reach a little further boy, put a little more cash fireplace, and everything will work out fine. Not a day went by at UCSB that I didn’t feel like a fucking hampster on a wheel, running always to find a better, happier life, and never going anywhere except down.

UCSB did help me though, with one thing. I learned at your university that the world I lived in, the one I was trying to become a part of was fucked and awful, not fit for anyone who ever wanted to be happy. Instead of looking to get ahead, to rise to the top, I started looking for a way out, found one, took it, and here I am in Central America, having the time of my life.

I don’t mean a vacation, I mean a full-on checking out and letting go, a clean break with the life I had and didn’t like, a way to escape the miserable cycle of awake, arise, eat, work, shit, sleep, awake, arise, supplemented by buying new and diifferent toys, things, devices, placebos for the real problem that life in the US style destroys everything it touches, corrupt the beautiful, corrodes the good, saps the value out of virtue, rewards blunt stupid drive for success at the expense of all other things. All for me, fuck the little guy – if they can’t stand up for themselves we can just roll over them and not even look back – it is an awful way to live, and UCSB perpetuates that uncaring, uninvolved, individually miserably lifestyle by being a big unfeeling diploma factory – put the money in, fuck around for 4 years, get a piece of paper, and welcome to the next circle of hell. No, I won’t do it, I realized, I would rather die then live like that – so here I am.

It’s a better life Maria, it really is. Adventure, friends from everywhere, a culture and language more expressive, kinder, more interested in your life and yourself. I imagine you have a home, kids, a husband, investments, a car or 2, a retirement account – a lot of things tying you to your life where you are, and perhaps you’re quite happy as well – I would hope so. However, the best thing I ever did with my young life is to have run when I had the chance, slipped the bonds of material society, tore my eyes off the TV, got sober(ish) and ran like hell. Thus far, I’ve never looked back, or been so happy as I have since I left. So thank you, and thank you to everyone at UCSB for the piece of paper Ahnold signed, as it has proven my key to getting the fuck out of Dodge, away from the life I hated, and into one I love. Still, UCSB was not a good time for me, and I’m thankful every day I’m away from that place – it’s not a very warm or friendly place, and I got the distinct feeling that nobody gave 2 shits about me except when I didn’t pay on time.

Thanks for reading, and good day to you. If you’re ever unhappy with your life, remember that the rest of the world doesn’t work like the USA, and there are places out in the world still where your neighbors know you, where starting conversations with strangers isn’t the mark of a criminal or dangerous psychopath, and where people you don’t know genuinely care about you. Oh, and it’s cheap as sin to live down here – I live twice as nicely on half as much, and don’t have to work all day every day just to keep a roof over my head. Well, take care, and remember to smile.

-k

A Series of Small Mistakes Culminating in My Fleeing From Drug Dealers

One of the things you always have to look out for when you’re on the road is the near-limitless pile of pushers, pimps, peddlers, and players trying to take advantage of the unwary traveler. Due to the fact that a whole lot of people like to travel, and a much smaller group are actually good at it, there has grown up in Central America a heathy culture of screwing over stupid white people – it’s a cousin to the other popular sport of shooting fish in a barrel. Now, I’ve no room to talk – I sit here sipping on a Fresca that I just overpaid 50% for since I didn’t walk across the street to check prices there – to be honest, it tastes a bit like wasted money, but a whole lot more like cane sugar, which beats the hell out of your American drinks and their high fucktose corn syrup – but I digress… The point here is that by the sheer virtue of being white, you are a target for all manner of schemers, thieves, troublemakers, and “the wrong sort of people.” You can minimize your chances of getting taken advantage of by playing it smart, not getting into situations you don’t understand, and not letting yourself get cowed by fast talkers, but in the end we all fuck up, make mistakes, and get into trouble – it is just a basic fact of life in a foreign culture.

Sometimes however, that just isn’t exciting enough – sure, you got talked out of 20 Lempira by a sad-faced boy, or someone picked your phone out of your pocket while you were sleeping on a bench in the bus station, or the taxi driver overcharges you substantially, but that’s not the sort of thing I can sit down and write a story about. No, to be worthy of a Citizen K adventure, you’ve got to go big, to really and truly fuck up to the point of putting your own life in danger. Here’s a story of how that happened, how we got out of it, and what we should have done instead. Spoiler: we survived.

How to Identify a Drug Pusher:

Someone you won’t meet often in the US unless you go actively looking for drugs is the peculiar fellow that I’ve taken to calling the Drug Pusher. The reason I won’t go so far as to call him a dealer is that he doesn’t actually have drugs most of the time, but sells them nonetheless – usually in the employ of a dealer but occasionally freelance, so to speak. How he goes about doing this is pretty interesting, at least to me. The Pusher goes about his life, travels the world, has another job sometimes, and meets absolutely everyone. He is a social butterfly, loved by all the little old ladies, popular with the girls, pals with every guy between 13 and 30, and looked up to all the younger kids. The thing that sets him apart from any other charming, well-spoken, popular young guy is that he finds a way to bring the topic of marijuana or drug use up very early on in meeting new people. It’s not subtle, usually some variant of “Hey man, are you new around here? I’m Larry, welcome to the neighborhood. Hey, weird question, you like to smoke weed?” To a positive assertion he’ll go on, preaching the taste, flavor, effect of the product he’s connected to, playing up the crowd before he goes in for the kill. He won’t ever offer you drugs, because he doesn’t have to – if you’re looking for something, you’re going to ask, and lo-and-behold, he turns out to be just the person you needed to meet. If you’re in a far-away land and want to engage in some healthy substance use or less-healthy substance abuse, the Drug Pusher is a character that will enter your stories from time to time.

How We Got Into Shit With Vlad:

We met Vlad (yeah, a Nicaraguan named Vladamir) in the back of a truck headed south. Sjoerd and I had our thumbs out, the driver stopped, we hopped into the back utility cage of the pickup and off we all went. As often happens when people are allowed to ride in the back of trucks, we weren’t the first bums who’d gotten a free ride – the 3 guys in the back gave us a once-over, we returned the favor, then everyone said their introductions and went back to standing around or sitting in the back of the truck. The exception was Vlad, the mid-20s Garifuna (dark-skinned) dude with an old American Eagle T-shirt, 12” pigtails, and slightly gapped front teeth that were hardly noticeable above the sheer force of his personality. Vlad, after warmly shaking our hands, started up a conversation with Sjoerd about fun things to do, and within a couple sentences asked him if he’d ever smoked weed. Playing it smart, Sjoerd admitted “yeah, a few times,” and pushed the subject down the road, but he and I shared a glance that said “well, do we want some?” It’s illegal in Nicaragua, we’re living hand to mouth and out of our backpacks – this is a bad idea. Yet, true to form, we didn’t immediately throw out the suggestion – be thankful for that, because if we had, there wouldn’t be this little adventure story for you to enjoy!

Twenty or so minutes down the road, after some random conversing and several more subject changes to and from drugs, our driver pulled up to his neighborhood and we – Sjoerd, Vlad, I – jumped out and started walking. While Vlad and I talked about his work (truck driving) his family (lived with his mother and little sister) and the town we were walking toward, Sjoerd and I were having a simultaneous non-verbal conversation about whether or not we should ask this guy if we can buy ganja. Combined, it must have looked ridiculous – 2 gringo-as-all-fuck backpackers and this big dude in a too-small shirt and pigtails walking along the highway talking inanities while the white guys shoot hand signals and weird looks at each other.

We walked a few kilometers, which gave us plenty of time to think things over. In the end, I asked Vlad if the reason he’d brought up weed so many times was because he wanted to sell some of it, and while he denied that, he did tell us that he “knew some guys.” Good enough – we followed him into town, Chichigalpa I think. Here’s where it got surreal: remember how he lives with his mom? Well, we went straight to his mother’s house and took a seat on the couch. Then, because Vlad is a pusher, not a dealer, we gave him the crazy-looking plastic bills with transparent sections that they call money here, and we sat around watching a National Geographic special on Fidel Castro in Spanish while he took off to get the product. The look we shared somewhere in here was priceless – “what in the fuck have we gotten ourselves into here?” – still, we’d taken a swan dive right into this one, and to get out was more difficult then just waiting to see how things turned out. We sat, played with the dog, and talked with 6-year-old Diana while we waited.

I was reassured by two things here – first was that Esmeralda, Vlad’s mom, and Diana, the little sister, were very nice, completely normal, and very friendly considering they undoubtedly knew we were buying illicit substances from their son. The second was that the dog, Rufo, was a fucking angel, loved being pet, and was one of the best groomed, fed, and most loving animals I’ve met in Central America. “Sure, Vlad sells pot,” I reasoned, “but his family is great, his dog isn’t abused, and everyone around here seems to like him – how bad can this really get?” Well… here comes that part of the story.

Vlad came back a bit later in the afternoon, right about the time I was sharing with his mother the intimate details of my time with the Peace Corps in Honduras. (which, incidentally, I just took the passwords off of here on Mental Cigarettes – check them out!) I opted to give her the abridged version, we said our goodbyes, and after Vlad slipped me a bag containing substantially shittier weed then he’d described, we were out the front door. Now, here’s the part where a person concerned about security would recognize that he had stretched his luck, come out thus far unharmed, and ought leave now before that all changes – being a different sort of person, the kind who seeks adventure at personal expense, puts his trust in the generosity and goodness of strangers, and consequently spends a lot of his time on the razor’s edge of disaster, I instead took a different course.

“Hey guys,” Vlad asked, “did you know that Flor de Caña rum is distilled here?”

“Here like in Nicaragua, or here like right here?” I responded.

“Right here man, we can just walk right up to the place, smoke, have a look around.”

“Sounds cool man, let’s do it.” I ask, then shoot a glance at Sjoerd, who nods. All of a sudden, we’ve an adventure on our hands, but we don’t realize what kind yet.

Vlad leads us across the street and a few blocks down before turning into a run-down block of homes and pulperias. Kids are playing soccer barefoot with a well-patched and scratched ball, a scrawny dog trots by, tail between her legs, plastic plate in her mouth. Families, not just one but a good 6 entire families, sit out in front of their houses in plastic chairs and on curbs, just sitting. In other words, it was any other poor neighborhood in Central America, with one crucial difference – everyone stopped when we walked into their midst – the game, the people talking, and instead they all glared unfriendly eyes at us. Well fuck – guess we’d found another part of the world where white faces aren’t welcome, especially when those faces are attached to the big bags that say “this person is richer then you, and for his pleasure, he comes to visit your part of the world just to fuck around.” It’s shittier when it’s true – I have no good reason to be here – I’m just passing through on the way to Costa Rica. I was about to mention this to Vlad when I realized something crucial – they weren’t looking at us, they were looking at Vlad with deep distrust.

I didn’t know what to do with this information – it didn’t fit with my train of thought, but I stole a glance at Sjoerd, and he’d seen it too – at least we were on the same page. Half a block down it got weirder – a smallish guy in a blue shirt and worn jeans whistled loudly, I snapped my head in that direction, started wondering if he was a threat, but then Vlad whistled back and waved. It still didn’t feel right, but if Vlad knew him… I let my mind slip back down a few notches – lets just smoke a joint, see a rum distillery, and get the fuck out of here. The guy in blue came up to us, slapped hands with Vlad, and introduced himself – “Mynameisdavid” he said in one breath, no spaces, the word vomit approach to English – thus Mynameisdavid he became. After the introduction, Vlad led us down a foot path, and Mynameisdavid followed – here’s the first point I decided that we needed to change the situation, where Juan Carlos’ warning voice broke through my comfortable reality – this was not a good scene.

Down the path a hundred meters, I asked Vlad if we could stop and smoke there instead of going all the way into the distillery – it was getting late, I said, and we needed to keep going south. He shrugged, we sat down on a log, and Sjoerd did his magic Dutch joint-rolling trick while I tried to keep Vlad and Mynameisdavid talking about themselves, about their families, histories, anything. Vlad took off his shirt in the clinging heat, and that’s when I saw the 4” ragged scar on his right shoulder – an unmistakable knife wound. “What’s that from,” I asked, wanting to see how he lied so I catch it again later. He didn’t though – “It was a knife, a machete actually.” I gave a low whistle, and told him he was lucky to still have an arm. “Better off then the other guy, he’s dead now.” was the reply, delivered straight to my face without blinking or smiling. I laughed, but it was forced. Sjoerd finished rolling the joint, and I’ve rarely needed one like I did then.

We sat in our little circle, 2 brown faces, 2 white ones, smoking what ended up being pretty awful weed. Actually, I don’t know to be honest – most of the marijuana high is your own perception of it, and right at that moment I wasn’t in any mood to be spacey and get lost in my own head. Instead, all I felt was wariness and fear – this was not a good situation. “When you are in a bad situation, change it. Take control – they have a plan, so get away from it.” Juan Carlos’ words, delivered to a frightened Peace Corps training class came bubbling up out of my subconscious. I felt the knife in my front right pocket, its weight suddenly magnified – but could I use it, even if I had to? Better not to find out.

“Hey guys, we really need to get going,” I said, “and we need some food before we go. Do you know a good cheap comedor or restaurant around here?” Change.

“Yeah,” Sjoerd chimed in, “I’m really hungry, lets do that.” Awesome wingman, this guy.

Vlad and Mynameisdavid shared a look, and even though it lasted an instant, the message was pretty unmistakable – Fuck, this isn’t going as we wanted. Good, I thought, exactly what we were going for.

After tramping back out of the same neighborhood, enduring the same warning yet scared looks of the families alongside the road, we were on the main road. Here I fucked up again – we could have turned right, walked along the busy main road straight to the highway, hitched a ride, and gotten the fuck out of dodge. We actually started doing this, but as we were saying goodbyes Vlad pointed out that we’d come from that direction and we hadn’t passed any comedores on the way in. It was true, and we were hungry – after a few second’s hesitation we turned left and put ourselves back at the mercy of 2 guys who quite definitely had bad intentions for us. Fuck. However, Vlad did give away part of the game here, telling us that the bus station was ahead of us, right near the center of town – it really pays off to listen to what information people let slip.

A few hundred meters down the road we got to a central plaza, a statue set in the middle of the road that cars had to swerve around – a great strategy, Sjoerd pointed out, for dealing with the problem of drunk drivers. The statue’s base had the marks to back that statement up. We circled around it, and ahead of us on the right was a little unnamed restaurant. The family that owned it was sitting out front, and we received a welcome that would have sent paint peeling back to wherever it had come from. “I know, I know, we’re in shitty company,” I wanted to respond, but couldn’t for obvious reasons. Going up the front steps, I headed into – well, I walked straight into this family’s living room and grandma – why does everyone do that here? The restaurant was apparently confined to the 2 small tables on the front porch, so I gave my best “yeah, I’m a dumb white person” grin and headed back out. Sjoerd was already seated, everyone laughed, just another of my bonehead moves. And so we sat down, alternating natives and gringos, around 3 sides of a small wooden table with a tired tablecloth and an even more tired jar of pickled onions in the center. It was awkward at best – really it was uncomfortable because none of the 4 of us wanted to be there, at least not together. Sjoerd and I were pretty happy about sitting down to eat, but not with 2 guys who had obviously malicious intentions, and they didn’t want to be sitting in public with 2 guys whom they couldn’t exactly rob or mess with in front of a whole family – thus, awkward. It was good though, because it gave us time to think, to plan, to change the situation more – time is almost always your friend when you’re trying to get out of a bad decision or five.

We ordered the cheapest plates on the menu, had a quick english conversation about offering our friends something to eat as well, and thus possibly get on their better side, but decided against it on the grounds that we’re totally broke – we offered them drinks anyway. Then, while Vlad sulked, sipped a coke, and stared off into the distance and Mynameisdavid wore my sunglasses and hollered and whistled at every girl between 11 and 35 who walked by, we ate some very dry but flavorful beef, rice, and beans. I would probably have liked it quite a bit, if not for the circumstances. We ate slowly, enduring the obvious impatience and uncomfort of our companions and the malevolent stares of our hosts, while sharing the looks of 2 prisoners resigned to prolonging their last meal as long as possible – ought to note that nobody ate the poisonous-looking pickled onions. At the end of it all, we reluctantly set aside our plates, paid, and got ready to left. I didn’t see it, but Sjoerd told me later that as we were walking out he saw the grandmother of the family crossing herself as we left – it really was that sketchy.

Leaving, my mind was going crazy – how can I change this situation? How can we get out of here without getting robbed or shot? Why in the fuck did I bring my laptop? Is this going to end up being my regrettable adventure? How do I even write this story? All of this was rolling through my head as we headed back toward the highway, and as I searched desperately for a way out. My chance came suddenly, and I have my Peace Corps teachers to thank for my quick reaction. We walked along the main road into town, 4 lanes wide, busy like Sjoerd’s mouth on free blowjob day. There appeared a gap all of a sudden, a few seconds wide at best, between the oncoming traffic, and we took it. I looked at Sjoerd, he looked at me, and we stepped quickly across the street to the center median – it worked partially – Vlad, who had been ahead of us, was caught unaware and left stranded on the far side of the road. Unfortunately Mynameisdavid had seen our move and followed us, and was trying frantically to signal at Vlad, who kept walking down the sidewalk without noticing what had happened behind him. About now was when Mynameisdavid began to get more explicit – first telling us that we owed them a gift for their company, then after I declined that, that we would regret not giving them what they wanted. “Remember what we did for you?” he kept asking, “We know strong people. You don’t want us to get them.”

I was very much in agreement with that statement – I didn’t want him to get anyone, nor did I want to spend much more time with Mynameisdavid. Sjoerd and I started talking in English about this point, about how we really hoped that a bus would pass already. I kept stealing glances over at Vlad, telling Mynameisdavid that no, I would not pay him even 50 Cordobas apiece for their company, and walking rapidly toward the highway. I’m honestly not sure what Sjoerd was doing at this point – my attention was elsewhere, the heady adrenaline rush of imminent danger pounded in my temples, and all I know is that he was beside me and in no worse (or better) situation then I. We shared a few looks as we walked – we wer both scared, but determined to not give in to a pair of petty blackmailers, especially when one of them was across a very busy, very wide road and the other was a foot shorter then I. Then a couple things happened at once: first, in what I would quickly list as among the most awful moments of my life, I caught Vlad out of the corner of my eye finally notice that we weren’t behind him and run to the road’s edge. The second more then made up for it however, because the next thing that happened was that a bus finally showed up behind us. “Sjoerd, there’s our ride!” I yelled over Mynameisdavid’s whistling, 4 lanes of cars rumbling and honking, and the sounds of the busy city. We stopped at the road’s edge, reversed directions, and waved like idiots at the approaching bus. Vlad, now realizing what we were about to pull, dodged out into traffic, but only made it one lane before narrowly avoiding getting his ass ran over by a bus – he was stuck between the dense-but-fast traffic, and I smirked a little – this might actually work out!

We jumped up onto the bus before it had stopped moving, and the driver pushed back out into traffic. I heard Mynameisdavid yelling and whistling, but he didn’t climb into the bus, for whatever reason – perhaps he couldn’t pay the fare, or maybe it had become too public a scene for him. Regardless, we’d made it, at least partly. There was always the chance that Vlad and his friends would follow us in a car, catch up to us, and beat us senseless or shoot our gringo asses – thoughts like this wove their way into my brain until I couldn’t shake them loose – Sjoerd’s too I imagine, because we both sat facing the aisle, packs still on, ready to bolt if need be. Still, as we rode down the main road out of town, it started to dawn on us that we’d dodged that particular bullet, and that we’d be safe to make bad decisions another day. Hit the highway, paid our fare, and hopped out – only one last thing to do. We needed a ride and fast, and so it was thumbs out at a brisk walk, and we headed south toward León. I kept looking into the cars that passed, expecting to see a huge muscled guy with pigtails any second, but nobody fit the description.

A few minutes on, a grey Toyota pickup passed us, then 50 meters down the road braked and swerved over. Sjoerd and I looked at each other – well, is it them? – passed unspoken. We shrugged, ran down toward the truck. The adrenaline began seeping out again, the heady rush overpowering. I skidded to a stop at the blackout-tinted driver’s window, which wasn’t rolled down. Fuck, it’s them! – No, it wasn’t, just a kindly male face, wrinkled around the eyes from a lifetime smiling, and his similar-age wife beside him. I asked if we could get a ride to León, they offered us one gladly, and off we went – suck it drug pushers, we’re gone! Wind in our hair, packs in a pile, we finally started to loosen up, laugh even.

“What a ridiculous, insane, idiotic adventure that was!”

“Can you believe what we just did?”

“God, I thought they were going to jump us!”

“Why didn’t we just leave?”

“Man, good thing we got them high – that could have sucked if they had reacted properly.”

“Yeah, that was a good practice run, with bad criminals instead of good ones.”

“Lets be more careful next time.”

“Agreed.”

And onward we drove, sun slowly setting, road unwinding before and behind, volcanoes in the distance, and Chichigalpa fading into the distance. I still don’t know if the name is really Chichigalpa, but I do know one thing – we aren’t allowed back there, Sjoerd and I. We burned that bridge to the ground the second we went in, bought drugs, and fucked over the pusher – our name is mud with all the wrong sorts of people. No matter, we learned a bit about ourselves, our ability to cope with bad situations, and came out alright and more knowledgeable. Experience, some say, comes from having made bad decisions in the past and learned from them. If that’s the case, I’ve gotten a whole lot of experience from this little adventure. The moral? What moral? I was doing something illegal, dealing with shady people, and made a whole lot of bad decisions followed by a few choice good ones. Keep your head on straight and your eyes open might be one. Don’t buy pot in Nicaragua might be another. It all depends on your point of view and what you’re aiming to do. Take this story as you may, and may it help you out someday.

Vemos! -k

Peace Corps Diary #6

How’s this grab you for a goofy, lighthearted, somewhat inappropriate introduction: I’ve been kicked out of the Peace Corps. Here’s why:

Last Picture Taken Before I left Pespire, 5th May, 09

An Abrupt Change of Course:

I don’t know how to write this; I’ve been staring at a blank page trying to begin for a while now, and all I can think is that I’m in some twilight zone, some alternate dimension, that I didn’t just get kicked out of the Peace Corps. Except I’m not. I’m out, gone, finished, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my friends.

The morning of 21st April, with no warning, no inkling that I was about to end my life here immediately, I got a phone call from the Duty Officer (the person we have to update with our whereabouts) which is really unusual. Generally it means that you’re about to get an answer to a question you asked, permission to go somewhere, or you’re in deep shit. I hadn’t asked any questions, I wasn’t going anywhere, so I knew that I was fucked, just not why.

“Hola”

“K, this is L. How are you?”

“I’m ok, getting ready for school. What’s up?” I’m late, don’t have time to chat.

“K, we need you to come in to Teguc. And bring all of your belongings.” What in the fuck?

“L, what are you saying? Am I in trouble?” What did I get caught for?

“I can’t say K, you need to come talk to T” (country director) I am so screwed!

“L, I don’t understand – what’s going on?”

“I can’t tell you K, I’m sorry. You’ll understand when you come in.”

“L, can you at least tell me what I need to pack?”

“Everything. When can you be ready to leave?”

“It’s 7:15 now? I can be ready by 9.”

“Cheke, vaya pues.”

And then the line went dead.

I sat on my bed and just stared. I wasn’t even completely dressed yet, had been rushing to get to school on time, putting on my pants. However, I couldn’t sit still for long, so I got up and started putting my things into bags. It was the worst feeling I’ve had in a long time; dread, fear, confusion, anger. What the fuck was happening? Why was I getting called in? What did they find? Do I have to leave? What am I not being told? I continued in this vein for a while, stumbling around, packing quickly, unable to stop my racing brain from jumping from one worst case scenario to another.

I told X first, since she’s my best friend here and I’d be one sorry son of a bitch if I didn’t let her in on what was going on. Host family found out next, or at least Don M and the house staff. My mother was at work already by 7:30, so I couldn’t tell her in the same way. M asked me what I would do if I was removed from the Peace Corps, and I told him I just didn’t know. Saint that he is, he offered me his house rent-free for a month, gave me a hug, and told me that God makes everything happen for a reason. I smiled, said I hoped the reason was a good one, and went back to my room to pack my life into the same backback, duffel, and laptop bag that I came in with 2 months ago.

It all just barely fit, and luckily I had X there to help me, though by help me I really mean watch and tell me how she’s going to miss my sorry self. Still, that helped too. The whole experience felt surreal by this point, and I remember sitting around afterward on my bed, with my pitifully tiny pile of possessions, and thinking that I’d blown the best thing in my life and I wasn’t even sure how.

Not that I couldn’t make a few guesses, but really I couldn’t think of anything that I’d done that would get me singled out by the Peace Corps for some sort of admin action. I don’t want to be one of those rumor spreaders, but the stuff you hear about going on as a PC volunteer is as hilarious as it is contrary to the big book o’ rules. And aside from a few minor indiscretions, I thought I’d steered the straight and narrow pretty well – I was one of the ones using the malaria drugs, mosquito nets, taking all his meds and making sure that I did every scrap of homework and reading. I called the Duty Officer to update whereabouts whenever I so much as went for a walk for too long, kept good tabs with my host family, did everything I could to keep myself on the white side of that gray line. Compared to some people I know of, I’d been a less-then-perfect angel. The beach trip was my main concern, but that went by the wayside when I talked with the other people who had been there with me, and they weren’t going anywhere.

Thus it was with a whole lot more confusion then fear that I loaded my bags into V’s Landcruiser, hugged my crying host mom goodbye, blew a kiss to Pespire, and left for presumably the last time. It was, looking back, one of the worst moments of my life. I didn’t quite cry, but I might as well have. My spirits were crashing, I was pretty much hopeless. And without even knowing why, I started dreaming about running away, ditching the Peace Corps and living on in Honduras without them. I could do it! I realized in a flash that all my training and all my classes had been for exactly this – to live on my own in Honduras without the help and guidance of the staff. It was a wildly silly idea, but it comforted me and kept me sane on the ride north to Teguc and my execution.

The other thing that kept my spirits up was V. He cajoled, told jokes, gave me strategies to keep Trudy from throwing me out, told me how all I needed to do was hold my tongue and I’d come out of it ok. I don’t know if he really believed it, but I do know that it kept me from flipping out, grabbing the wheel, and sending us careening off the mountain pass right into that gigantic dam the Italians helped build. (Or at least, that’s what the sign says) Still, it was a long, bitter, frustrated ride, as V and I went through all the bad things I’ve done and tried to figure out what, if any of them, could be sending me home. He was stumped too, and so after a while the conversation drifted to sports, to politics, to his family and kids. V is really a great guy, and writing this now I realize I have to thank him sometime over the next week for all his help. He’s really been the gallo mas gallo of our Peace Corps training, saving everyone’s bacon, driving our gringo army around, and just being a genuinely cool and funny guy. Sitting there talking with him, I remember thinking that I would miss V, just like everyone else I’ve met here.

Getting into Teguc, we passed V’s house, a lot of fast food places, and spent more time in traffic then I want to think about. I was starving for more, I realized. I’d gotten just the barest taste of the life down here and loved it, and now I was about to lose that love forever. I gawked, I stared, tried to take mental notes and pictures. I wanted to keep every second of this place forever, just as it was. In the back of mind I remember thinking; at least you’ve got all your writing… But that just made things worse, as I knew my book, the Peace Corps Diary that I hadn’t really named yet, was going to hell. Who reads a book about 2 months of Peace Corps service? Only the sad depressed writer, that’s who. “I’ve got to snap out of this,” I said to myself out loud. V looked at me and smiled. “You’ll do fine. I don’t know what’s going to happen in there, but if what you’ve told me is true, you haven’t done anything worth getting kicked out for.” I felt a little better after that, but only enough to keep myself breathing. We inched toward Peace Corps headquarters, and I prayed for a pileup collision, or maybe an act of God to keep us away.

No such luck. Around 11:30 we pulled into the back parking lot of the Peace Corps headquarters. V pulled into the gate as it slid open, and we idled between the now-closed gate and one of those drop-down arms like you see at railroad crossings as a guard with a gun popped the hood, checked for bombs under the car, and checked V’s ID. Never once did he actually look into the vehicle, so the giant fertilizer bomb we’d brought with us went undetected. V wished me luck, I left all my things in the car, and I walked into the main building. Here’s where things got interesting.

L met me in the front lobby, shook my hand, told me how sorry he was that I had to come down here. His face told me that I was gone, gone, kicked the fuck out, goodbye, but that it wasn’t what he wanted. I got the same looks from everyone else there. S, the front desk lady, the Spanish teachers walking past. Something big had happened, everyone knew I was going to be gone, and I still hadn’t even figured out WHY! L led me upstairs, and we sat outside the office of one Trudy Jaycox, director, Peace Corps Honduras.

I’d met Trudy before, well less met then sat through her speech on how she was a hardass, and rulebreakers were ruining Peace Corps, and how she wasn’t going to tolerate anything from us. X asked her a question on that date, and I forget the exact wording, but it was about whether Trudy’s focus was on the rules or on helping people. Trudy’s answer? “I run a tight ship.” So I figured I knew just about what was going to happen once I stepped into that office. I took a few deep breaths, drank a glass of water, and sat there in stony, creeping silence with L. He tried to talk to me a couple times, and I gave him noncommittal grunts, and he apologized again, and I felt really bad for the guy. It must suck to have to be in his shoes, doing the dirty work he doesn’t agree with. I hope I never have to do things I hate just to keep my job, because it’s pretty devastating, if L is to be an example.

After 5-10 minutes waiting, Trudy called us into her office, and as I walked through the door, this was her opener: “K, sit, I’ve got some bad news for you – you’re not going to be continuing your Peace Corps training, and you’re not going to be sworn in as a volunteer next month with your class.” She started to immediately go on, but I cut her off at this point. “I don’t even get a hello?” I asked, partly reeling, partly determined to throw her off her game. JC, the security officer, tells us at every session to change the situation, throw your attacker off her guard, get control. Here was a pretty good time to try to put it in action. So we exchanged pleasantries and inquired about each other’s health, which was absolutely ludicrous in the situation. I did love how confused it made L look though, along with Trudy.

So we sat down around her table, and Trudy asked me what I knew about the Cal State Fullerton Daily Titan. I told her that a friend had put some parts of my Peace Corps Diary entries in them, and asked her if this was a problem. Trudy responded that I needed to ask permission for this sort of activity, and I apologized, telling her that I had meant to, but the story had been published before I had gotten a chance to, and I was still trying to figure out who exactly I was supposed to contact. She ignored this, and told me that she was displeased with my language (exact quote, you said the s-word 2 times, and the f-word once.”) and that she had been further displeased when she went online to search my blog and had found it password protected. She asked me for the password, and I politely declined. She went on to say that she had done a series of searches for my name, citizen k, and had found my Twitter account. This, she said, was the bigger problem.

T-dog told me that she had gone through my Twitter comments and read many instances of profanity, vulgarity, references to alcohol and illegal substances, including, and this part was in a super-serious voice; The suggestion that someone ought to send you Marijuana. I couldn’t help myself; I bit my lip to keep from laughing out loud. Part of it was the indignant, serious, borderline irate voice here, the other was the fact that I knew, being the writer, that she had read all of my inane, sarcastic, sometimes witty, usually stupid Twitter comments, and taken every single one at face value, and completely out of context.

This actually happened too – Trudy pulled out a stack of paper 150 sheets thick and dropped it on the table. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, as if it was a bomb, or some guilt-proving piece of legal evidence. “This is every Twitter message you’ve ever sent. I’ve highlighted all the ones that show inappropriate behavior.” And she had, which was rather impressive, though I did like the fact that she’d highlighted every tweet I’d ever done that contained swearing. This, it turns out, is a fuckload. The stack even had a coversheet of the worst of the worst, the marijuana joke, a few about drinking, one about being hungover, one about the awkward encounter with the 17 year old cousin (last email) and the one about how we all wanted Jesus to just die already after the Stations of the Cross. Minus any context, minus any desire to learn the stories behind these messages, with a focus only on rulebreaking and running a tight ship, it must have been some sort of damning proof of my lack of character, but to me it wasn’t even close. It was Twitter messages – I’ve said worse, and actually meant it.

Still, since she was making the decision and I wasn’t, I tried to reason with Trudy, to put the tweets in context, since 140 character sarcastic little word bombs leave a lot of room for interpretation. I walked her through the stories of a few of the quotes she had picked out, and even though I got L to crack a few smiles and laugh once, Trudy just sat there stone faced and frowning. “And you think this justifies your actions?” she asked in the tone of voice that tells you the question is quite rhetorical, you pathetic little piece of shit moron scum detrius. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong here. I think this is a difference of opinion, and you’re kicking me out of the Peace Corps because you don’t like my language.” And sure enough, after another 15 minutes in which I offered everything from destroying Twitter, writing an apology in the newspaper, and sucking an unspecified numbers of dicks, she dismissed me from her office, telling me that I had a choice between resigning and being administratively separated, which is a nice way of saying thrown out on my ass.

Now, here’s the thing: there was a good deal of lying going on in this meeting, and for once I wasn’t the one doing it. Trudy didn’t tell me that only admin-sepped people can really fight the Country Director’s ruling. She told me that her decision was the only one possible given what I’ve written, which isn’t true, since the Peace Corps handbook pretty much says you’d have to be writing something crazily racist, offensive, anti-Peace Corps to be kicked out. No, really Trudy was kicking me out under the little clause that says “at their discretion, Country Directors can remove trainees from the program at any time.” This was a personal, discretionary sort of boot, but they all feel pretty much the same when they come in contact with your rear end. There were a few other lies too, like the fact that I had to leave the country immediately, that I couldn’t stay in Honduras, that I would be an illegal alien without my Peace Corps Passport, that the embassy would get involved if I tried to stay. Scare tactics and outright lies work just fine when you’re not given the means to defend yourself, and when your only potential ally is staring at his shoes and pretending not to be there.

I wandered around the Peace Corps compound for a while, called my dad, and decided to resign, since I might want to rejoin Peace Corps at some point (hooray lying Country Directors) and really because I knew I couldn’t fight this woman. From all the stories about her, I knew she’d thrown out people for getting robbed, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for breaking all sorts of petty and inane rules. My case was just going to be another future example of how truly off-the-wall mean and strict Trudy is, and how you need to keep away from her at all costs. Helping Honduras be damned, its the rules that really count down here, and don’t you forget it. So I went upstairs, told Trudy I would resign, and started the process of destroying the life I loved piece by piece. Then we went and got lunch together, and had a very civil conversation about how people don’t often get the right impression of others, and make terrible decisions based on these faulty assumptions. As you might guess, I chose the topic.

The only consolation I had in this chain of ridiculously complex and bureaucracy-laden events is that Moneybags, one of my close friends since that first gathering in DC (sushi and sake) was also ending her service, though of her own volition. I was walking shell-shocked out of the main office when I saw her sitting on a couch outside the medical building. We hadn’t seen each other since the programs split off to their different sites, and we gave each other the most deliciously confused faces. “What are you doing here?” we both asked. It was a very welcome surprise to have a comrade through all of this, and I drew a lot of strength from the fact that I will never let myself bring those around me down. Her presence made me act happier, which in turn actually made me happier, because psychosomatic stuff works like that. We really couldn’t do much that afternoon, save close out our bank accounts, get physicals, and return a few items, so we spent a lot of the afternoon and evening hanging out at the hotel, using our computers, catching up on each other’s lives and watching crappy American TV with Spanish subtitles. As far as a last night here could go, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

I stepped out a few times to call people, took major advantage of the TIGO plan that gives you free texts all day after you send 10 of them, talked to probably half our training class, and received all sorts of support and well-wishes that I needed. I also got a cool 10 phone calls from members of my host family, all of whom asked me if I would forget them, if I would come visit, would I like to stay anyway without the Peace Corps… My host dad repeated his offer of rent-free living for a month, and made some generous offers about helping me find work. It was about this point that I realized exactly how much of a sad-sack pushover I was being. How in dog’s green earth was the Peace Corps going to force me on a plane after I wasn’t a member? They forfeited their right to do that, and if I wanted to stay, then nothing Trudy Jaycox could say or do was worth the hair on her upper lip about that. But did I want to stay?

There were a lot of compelling reasons not to stay, not least among them the fact that I was going to be without a job, without much money, utterly alone, and after this stunt, public enemy of the Peace Corps. (Trudy would make sure of that.) I also would have to rely on my nascent Spanish, accept that I was going to be very alone and very vulnerable, and figure out how to live without the support structures and safety net of Peace Corps. Was I up for the expatriate life? I certainly wasn’t prepared for it, but was I about to make a crazy run for the unknown? Money told me I was crazy, and that if anyone was going to run off and do something as stupid and wild as escape into Honduras and try to live, it would be me, which made me quite proud though it probably shouldn’t have. I thought about it a lot that night, sent out a text message to all my Peace Corps friends saying goodbye and giving my contact info, and resolved to sleep on it. Only to X did I say I was going to stay.

The next morning, 22nd April, I was up at 7 giving bags of my poop to a man in a lab coat. These he was going to test for viruses, bacteria, little friends I’d picked up, anything irregular. Money was there too, and so I got to witness a fantastic exchange between her and the doc about how one of her little jars of poop wasn’t fresh enough, and how she’d have to come back with another deposit later. Then he took our poop into the other room, and invited me to come have blood taken. What followed made every first responder and biology-knowledgeable fiber in my body scream in agony, revulsion and fear. This man proceeded to draw blood on me barehanded, without even washing them, then squirt my blood into a little tube, which he poured into a third tube and partly on the table. If that man doesn’t have the HIV already, he has a guardian angel or a magical immune system. He broke casi every rule of medical safety in one go, and I’m just hoping he didn’t pass anything on to me.

After that terrifying event, I walked (NOT ADVISED in Teguc by Peace Corps) the few blocks back to the Peace Corps office. There I met with one of the Peace Corps doctors, the one who had done my physical the day before. She gave me the end of service anti-malarial drugs, some advice on insurance, and my medical records. I was pretty much numb by this point, so after a half hour of nodding, signing papers, and getting my life back, I wandered back out into the courtyard of the Peace Corps compound, and sat around on a couch waiting for the staff to show up and let me finish the abbreviated, getting thrown out on my ass in the street version of leaving the Peace Corps. After a while I met with the cashier and found out that Peace Corps wanted all the money back that they’d given me a few days before. I had it, plus some, but I didn’t feel like giving it back if I was going to be living here, so I walked back to the hotel, grabbed a few hundred Lempiras out of the stash of 1200 I had, and paid that plus $5 plus my living/travel allowance of the past few days and was more or less squared away. All that was left to do after that was get my plane ticket and travel allowance ($50!) and take the long sad ride to the airport.

A, the same driver from the day before, and I spent a good 40 minutes in traffic talking about nothing in particular, sports, politics, bullshitting. I apologized to him for being in a terrible mood and he told me not to worry about it. I asked him if they always saddled him with the ex-Peace Corps members, and if they all got treated like felons or just me. He just laughed and we kept inching forward. By 11 we were at the airport, sitting outside the terminal. I said goodbye to A, hoping he would just drive off and let me be, but he parked and followed me inside the building. I sat in line to get my passport looked at, wasted as much time as I could, but A stayed right with me, a few feet behind and to my left, staying in my blind spot and never letting his eye off me. I was getting the full criminal treatment, and he was taking pains to make the experience as miserable as possible. Fuck it, I thought. Lets scare Peace Corps a bit.

When it was my turn to approach the baggage check-in, I smiled at the lady and proceeded to flip her world upside down. “Hi miss, I hope you don’t find me some sort of wild criminal, but I need your help with something. Can you make this process take as long as possible?” Her smile and cheery expression shifted from 5th straight into reverse, tore itself apart, and the twisted remains were very confused indeed. “Excuse me sir? Are you asking me to take my time here?”

“Yes, I want you to make this process take as much time as possible.You see, I don’t want to get on that plane, but the man leaning on the wall back there (quick jerk of the head in A’s direction) and some other people are pretty much forcing me.” Lets see how she handles this one.

“Are you some sort of criminal?” Yeah, that’s not the reaction I was going for…

“No, no, not at all, I just ran afoul of the rules of the organization I was a part of, and they’re shipping me home in a hurry. I’m hoping to stand here a few minutes, and when that man isn’t paying attention, slip out the side door.” Well, now its all out there, hope she’s one of the good people.

“I see… well, lets get started.”

To my utter amazement, she did exactly as I’d asked, taking a solid 5-8 minutes to take my passport, examine it like it was something fascinating, new, and possibly valuable, to read me all the information off of my ticket, to confirm I didn’t want to upgrade anything, to tell me about my flight. (Peace Corps sent me to San Diego via Miami, just for fun.) The other 2 lines open swirled past us, a blur of anxious travelers, efficient agents, and desires diametrically opposed to my own. I used the pocket shaving mirror my dad had given me before I left to watch A lean against the wall and stare over at me. About the time I was beginning to think that A would stand there boring holes in the back of my head forever, he got a phone call, and stepped around into a nearby hallway.

This was it! I thanked the agent, grabbed my ticket and passport, grabbed all 80+ pounds of my luggage, and did a fast little shuffle to the nearby door outside. Here it is, I thought, the point of no return, and I’m in too much of a hurry to even enjoy it. I was just about to step outside when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around and A was there, looking at me profoundly puzzled. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked in the first English sentence he’d spoken to me in 2 days. “You speak English?!” was the first reply I could come up with. It was like that joke about the 2 muffins in the oven, or those 2 horses, or any other joke where the punch line is “Holy crap a talking ____!”

“I spent 2 days stumbling over myself talking to you in Spanish, and you know English?!”

“Yeah, but I thought you were trying to practice. Your Spanish isn’t bad.”

“Thanks.”

“Welcome. Where are you going?” Oh yeah, that.

“I dunno, but I’m not going home just yet. There’s nothing there for me.”

“I can’t let you leave. I have orders from Trudy to do everything short of forcing you physically to board that plane. I could lose my job.”

“I’m willing to tell her you tried your hardest.” Not like I gain anything by telling the truth to Peace Corps…

After a couple minutes, in which I told A what I was getting the boot for, and he expressed amazement that that was on the seemingly infinite list of things one can get removed for, we reached an agreement. I would give him my ticket and tell anyone who asked that he had done everything possible to keep me at the airport, but I’d slipped out without him noticing, and in return he’d give me 5 minutes before he called the office to report my disappearance. We shook hands, he wished me luck, and I walked out into hot sticky Teguc a free man, borderline broke, and strongly questioning my own sanity.

Outside I hailed a cab, loaded my stuff inside, and we took off for the only bus station I knew of that went South, Mi Esperanza. 80 Lemps it cost me, and I found out later there were at least 4 stops closer to the airport, but as I watched A watching us drive off heading North, I knew it was $4.25 well spent. Hit the bus station 10 minutes later, and boarded a bus leaving in 5 minutes for Choluteca. I pretty much had time to throw my bags aboard, climb into the bus, and it was rolling. Found a seat, and just then my phone rang. It was L, calling on the Duty Officer line. I answered reluctantly, only to hear him laughing. “K,” he told me, “I have never heard of anyone doing what you’ve done, and I don’t even know what to say. Are you going to be ok out here?” I told him I had money and friends, and with those two things I’d survive quite nicely. He wished me luck, laughed again, and told me I was pijo loco. I definitely was, and doubtlessly still am.

Turns out that I had gotten on a bum bus; bad transmission left us going 10-15mph through the mountains to get home, and the whole time the grinding gears and burning clutch gave me the distinct feeling that we would plummet off the next sharp turn and die a firey death in the (magnificent looking) valleys below. I stared out the window the whole time, smile plastered on my face, watching the world crawl by and angry motorists whip around us horns blazing. I couldn’t believe what I’d done, but not in a bad way. I just really doubted I’d go through with the plan, that I’d actually take a running leap off the deep end without my floaties on. As I was still airborne, it was todo pijudo, smooth sailing. I had no idea where I might be landing, but the sheer joy of being free blew in my face with the fresh air.

Hitting Pespire almost 3 hours later, I hopped out, pulled my bags out of the under-bus compartment, and staggered fully loaded into the town I’d left 18 hours earlier. It felt… different. This wasn’t my training ground, I wasn’t a Peace Corps member, I had no compelling reason to be here. It was just a place where I happened to know people, a safe place in a strange world. I dropped my things off at the house, showered, and felt the creeping edges of exhaustion, fear, and sadness setting in. The family wasn’t home, just Marie, the live-in cook/housekeeper, and though she was happy to see me, she had things to do. I needed a cigarette, a beer, and a friend, and luckily all three of those happened to be around, in the form of the most catracha gringa I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in my short time here. Pulling out my phone, I called Natalie.

What I mean by “catratcha gringa” is that Natalie had adapted far better to living in Honduras then most of the people I’d met. She’s the one who taught me Honduran card games, how to swear, knew all the local dances, and talked, walked, and acted like a local. She also happens to be the poolhall-frequenting, hard drinking, hard smoking, subversive type, which is exactly what I needed at this point. I knew she was in town teaching the WatSanners something today, and so when I called her to find where she was, it turned out she was done teaching, so we met in the hotel to drink a few beers.

We sat around for a few hours, nursed Port Royals (local Pilsner, one of the better local beers) and talked about the craziness I’d just pulled off. I guess the news had spread already, because she greeted me with “holy fuck you ran away at the airport?! I bet Trudy flipped!” Nic has her own issues with Peace Corps which aren’t important right now, but she definitely isn’t harboring an overabundance of love for the T-dog. We sat, she smoked, we drank, and we talked about what in the hell I was going to do next, having burnt all my bridges and taken the aforementioned dive into the unknown. After a while the other WatSanners showed up and we had a round. It was a good time, but I noticed pretty straight off that I was already being treated differently. Like I was damaged goods, like I was something that could potentially hurt them. Found out that they’d all been warned that I wasn’t allowed to be around Peace Corps functions, and that administration was gunning for me. It was my first taste of the unpleasant parts of being ex-Peace Corps.

Luckily Nicole made up for it and then some with her relentless cheerfulness, jokes, and general happiness at the havoc I’d caused. We talked some more about my getting a job and a visa while the rest of the group joked and chatted among themselves, and I was painfully aware of the fact that they’d formed their little circle of chairs excluding Nic and myself. Still, I was happy – I’d pulled off a great escape, was free, and had at least one great friend who was happy with me. A few beers later we parted ways, and I headed over to Carlito’s house to play soccer with the other half of the team.

I got a great greeting here, not entirely because one of the teams was down a man and they needed a 5th. I stepped in on the teacher/local team, and we ended up winning 3-2 with a great off-the-wall one-touch around Jesus into the back of the net, after a wild game in our little dirt and weed field. It felt good, the running, the playful ribbing, and I was in a fantastic high state, except for a little nagging pain in the back of my head. We parted ways, I stepped out to walk home, and as I made my way back I first realized that the little pain was spreading. Migraine. Well, there goes my evening. It was Katerina’s birthday party that night, but when I get one of these, I’m down hard for at least 12 hours. Quickening my pace I raced to make it home before the storm hit.

I barely made it home, vision streaking, brain aching, sweating heavily and with full body aches appearing with wild rapidity. I stumbled into the house, caught my second wind as the family approached me with hugs, smiles, and tears. Everyone was so amazingly happy to see me that I couldn’t help but to be glad as well. As it turned out they were all going to San Pedro Sula (biggest city in Honduras, to the Northwest) for some business dealings, and I was to have the house to myself for a few days. Then they left, quite suddenly, and I was alone again in the big house.

Well, not quite. The two girls were there, and it proved impossible to convince them that I had a nauseating headache and couldn’t see, so after 15 minutes of trying I gave up and said goodnight, and they followed me as I stumbled to my room, asking repeatedly why I wasn’t going to the dinner table. I couldn’t make them understand, not by telling them I had a massive head pain, not by saying I felt like I was going to vomit, not by any means that my jumbled brain could manage to put together. I barely made it into my room, remembered how filthy I was, dragged myself to the shower without most of my vision, took a pathetic attempt at washing off the sweat, dust, and mud, and more or less crawled back to my room to collapse naked and sweating on my bed. Marie spent the next half hour knocking on the door, and when I stopped answering the same question over and over, stuck her head in through the window and asked a few more times. I pretty much couldn’t speak after this, and I think that sticking her head through the window to see me nude and in the fetal position finally got through to her in a way my words never could. She pulled her head back through the window and I lay there spinning for an eternity before falling asleep.

Citizen K, Illegal Immigrant:

Here they have an expression, which might actually be part of the slang of all Latin America, “mojada” which means “wet” as in our own hateful “wetback” as in just crossed the border. For those of you that like knowing the roots of the words they use (probably just me) it comes from the fact that you have to cross the Rio Grande to get from Mexico into Texas. Hence, when you got into the US, you were mojada, and just happened to be an illegal immigrant. I had my own mojada moment right after leaving the Peace Corps, and it went a little bit like this:

Because I’d fled from the airport so suddenly, and so unexpectedly, I did happen to screw one thing up in my flight, and that was that I had left a small yellow sheet of paper, the immigrations and naturalization page from my passport, on the airport baggage counter. This came back to haunt me, as I was in the country on the Peace Corps’ passport, which 3 phone calls the previous day from Trudy, L, and others at the main office had made abundantly clear that I had to return NOW. So after a half-day in bed, I got up, ate, tried and failed once more to explain that I had not come to have dinner because I had a terrible head pain, and took the bus back to Teguc, back into the belly of the beast, back to Peace Corps headquarters.

It felt a lot different heading back in, because I knew that they had no hold over me this time. I smiled at the guard as I signed in at the gate with my now-useless PC ID card, and walked straight up to Trudy’s office. Nobody stopped me because nobody was there – it was lunchtime in Honduras, and that means everyone goes and eats a communal lunch, which is a pretty cool way of going about things. They definitely work to live, not live to work. Anyway, if Trudy was surprised to see me in her office again, she didn’t show it. We sat down and talked, and I asked her if she’d given any thought into reversing her decision to let me go. Thus began an hour of mental chess, a polite, calm, occasionally cheerful verbal battle to the death. I sweetly gave her business advice that really was a nice way of telling her nobody trusted her decisions. She told me that she was so very sorry, but the Peace Corps would have to charge me for the plane flight I hadn’t taken, because that just was how things went. I apologized for how I’d assumed Peace Corps would prioritize helping people over following rules simply for the sake of rules, and Trudy smoldered. I eventually got her to agree to have someone help me transfer my visa from my PC passport to my personal one, so I thanked her and left. Fighting a passive aggressive war is the stupidest thing in the world, but I had the concession I needed, so that’s something.

After that we parted ways, I met up with one of the women from the Peace Corps office, and she and a driver took me and my 2 passports to the immigration office. Here’s where things got a bit complicated. Turns out that that yellow page I’d left in the airport wasn’t necessary to change my visa from one passport to the other except if one’s passport stamp was smeared. Mine was. Also, a search of the computer for my records revealed that I had left yesterday on a plane to Miami, and my visa had been thus terminated. I was, the woman on the other side of the counter told me, an illegal alien, subject to a $125.00 fine I couldn’t afford, and required to leave the country immediately. It was just like the Peace Corps’ proclamation, except real and enforceable. All of this was final, I was told, unless I could find that yellow sheet of paper that proved I existed. Thus we headed to the airport, and I pondered a second wild escape in 2 days.

Arriving there, we found the United terminal completely deserted, since apparently there aren’t flights every day, and eventually flagged down a passing custodian to ask directions to the immigration bureau. Here we explained the situation, and proceeded to search through the yellow immigration sheets for every person who had left the airport the day before, which is how I know that 297 people left Honduras on United flights on the 22nd April. Went through every page, one by one, and nothing. I got really down at this point, and we did it again. Nothing. I contemplated saying that I needed to use the bathroom, and pulling off another escape at that point. As I was waiting for the right moment, one of the men from the office held up a sheet triumphantly, and sure enough it was mine. A quick visa transfer and I was good to go for another month, after which time I have to leave the country to receive another 90 day visa. Why couldn’t I have been kicked out a week later, after I received my residency card?

After a trip back to the PC office, said my goodbyes again, asked JC for directions to the nearest safe bus station, since he’s the best person to ask about that sort of thing hands down, and walked a half block to the bank to change some money. I gave the woman $50, got 940 Lempiras in return, and realized for the first time that I might be able to live quite a while off of my $250 all-I-have-in-the-world savings. Heading back outside, caught a cab, and traded life stories with a 34 year old cabbie named Dominic (this is a real name, value it accordingly) After he dropped me off at the station, I rode the bus home sitting in down the aisle, packed in front of a gassy old man doing the same, and next to a woman who didn’t seem to notice she was elbowing me in the head, because she did it quite often. Maybe someone told her gringos like that sort of thing.

I got home, second time in as many days, but this time was different. People greeted me in the streets, kids yelled my name to me, I ran into at least 5 people I knew on the way home. It was great. I felt a lot more stable, more at home, like I could actually make it out here on my own. I know not what the future may hold for me, but with friends, a supportive family (both here and at home) and adventures to be had, I’ll give it my best shot. After all, worst case I’ll run off and have myself a grand Central American vacation, and that is in itself pretty appealing.

My New Family:

So I feel a bit guilty realizing now that my host family hasn’t come up as often in my emails as they ought to have, but it isn’t because they’re bad – on the contrary, they’ve totally included me in their lives, to the point of calling me their oldest son and inviting me on family vacations – but because they’re busy as sin, working their faces off to keep up with the competing needs of managing a hotel, a chain of stores, and businesses stretching between Pespire and Teguc. I’m often working different hours then they, and in the evenings I’ve been spending much time with X, as we try to cope with the fact that each of us is going to be a 2-day bus ride from our best new friend for the foreseeable future. (Actually, we don’t KNOW this yet, but it’s fairly certain.) Anyway, I just thought I would toss in this little profile of the family members so you get a feel for the people I live with.

The first thing you ought to know about this family is that they’re patrons of the town. They have their thumbs in every pie, their tentacles spread to every corner of small Pespire, and they know pretty much all of what goes on, and control a fair bit of it. This isn’t a bad thing, just a relevant bit of knowledge that gives an idea of the what the family is and does. They’re busy people, and often we see each other only in the mornings and after 6-7 pm. They run their businesses, hotel, and spend their free time exercising or visiting family. They might be the wealthiest family in town (definitely the most visibly wealthy) but they’re not the idle rich – in the time I’ve been here, they’ve taken one 2-day vacation, and the other members of the family make up for it by dropping by to visit often. Yeah, busy, well-connected, respectable family.

The kids live in Teguc, where their attend school, university, or work. Like most Hondurans, they’ve had to go into the city to keep advancing in life, so the oldest son is manager of the family store in Teguc, the oldest daughter is married and living with her husband, the 23 year old daughter is at university, and the youngest son (who I see most often) is attending a private school there. The rest of the extended family lives in and around Teguc, mostly in the neighborhood I talked about visiting last email. Every weekend some of the kids, or occasionally large groups of family members, will come home, swim in the pool, play PS3, and complain about how boring Pespire is. I’d say something snarky about that, but I used to have much the same reaction to San Diego, so I’ve no room to talk. We all think we grew up in somewhere boring, because that’s our baseline.

What this means is that every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the morning, there is a flurry of activity, noise, and buoyant family members floating around the house. (Oh yeah, that’s a pun.) However, it also means that during the week I pretty much have to keep myself busy, because nobody is around. The majority of my days are spent either working, exercising, or doing what I am now, sitting in a hammock typing page after page or surfing the Internet in slow motion. Not at all bad, some days you just need to unwind alone, but I wonder how well it’ll suit me once all the other PC kids leave. At least some of the host families, X’s especially, have told me I ought to come visit. Time to integrate into my community to the fullest. Anyway, this is sidetracking to the extreme, but what I meant to write is that I really have been fortunate to meet this family, to have been put up in this living situation, to have been offered the kindness and love of a gigantic (20 sets of aunts and uncles!) Honduran family. We get along great so far, as the next part shows, and I can tell this is one of those life-long friendships they warned us we might get into early on in Peace Corps training.

Heart to Hearts with a Whiskey Chaser:

My host dad and I have developed a really healthy spiritual exercise that we follow at least once a week and it isn’t going to church, though we do that as well. We never consciously decide to do this, it just follows naturally from one of our conversations, and once the ball starts rolling, it’s pretty much impossible to stop. I’m talking about guy talks, the serious heart to hearts, where you, in a very manly way of course, tell each other just how grateful you are to have the other around, and then spend the next 5 hours talking about various subjects.

The key ingredient to this just happens to be alcohol, that glorious social lubricant that keeps the world turning and ugly people getting laid by people far prettier and far more desperate then themselves. We had another of these just last night, when I took a break from writing and walked down into the backyard to do some pullups. My dad was sitting under a tree with a Corona, and he offered me one as well. I took the last one out of the cooler, and while I was drinking it he disappeared upstairs and brought back a 1/5 of whiskey and a shotglass. My thought: oh shit, I’m not getting this email done tonight. What I should have thought: Well, here’s to spending tomorrow nursing heartburn and a hangover, and tonight blitzed out of my mind.

We then proceeded to take 6 shots of whiskey apiece, which I haven’t done since I was in those curious prime college years where your friends dare you to do stupid things. The difference being, I guess, that this wasn’t a dare, just a war against my stomach lining for purposes unknown. He almost poured me a 7th, but I told him that I needed to grab my swim trunks, and hurried upstairs to change. Got into my bootyhuggers and came back down to swim a few laps, when the whiskey decided it was time to say hi. We’d taken them quickly enough that the 6th was in the door before I’d finished properly introducing myself to the 1st, and so I swam a dozen laps (like 4 strokes apiece) to get my head clear. Then another dozen. I didn’t want to be this messed up, I remember thinking. I had plenty of things I needed to do. Still, pride is a powerful force, and social pressure to heed the wishes of the guy who is making your entire life possible is even moreso. With a bit of reluctance, and the general countenance of a man facing a firing squad, I swam back to the side, hopped out, and got down to the business of drinking.

The secret, incidentally, to drinking a lot of booze has a lot less to do with body size or average consumption as it does mindset. If you come into the drinking war secure in the knowledge that you have spent nights hugging the toilet, or passed out on a couch in some slummy house only to wake up covered in crudely drawn penises and “HOMO” written across your forehead in sharpee, or worse, thrown up in a girls’ mouth when the two of you were making out (way to go, other Devon!) then there’s a pretty good chance you will come out of it just fine. If you have experienced the terrible effects of a night of binge drinking, it gets seared into your brain, and every hard-fought night of keeping too much down, holding it together when you’re well past done, becomes your weapon the next time you’re swimming in booze. I’ve had enough rough experiences with alcohol to last a lifetime at 22, (sorry M&D, it’s not something I’m proud of) and so I can generally hold my own against most anyone.

Take my host dad. He outweighs me by an easy 50 pounds, and his age and experience ought to give him an advantage on me in this sort of contest. Still, every time we sit down to drink, its him who gets wasted, and me who drags him off to bed at 2 am. This night was no exception, and after a few more whiskey shots he got real open, and started telling me the most heartbreakingly kind things. For one, my dad uses “vos” to refer to me now, which is a verb form used only among close friends and family. To be “vos-ed” by a Honduran is a compliment of the highest order. He also told me repeatedly how much he cared about me, referred to me as his oldest son, and repeated his earlier story about how I was the one who made him trust white people again. Actually, I don’t think I’ve written that down so here it is:

Basically, the Peace Corps hounded my host family for 8 months to get them to accept a volunteer, because the family had had a terrible experience with their last one. She was impolite, didn’t like their food, insulted the mother, and generally spent as little time with the family as possible. After her, the family decided, and my host dad swore, that they would never host another Peace Corps volunteer. As my dad put it “I would never have another gringo living in my house. Never.” Anyway, they were worn down by 8 months of phone calls, visits, pleading, to take another volunteer. My host mom consented eventually only a few weeks before I arrived, but my host dad did not. He remained adamantly opposed to my living there even after I arrived. (This explains why I didn’t see him more then once in the first week.) However, he said that my humbleness and kindness made him reconsider a ban on all white people. As he puts it, God sent me to the house as a message to him not to be so hasty with his judgments. Really, the story is so much more vivid in Spanish; I do it no justice here, but it choked me up a bit, and still does, to know that he thought so highly of me. I’ve a lot to uphold here.

Back to last night. We drank well over half a 1/5th of whiskey, which is just a retarded amount, and hung out in the pool, with him telling me over and over how much faith and love he has in me, and me trying to say something even half as meaningful. Later we talked about his business, swine flu (sorry, that name is offensive apparently) and how I really need to get paid by the NGO if I work there. Finally, around 1:45, we staggered up the stairs to bed, stopping in the kitchen for a glass of wine to help us sleep, he said, and to knock me the hell out, as I thought to myself. I made it to my room, dropped my suit and towel, drank a lot of water, flossed but didn’t brush because I wasn’t up to move, and passed out mostly on my bed.

Diving Into Development Work Feet First:

The Friday after I left the Peace Corps, I had an interview with the meru meru, el jefe, the boss of a local NGO funded by the European Union. I don’t know a whole lot about them, except that they have very slow wifi that I spend a good deal of time stealing, and they seem to be involved in or in charge of all the community aid, organizing, and development work that goes on around Pespire. X and my host dad both put in a good word for me, and after my reassurance that I hadn’t been removed from the Peace Corps for anything seriously bad, J, the boss, offered to let me try the work for a week and if I could prove I was up to it, he would consider letting me stay on. It all sounded a bit vague for my tastes, but then, my whole life is vagary, unfocused adventuring, and flying along by the seat of my pants, so really who am I to complain?

I started Monday, 7am on the dot, at the NGO campus where the Peace Corps has been using their salon for its air conditioning and internet. We’ve (ack, its weird to talk about Peace Corps and not use we) I mean they’ve gotten a ton of help from these guys, and so I was pretty familiar with the place, just not what it was they actually did. I helped out with a wide range of activities, starting with a run down to the town of Langue (lahn-gay) to pickup up Leah, a Peace Corps engineer from the class before ours, and one of the most gorgeous girls I’ve met down here. Roddy, one of the NGO drivers, and I took the 45 minute drive down toward El Salvador, past beautiful rolling hills, to remote Langue. There I gave Leah a shock, walking into her local counterpart’s office where she was on the computer and asking in my best SoCal bro accent “is uh like Leah here?” (Her response: What are you doing here?! Didn’t they kick you out?”)

We drove back to Pespire, got our assignment from J, (sounds so James Bond) and set out on the worst roads I’ve yet encountered to San Juan Bosco, a remote community 20km and 1 ½ hours from Pespire. They’ve been trying to put in a water system for at least 3 years, but a lack of funding and a comedy of errors cut the last attempt short. We’ve been pulled in to update the project, and hopefully oversee its construction. First, we had to meet community leaders to get an updated list of who lived there, what buildings had been added, and what changes the community wanted added. It was the sort of thing that might only take a phone call in the states, but here we had to drive to town, find someone who knew the boss of the junta de agua (water board, water commission) then drive around looking for him, eventually finding him painting a house on the outskirts of town. He was a wizened old man of perhaps 60, strong in the hands and arms, in dirty jeans and a bloody shirt, the corner of which he was using to dab a large cut under his right eye. I gave him the emergency toilet paper I keep in my bag, and with that firmly pressed against his face, he set about telling us the details we needed. That 20 minute talk completed, we drove back to town to celebrate with pineapple juice, coke, or peach soda, depending on who you were. We thanked our guide and took the 1 ½ hour ride home, with me snapping pictures all the way. Lesson: simple tasks take all day, be patient.

On Tuesday I was supposed to head out early with Sam to visit local junta de agua members and drum up support for a training session on Wednesday, but he had other things to do in the morning, so mostly I dozed under a tree and updated my phone on their wifi network. After a good 2 ½ hours of this, and a lot of questioning my reasons for having come at such an early hour, and sweating profusely, Sam came back out from whatever he was doing and and we took a motorcycle into the back country. Or rather, he took a little 70s Yamaha and I hung on for dear life as we rode down the highway at 30 miles an hour and 18 wheelers flew by and slammed us with gale-force winds. Fortunately (I thought at the time) we turned off the main road fairly quickly, onto a dirt one that seems to be the turnoff for most of the communities to the South and East of Pespire. However, we took a new turn this time, and in short order we were bouncing, bumping, rocking, and dodging cows on our way down one of the worst roads I have ever had the displeasure of traveling.

For miles we worked our way down this rocky path, and I had the distinct impression that my brains were turning to jelly from the constant battering we took. It wasn’t nausea I felt, it was more a difficulty thinking, a sense of vision blurred by the vibration of the road, and a constant sense that I was one gravel patch away from falling off the bike in my loose-fitting helmet and short sleeves. At one point we stopped in a small town and drank cokes to get the grit out of our teeth, and I played with kittens so skinny they looked half dead. Overheard a great conversation between schoolkids too, part in broken English, about how it sucked to speak a foreign language because you never understood what the native speakers meant only what they said. I looked at them at that point and deadpanned “I know exactly what you mean.” Sam and I laughed, then resumed beating ourselves up after that.

The point of all this was to get people to meet up the next day for a training session on water systems, hygiene, maintenance, and administration. Really what this meant is that someone had to go around door to door to talk to people, make sure they were coming, and give them some advice on what to bring. It also meant that we drank a lot of offered drinks, sat around on a lot of porches, and spent far too much time on the short roads between small communities. At one point we got stuck in a tight spot on an uphill grade with a couple trucks coming the other direction, and had to stop to let them pass. This meant that after the trucks went by and the dust cleared a bit, we had to try and build up momentum again and climb the hill. Sam gave it his best, keeping the gear low, climbing steadily, but the hill was small boulders, and we were pitching and yawing all over the place. It got so bad that I was getting rocked slowly off the back of the bike, until I was just barely on the mudguard. I yelled at Sam, but just then he gunned it to climb another steep section, and I let go of him and tumbled off the bike. Nothing bad, a 2mph fall can’t do too much damage, but we had a good laugh and I spent the rest of day covered in dirt and looking like a guy who couldn’t ride a motorcycle. Lesson: Sometimes bailing out early beats hanging on tenaciously until it is far too late.

Wednesday and Thursday were almost identical; Sam, Ricardo, a SANAA (gov’t water agency) guy, and myself took a truck out to Espinal, one of the communities close to Pespire, to teach the class we’d been recruiting for the day before. Along the way we picked up half our students, and followed other trucks down the dusty dirt road. This meant that we, and especially the people riding in the bed, were completely covered in dust and grime by the time we started. I looked like a raccoon whenever I had my sunglasses off, and the site we went to lacked running water. We sat around spitting grit and sipping small cups of water from the 5 gallons we’d brought, and then set up the projector and my laptop while the audience trickled in.

Ricardo, the SANAA guy, started us off, and after a brief intro, turned to me and told the crowd “And here is K, an expert on water system design and maintenance.” Really?! I’d been put on the spot before, but water systems expert? I clean them, can probably replace most of the parts, understand how they work, and have minimal MINIMAL experience in the rest. It’d be like calling me an expert in economics because I devour a lot of books on the subject and read some very good blogs and periodicals. Anyway, it turned out alright because Ricardo had a whole USB drive full of presentations, slide shows, and videos, and so we really just kept switching between these, elaborating, doing group activities, and expanding upon the points already made. I ended up impressing myself by running the group through how to maintain a water system entirely in Spanish without looking or feeling like an idiot. It actually was pretty cool to be in the teacher position for once, and it helped that the people who came really wanted to learn. Lesson: sometimes you just have to throw yourself out there and see what sticks.

Thursday, since we were continuing the same lectures, was very much the same in most regards, except we switched the focus to admin work, which I know a lot less about. I mainly worked the projector and computer, and little eeepy (that’s a cross between my eee pc and eevee, from Wall-E) really got through her paces. Still, between discovering and reading all the hidden files (read, pornography) on Ricardo’s USB stick, working automatically with the projector, and reading every file type and random drive we plugged into her, she played a great village bicycle and never complained once. Way to go $400 computer. You kick ass. Lesson: Ubuntu makes Windows look bad, per the usual.

Friday was a holiday, Mayday, which the US doesn’t celebrate much because we’re scared of commies, but here it meant we didn’t have work. Instead I had a lot of fun with Sam rebuilding his semester-long project that had somehow gotten totally destroyed when his hard drive crashed. 6 ½ hours of Excel, Powerpoint, and recovering corrupted data, all the while trying to explain it in Spanish. Can I just say that I love how you can trick Windows into working with corrupted and recovered data just by manually changing the file extensions? Brilliant. No work though. Afterward I went to visit friends, play Settlers of Cataan, and home. That I guess counts as a work week, right? Lesson learned: as soon as people learn that you have some skill with computers, they suddenly begin to have problems. These problems will gradually escalate in intensity until you’re their network administrator. Gah.

A Night of Culture, Fine Storytelling, and Bindhi:

Just to prove my life isn’t all work and no play, I went with X the other night to meet some of the other friends she had made while I was writing overly long emails and playing UNO and getting hammered. These two had always sounded like an interesting pair, both development workers from Europe, one Italian, the other Belgian, and both a bit older and loads more experienced then I in the ways of the world. So I was happy just to tag along and see what would come of it all, and maybe even find a couple local friends out of the deal. Networking, you know, that whole “its who you know” schtick that you think is a load of crap until you realize that twit Tim Geithner (or however you spell it) is Treasury Secretary, and you cry a lot as the dollar loses value like I will lose weight the second I get Dengue Fever. So anyway…

Turns out that Marley, the Belgian world traveler-turned-NGO-worker, had 2 friends visiting from Europe, and Jake, the hilarious Italian guy with an affinity for going shirtless, was going to be cooking dinner. I was introduced to everyone, rapidly forgot names, and we carried a table outside to try and beat the heat, which kinda worked in the sense that occasionally a breeze would ripple through and dry a layer of sweat on us so we could build up a nice base coat. X had brought henna to tattoo each other, but instead we drank some delicious mix of guaro, pineapple, OJ, and ginger ale that was pretty much rubbing alcohol, but actually tasted great. If you can find some Guaro, which might not exist outside of Honduras, I recommend it highly. After that the girls (really X) had the bright idea of trying to make a “three-headed-monster” which is about 99.6% less sexual then it sounds. (The 0.4% is because someone got a foot to the boob.) Basically the girls tried to make stack of themselves that if it had worked would have looked kind of like 3 girls stacked on top of each other, or if you’re drunk enough and/or crosseyed, a monster of the three-headed variety. It worked great, as far as I’m concerned, because nobody took a header into the concrete.

Actually, before that all went down, we met the pet iguana, who was less a pet and more an iguana sleeping above the pila in the bathroom. He didn’t move much, but he was the life of the party. Then after the woman-pile, we got into deep conversations that the French girls (oh yeah, the girls visiting were French, worked for Kraft, and one of them was starting a 9 month tour of the world) kind of were able to follow, and at some point we all started wearing Bindhi, the little sparkly line down your forehead that you may recognize as being a Hindi princess thing, or if you’re me, you’ll still be unclear as to what exactly it means. I’m sure there are pictures on the Facebook. Anyway, it was a great time, and I discovered that spaghetti and tuna is actually awesome if you have a real Italian cooking for you, but if you cut it up he’ll act as if you cut a part of his heart out, ate that too, and claimed it needed more salt and/or garlic.

After dinner we got into a fantastic conversation about traveling, and it turned out that Marley had spent 18 months living out of her backpack, traveling the world, and sightseeing. She had a thousand stories, and with the rest of us chipping in, the girls breaking into Flemmish and French, Spanish and English mixing freely, it was one of the most enlightening and beautiful conversations I’ve been a part of. It was just so free, so open, so full of life and love that I didn’t want to leave, and we sat up talking until well past midnight. If only this sort of experience wasn’t so fleetingly rare, beautiful like a moment you’re nostalgic for as it is happening, this life would be so much the richer. Sadly, all good things must end, and so when the girls left the next morning for a few week vacation, and I headed to work groggy and disoriented from lack of sleep, it felt all the more surreal to have run into this group in the middle of Pespire, Honduras. I hope we’ll be fortunate enough to do it again sometime.

Crippling Bouts of Depression and Doubts:

Ok, so they’re not crippling, but I really like the way that title rolls off the tongue, even if it is misleading. Say it a couple times. That said, having thrown my entire life into limbo and run off seeking adventure and what-have-you has given me an ample amount of time to doubt myself. In addition, following my usual peaks of highs and lows, I’ve moved into one of the lows, so I’ve been extra vulnerable to just getting down, cratering into my own psyche. It’s been a struggle to keep myself moving, happy, and motivated these past couple weeks, especially as all of my friends here are moving into the site assignment phase of training, and getting ready to become full-fledged Peace Corps Volunteers.

For me, the hardest part is that I can feel the gap between my teammates, my close friends, my comrades and I gaping wider every day, as the tidal wave of Peace Corps carries them on to the next stage of their journey, and I struggle with the mundane details of everyday life. They get to do the projects, build things, take field trips and play in the river, and I go out to the aldeas and teach community leaders how to repair their water systems. Sure, I’m doing good, and its great that I’m able to do the work I am, but that doesn’t replace the feeling of being part of something, of coming together with other motivated young people to work and grow and hopefully accomplish something big enough to matter. I just can’t help it – every time I’m around my friends, with their talk of site assignments, projects, where they’re going, what they’ll be doing – I just want to scream at the utter unfairness of it all. This was my life dream, the voice inside rages, and I’m watching from the sidelines, a bit character clinging to the edges of a story that once was his own. Maybe I’ll feel better when they’re all gone.

Most days, I don’t really interact with my old friends anymore. Our paths move in different directions, I’m busy with my work, them with their training, and so unless someone makes an effort we’re not going to run into each other. To complicate matters, my good friend Ms. Jaycox has made it abundantly clear to the staff here that my presence around them, around Peace Corps activities, around my friends will be at the price of their future service with the Peace Corps. In short, if I’m involved with them, and she finds out, heads will roll. I found out as much from the Program Training Director one day after we were playing soccer. It baffles me how someone can make this sort of a threat and not realize that all it can hope to accomplish is further damage to the program, to the Peace Corps, to Honduras. All because I wrote naughty words on the Internets, and then stayed around to work harder then anyone else will have to to try and help without Peace Corps assistance. Man, if people like me are the enemy of Peace Corps, then I would be fortunate if I had the same sort of enemies.

The net effect of all this is that my friends are afraid to be around me. They don’t say it, and if I show up where they are they won’t kick me out, but nobody aside from X has contacted me since I came back. It’s disillusioning to carry on a one-sided relationship with people, and after I realized I wasn’t going to get invited to anything anymore, I’ve pretty much given up being part of this same team. I feel bad about it, because I know friendships are never lost because of just one party, but I think that it says a lot about how our relationships actually were; I thought we were all friends because we were the same sort of people, but really we were friends of opportunity, like the friends you work with and then never see again after one of you quits. That’s the part that gets me down, that makes it hard to be around everyone, to force a smile. I’m not one of them anymore, and I never will be. They’ll go on, have their Peace Corps experience to live, to treasure, to tell stories about their entire lives, and I won’t have any part in that, except as a small footnote in the introduction, a face in a few photographs, and a little tangent about the people stupid or unlucky enough to get kicked out.

And Yet, Life Goes On:

I’m sitting outside today writing, and my host father keeps coming out to give me some company and another alcoholic beverage. So far we’ve had 2 beers apiece, a half bottle of wine, (in pint mugs, to keep it classy) and he just gave me a slug of whiskey that would knock me down a few pegs even if I hadn’t skipped lunch today to sit and write and get over my hangover from last night. (Yeah, and Peace Corps made a big point of telling us how much drinking is looked down upon here.) So I’m sitting here, munching on a carrot, drinking whiskey, thinking, writing. It’s a life I’m quite ok with, especially after the booze sets in. I’m starting to come to terms with not being a member of the Peace Corps any longer, and while I’m far from happy about it, I’m not going to let it take me down.

Everything has its yin and yang, and there is an upside to not being in the Peace Corps – I’m not held to the same rules, I can travel, I’ll definitely make more money. I don’t have to obey a capricious old woman who long ago forgot the purpose of the Peace Corps. I can stay out past 9pm. Maybe I’ll buy a pickup truck, if I can scrape the cash together. (turns out US drivers’ licenses work down here too.) I’ve been given my freedom back, and what I do with my life is no longer clear or straightforward. I’ll have an adventure, that much I’m sure of. The trick will be in finding out just which type. I’ll find out soon, I imagine, and that too will be part of the fun. I’ll keep writing it if you’ll all keep reading. And actually, since I’m not Peace Corps any longer, you can spread this one to your friends. I’d love to actually do something with writing, and this is one way to start. Anyone know a newspaper I can start writing for?