It is four days until Christmas.
A beautiful rain came over the canyon today and feeds next year’s harvest. It appears that the holidays with bring the gift of rain to our dry soils.
It certainly doesn’t feel like Christmas. It isn’t like we have the money to go shopping in the malls, nor do you hear blaring Christmas music everywhere you go. I have talked to some of the other volunteers about it. Some are going home for the holidays. A few don’t miss anything about it. But, for the most part, it just doesn’t feel like we are missing anything. We are so far away (figuratively more than physically) that it doesn’t really even register that it is the holiday season in The States. I mean, we know, but we can’t feel it. At all.
One volunteer called me the other day upset because the family put up a single strand of Christmas lights. With this notion she realized that Christmas was coming, and the pittifulness of the attempt to decorate made her sad for a few reasons. Sad for the culture we live in and there inability to go above and beyond as the Western way requires. Sad to be so far from family and friends. Sad to be impotent in providing a solution for either of the above mentioned. We want to be able to buy every girl and boy in our town a doll, every mother a new dress, ever father a new pair of shoes, and 10 strands of lights for each family for their Christmas celebration. But, we can’t. We want to be able to fly ourselves home for the holidays, even if it is just for a few days so that we can be a part of the gatherings. It aches to be so powerless.
I was fortunate enough to be in Arequipa attending meetings a few weeks ago when Cesar’s mother was decorating the house. She kindly invited me to partake, and Cesar kindly put on all the Christmas songs in English he could find on the internet to help me feel at home. As his mother cooed over every decoration we pulled out of the single box that contained the house’s decorations I felt at home. While I don’t know these decorations, I could see my brother and I doing the same with our own. The glass nativity scene that used to be my grandmother’s, the fabric tree calendar that counts down the days until Christmas my brother and I fought over when we were little, and that ornament that I love that is a cheese house with a tiny little mouse inside hanging his decorations. It is funny the things you long for. It is also funny the things you don’t.
Our Christmas decorations are littered with nutcrackers, claras, rat kings, snow queens, and sugar plumb fairies. I couldn’t miss them less. Funny, it wasn’t until I was thinking about Christmas decorations that the idea that I am not in a Nutcracker phased my mind. While my stomach continues to flip (and probably will for the rest of my life) every time I think about ballet, now, I am at peace with it. I can watch a talented ballerina and adore the art again instead of wanting to strangle the life out of her.
While serving in the Peace Corps and living so far out has pulled me away from so much that I love, it has also pulled me away from pain. Peace Corps has given me a place, a belonging. It has surrounded me with possibility and passion. While people tell me they couldn’t do what I do, I can honestly tell them, “I couldn’t do what you do. This is right for me. This is where I fit.” Their ‘couldn’t’ referring to the conditional, my ‘couldn’t’ referring to the past tense.
This holiday season all I can do is give thanks, over and over. To have people I love all over the world and to have been kept safe in all my journeys.
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