Week 29 - This is What it's Like When Worlds Collide

As some of you may know, my father, in a fit of what can only be described as impulsivity derived from paternal love and relatively cheap airline tickets, came to visit me this last week. Much of the visit was very good, but what struck me was not that it was so good to see an old, familiar face (indeed, the oldest and most familiar), but the way it reflected my image back at me.

I suppose I should clarify that last sentence a little bit. I’d hate for you to think that I was so self-absorbed that I need to see myself in every situation. What I mean is that my dad is someone who knows virtually nothing about contemporary Guatemalan mores, and speaking Spanish is, put lightly, not his forte. In essence, he is exactly like I was when I first arrived.

When I first joined Peace Corps, I knew nothing, and it forced me to construct a new world of familiarity. Everything was new to me. Even the people with whom I came were entirely foreign. They had different educations, interests, Spanish abilities, stereotypes, and accents. Obviously, to survive here, I had to make their acquaintance.

Little by little, I became more knowledgeable about my fellow volunteers, about my host country, and about Spanish as a language. But in doing so, it remained entirely divorced from my life back home. There was no pollution of old relationships—to the people or the culture—that crossed from the old to the new. My point, if I have a point, is that everything that I’ve built here has been unique to this place.

So when my father came to Guatemala it was unexpectedly more complicated than simply having a loved one come to visit. It’s difficult to overlay separate lives, and it felt like a profound collision of my old world with my new one. I’m not saying that I am necessarily an entirely new person, or even that I’ve consciously worked at reinventing troublesome parts of my personality, but I found it uncommonly difficult to straddle both personas: I was the dedicated PCV during the mornings, then the concierge during the afternoons, the translator throughout the day, and the young adult off with his friends after my he went to bed. I loved having him here, but it was a role I wasn’t prepared for. It was a role that others had filled for me during my first weeks in country.

Mostly it felt weird to be in a condition where that was possible for me to do.

It’s happened only one other time in my life: My friend and former roommate Will L. once visited me while I was studying abroad in Athens, Greece during the fall of 2008 just before the U.S. presidential election. While there I wrote weekly emails with almost as much religiosity as I do here. Being a digital packrat, they weren’t hard to dig up. At the time had this to say about his visit:

“I'm finding my ability to speak and understand Greek has improved noticeably. I guess that's to be expected, given that I came to Greece knowing nothing and now know at least a little something, but Will really made me realize that my language classes are not necessarily the poorly-organized jumble I thought they were. I surprised even myself by having a mildly intelligent exchange with a shop owner while Will looked at all the trinkets and t-shirts that stores near the Acropolis try to hawk to tourists like, well, him. I won't go into the meat of the dialogue, but I assure you it was ripe with comments concerning where I was from, what I was doing in Athens, and the didactic nature of Sophoclean thought and its pertinence to the contemporary geopolitical climate. That is, ‘go Obama!’”

What strikes me with this is that it is virtually identical to how I feel now. My question is, is this a normal phenomenon? I’m not talking about the slow acquisition of acculturation or linguistic competency, but rather that it seems virtually impossible to see how far you’ve come without literally standing next to someone on square one? I suppose on some level it’s like anything else, the athlete who doesn’t know how good they are until they disgrace their old training partner; the child who must stand next to last year’s penciled height mark on the doorway to see how tall they are now.

I guess it really doesn’t matter; if you’ve read my other posts you know that I haven’t been too shy about making sweeping claims about personality changes. “I’ve gotten more mature with this,” or “my that has improved substantially.” Still, having a stationary target to compare myself to really helped me to see what’s really going on. As a result I feel mildly refreshed; I looked forward to going back to San Se, to continuing my life rather than staying in Antigua, the tourist heaven I idealized so much during training.

To paraphrase the immortal words of the Pampers jingle, “Mommy, wow! I’m a big kid now!”

Sorry, I forgot my camera while he was here, and so, like last week, there aren’t any accompanying pictures. Next week, I promise…