When Things Don't Go According to Our Plan By Genesee McCarthy

Last year at around this time I began the application process for postgrad service. I did extensive searches and found a program that I fell in love with. Their sites, their mission…everything about it seemed perfect. It had a very lengthy application that involved writing pages and pages of personal essays but I knew it would be worth it. In April I got a call from them about setting up an interview. I was so excited! I remember preparing for the interview and feeling like this was so right, this is exactly where God wants me to be, I just knew this was the program for me. And then they called and instead of interviewing me, told me they thought I wasn’t ready for international service.

I was extremely heartbroken. I had to rethink all my plans and motivations. The belief that I could live abroad was shaken to the core.

After that I still wanted to do service, but I concentrated more on school and writing my senior thesis. At graduation I still had no idea what I was going to be doing in the fall. I was lucky enough to stumble across two other programs that also had sites I was interested in and whose applications were not nearly so long. I applied to them both and waited without too much hope.

I went back home for the summer and picked up a babysitting job to fill my time and take my mind off of not knowing what I would be doing. I ended up hearing from both programs within a day.

After phone interviews with the two programs, one really stood out. The interview was great, a nice, honest chat, and at the end the director told me they wanted to send me to Bolivia. I went to a month long orientation from July to August and I left September 8th.

I had looked over this volunteer group at first because the website seemed a little outdated and there wasn’t too much info online. But I am so glad that I ended up applying because it is the perfect place for me. I am at an orphanage with over 100 girls in a small town in Western Bolivia that has been receiving volunteers for almost 20 years. The nuns that work here are so much fun. They have incorporated the volunteers into the daily life at the orphanage and really depend on us. It’s great having a set job and knowing what is expected of me. Also, the community is so used to having volunteers that we were incorporated with open arms right from the beginning.

I absolutely love being here and feel so blessed that I didn’t give up and found the perfect program for me.

Gen with some of the older girls she works with in Bolivia.

(The program that I found is the Salesian Lay Missioners. They are sponsored by the Salesians of Don Bosco and the website is: http://www.salesians.org/slm/)

Speaking in Public: In Spanish

I do not get nervous when I am preparing to speak to a crowd of people. I am a freak of nature I suppose: I hate chocolate, find great joy in running, and relish the opportunity to speak in front of 10´s or thousands of people.

I remember leaving the United States and sitting in that Miami airport with two thoughts preoccupying my mind. I think when we are going through a shocking transition our brain has a beautiful and uncanny ability to not focus on what might be too much for us and instead allow us to preoccupy ourselves with rather trivial matters. For me that day, holding a bottle of Odwala juice in my hand and a speech by Greg Boyle in the other, I feared two things: I won´t taste orange juice this good for two years and perhaps more frightening yet, I will never be able to speak in public like I did back at LMU, back in Albuquerque.

We all have talents and sometimes they are obvious. The really good athlete finds little room to hide on the court or field and the intelligent student is reinforced every 9 to 18 weeks with a piece of paper that can speak volumes with one vowel: A+. I was one of those kids that went through high school generally OK at everything but great at nothing and it was not until college that I realized what my talent was: public speaking. I have given several speeches over the years from crowds of 10 to 2,000, and almost every time is without a script and oddly enough, without a fear.

But coming to South America, I was not prepared for many of the realities that would greet me but I was sadly, ready for one: It would take months, years, or maybe I would never reach a point where I could speak with the same clarity I spoke with in English. Hindered by grammar and a lack of vocabulary, how could I ever move a crowd like I had in the past? I just discovered my talent, and now I thought I was sidelining it for two years and feared even more if I would ever be able to recover it…

And so sitting in the conference room at the language institute looking at this crowd of eyes looking back at me I felt like laughing and crying as for the first time in months, that old feeling crept back into my body. Here I was facing a group of Spanish speakers, about to tell them what my service journey means to me. It would be a short speech, all of about five minutes, but as my mouth opened to give my first speech in a foreign language, my heart skipped a beat with an ever joyous and unbelievable clarity: I am ready.

I still do not speak Spanish correctly. I get the verb tenses wrong (for God´s sake there are 14!), am short on my vocab by about 40,000 words (according to mi MINI dictionary), and mix basic sentence structures up because I am translating from English to Spanish rather than just speaking. When I spoke to this group though, I did not speak from a mind that was busy trying to translate words from one language to another: I spoke from my heart, incorrect verb tenses, simple words and all. I spoke with a belief that became a desire to reach these people despite the many barriers that stood between us. Words from the heart coupled with a genuine and sincere conviction in what it is you want to say and I am convinced you can still reach people, still move them to feel what you are feeling.

In a volunteer life more often than not defined by the humbling recognition of our inabilities, I had my five minutes to shine, my five minutes that taught me what might be the most valuable Spanish lesson I will receive here in Bolivia: if you want to communicate with people, search less in the textbook, and more in your heart where language has the ability to become universal. I'm listening to Kite by U2 at this moment and can´t help but scream out the lyrics with Bono ¨I'm a man, not a child! Whose to say where the wind will take you, whose to say what it is will break you, I don´t know where the wind will blow!¨

I made a connection a few nights ago, I gave my first ¨discurso¨ in Spanish, and throwing humility out the window, it felt frickin great! And if that weren´t enough, the juice is even better out here, and a hell of a lot cheaper! (=

Please remember to shop smart this Christmas and read the blog about Christmas about 2 or 3 entries back now.

It Was Never About the Money

It´s the feeling of being violated that really eats away at you. I was frantically searching pants and jacket pockets already searched hoping for a result I knew was impossible. My next step was to process whether or not I could run down a moving bus already a couple hundred yards away. No, impossible. DAMN! About the same time I became resigned to my fate I imagine that someone on that bus was leafing through the wallet they had so smoothly robbed me of, and smiling at their discovery of a Credit Card and US $50 (a goldmine by Bolivian standards).

And yet, the money, even though it is close to a month´s salary, was not what was on my mind. Make no mistake I felt pain and anger, but if there is anything positive to take from the experience, it´s that $50 and a Bank Card were the least of my concerns. Instead my mind drifted to the photos of family and friends I had kept with me throughout the years. I thought of the Magis Man card I had treasured for years, a card I read when I struggled with my reasons for being here, going through all of this, and it angered me to know it was gone. I thought of the quotes I had scribbled down over the years on scrap paper and napkins, some for inspiration, others to never forget a funny moment with a dear friend. I even thought about my old university ID and State of New Mexico Driver´s License, momentos of a life lived in that seemingly foreign land: The United States of America. All that, momentos of my identity were gone, and with it, something else was speeding away with a bus, something I so desperately hoped to never lose.

There is the inclination immediately after being violated to lash out at the world. I try and be honest with these reflections so I must confess that it took a few minutes to remind myself that this did not happen because I was in Bolivia, it could happen anywhere, and if anything, it happened because I was foolish and not secure enough with my belongings. But still, in Bolivia or LA, there is a profound hurt inside not only about the sentimental items lost, but indeed about a sentimental consciousness that deep down wants to believe in the good of humanity.

In the end, it is not about the money or the credit card or even the photos and quotes. The financial items are easy enough to replace, perhaps a statement of how extremely lucky I am even in my most unlucky of moments thus far. The pictures too while never being the same again can be replaced by new photos of old friends, perhaps a greater gift than keeping the old ones around. And the quotes too while gone forever will eventually be replaced, full circle by other moments of inspiration, other joyous moments I won´t soon want to forget.

Buddha has a quote that says we can´t travel the path until we become the path itself. I am sure he had a different meaning in mind than what I have in mind, but in an attempt to take a lesson from every experience, every moment, I must say thankfully a part of me is able to give thanks for this robbery. She (the gut works in such a way that I am almost positive I know who it was) robbed me of a wallet and she robbed me of a my trust, but she reminded me that it is the very pain and darkness in this world we stumble through that enlivens us with the desire to do what little we can to fill it with joy and light.

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” Aldous Huxley

In other news, I am rebuilding my collection of sentimentality, any cool photos, quotes, or good memories (quotes and memories prefered on scrap paper or napkins please!) between us can be sent to the following:

Asociados de Santa Cruz
Attn: Patrick Furlong
Casilla 238
Correo 11
Santiago, Chile

(=

And now more than ever, please remember to shop responsibly this Christmas.

Meeting my Great-Grandfather In Bolivia

I saw my great-grandfather today. Walking to school like any other day, but suddenly I noticed him. There he was, sitting in a ditch just outside the gates of the language school. He sat alone and he looked tired. His face was dirty, and his eyes looked lifeless, sadly, even hopeless. But in his face I could clearly see the man who chanced and sacrificed so much for me, never knowing what his efforts would produce. But here we were, me looking at him, clearly seeing a man who escaped the vicious poverty of Ireland that left him little options but to escape to a supposed better life, to become an alien in the land of opportunity. So here I stood, looking at a living face of history: college degree securely behind me, the world optimistically ahead of me. I looked into these curious eyes which looked silently back at me. How would I respond?

I had so much to say to this man, so much built up but as I looked into his brown Bolivian face words were a luxury neither of us would have that day. In the refuge of our shared silence, I could only hope that somehow he knew what was racing through my mind, what I so badly wanted to tell him but at that time, had no ability, perhaps even no right to say.

If I could look into this native and dark Bolivian face and out of it pull the image of my own family, I hoped he could look back at my pale gringo face and somehow in me, see his own kin. I wanted him to know that the poverty which pretty much was assigned to him at birth because of the location of the world he was born into angered me just as much as when I thought about the wretched poverty so many in my family endured in Ireland. I imagined what it would be like if years from now, my path and his were to cross again, but this time in Chicago or Los Angeles, where he had perhaps attempted to escape a life of poverty to claim what was his right as much as anyone else’s: a chance to feed his children and give them an opportunity at a life other than vicious and dedegradingoverty. And so I imagined seeing him in LA, working some difficult dead end job for little pay and no benefits, and I wanted to let him know that illegal would not be the word I would disdainfully use to describe him. For was not my own great-grandfather an alien in a country that promised opportunity, a treasure in his time he perhaps discovered somewhere behind the many signs and want ads that read ¨Jobs available: Blacks and Irish NEED NOT APPLY! ¨

I do not know the real face of the man I would call my great-grandfather. I know he lived in an impoverished land, escaped it and fled to America in pursuit of something more and for that, faced severe discrimination. He endured so much, even his own child, my grandfather, endured so much for me, and sadly, I do not know what they looked like. But all that got me thinking, imagine if we were able to look at the real human face of poverty and ¨illegal¨ immigration, and political rhetoric aside, we were able to see in that once foreign face our own family who at some time or another struggled against the odds and discrimination to get us where we are today.

I saw my great-grandfather in the face of an impoverished Bolivian today, and against the odds of our cruel and spiteful world, I hope in my face and my experience, he was able to get a glimpse of his own kin. Only when we identify with that face and see our common good linked to theirs will we begin to understand it is the poverty that should be illegal, not the person.

When my great grandfater came to America, he was greeted by these words on the Statue of Liberty..."Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door"

I wonder if we will put the same words on that gigantic wall we want to build across the Mexican border?

Oh the Mountains We Will Climb

After another restless sleep, I woke up in a coughing fit and already short of breath. The journey had not even began, and here I was, in my bed, battling a cold and as a result, receiving a not so pleasant reminder that my asthma was anything but happy here in this altitude. Perhaps I should have been thinking about that all a little bit more, but at 4:30 AM I had only one thought running through my head: I hate chocolate.

Not only did I hate the bitter taste of it, but as I stuffed it into my hiking bag, I was fearful of the end result of the equation that kept running through my head. Lots of chocolate + a hot sun = melted chocolate = a dirty backpack. But to climb a mountain like Tunari, I was told I would need all the chocolate I could find. For energy, my favorite Auzzie climber told me the night before. Reluctantly, I through the chocolate in my bag and said a prayer, not to survive the 16,000 peak in spite of my asthma and sickness but instead, only so that the chocolate might not get my bag dirty.

And so hopefully you can place yourself in my shoes at that moment when I stood half way up this mountain, exhausted and out of breath, and reaching into my bag found a chocolate that was not melted, but in the contrary, frozen. Standing in my three layers of clothes, drenched in snow, and numb from the cold, I could not help but laugh at how wrong my prediction had been. I came expecting abundant heat, almost left my third layer at home for the day, and throughout the entire hike found myself in frenzied and freezing conditions where my sunglasses, brought to protect my eyes from the sun, were now the only thing that protected my vulnerable eyes from the flurry of snow that attacked my body.

There were indicators that this day would end up as odd as it did. First, waking up sick and short of breath. Or perhaps the eerie and unusually silence the streets of Cochabamba provided that morning. Of course it should have became more evident when my hiking group narrowly avoided walking into the middle of ten sticks of dynamite a work crew had planted to blow up a part of the mountain. As we scrambled for cover as little rocks flew closer and closer our way, perhaps that was the moment it should have clicked today was just going to be one of those days. And yet, all the snow, dynamite, and mind and body numbing wind could not have kept us from our goal that day. Walk, climb, or as was the case near the end, crawl, I needed to make it to the top of this peak. That same determination I feel in marathons crept into my cold bones that day on the mountain. Perhaps I was chasing after what would in the long run be an insignificant feat. Perhaps, ok, never mind, yes, it probably was stupid to do it in the condition my body was in. But you must understand that this mountain presented the opportunity to, for the first time, conquer my surroundings, rather than let them continually conquer me.

And so as I stood atop the 16,000 foot peak, looking down on the clouds, entrenched by the frigid air and surrounded by a flurry of rapidly falling snow, I felt this peculiar peace that allowed me to remember all those times I stood barefoot on the sands of the Pacific Ocean watching the sunset over that big mysterious body of water, all at once aware of how big this world was, and yet, what my special place was in this world where I truly stood as just one more insignificant dot on the map. I belonged to nature, and nature belonged to me. The world was an incomprehensible mess, cradled intimately just below my finger tips for my eyes to capture. I found refuge and happiness in the peaceful silence that greeted my jubilant shouts of joy. It was my day to be in charge, my day to not let language or anything else bring me down. When you stop and look at our lives, it is as though we are on a continual hike up a mountain, and for one brief moment, I reached the top, took a break, and soaked the view in. And what a view it was.

Cuestion de Fe

As he reached for the bottle of beer, I figured our drinking would begin. Instead, he opened the bottle, poured some of the beer onto the wall of stone in front of us, and quietly with knuckles already red with blood grabbed for the sledgehammer again. He turned to me, with a serious look of conviction in his eyes, sweat on his brow, and told me, ¨es cuestion de fe.¨ Silently I watched, repeating to myself what he had just told me, ¨it´s a matter of faith.¨

There is so much I want to share with you all and so much that is building within me, but all I want to say just will not come out right. I am tripping over words in Spanish and now even in English, and thus, the high altitude of Bolivia is not the only thing that has got my head spinning.

It was not until the day I journeyed to Quillacollo that I felt capable of sharing a little more about life in Bolivia.

I woke up early one Friday to navigate the ever so crazy streets of Cochabamba, a city that does not believe in stop signs or traffic signals, only good horns, and better breaks. Our destination: Quillacollo, a place place rooted in the history of Bolivia, where it is said the Virgin de Urkupina appeared to a person in need of help (sound like a famous virgin in Mexico and elsewhere?). At this shrine, I watch as my host family, who I have known for only two days , purchases a little toy house, fake money, and bottles of beer. Do not fear my friends, the beer was neither little or fake. The legend around this place we were visiting is that if you pray to the Virgin for what you most need, and return with those little items you bought and provide as offerings, she will provide what you need in full. I was both intrigued and confused.

It´s a matter of faith, es cuestion de fe, Pablo, my host brother told me, as we hiked up this large hill. We said our prayers to the shrine of the Virgin, and climbed some more, casita, beer, money, and now, a sledgehammer in hand. The sole purpose of the sledgehammer is to go to town on this huge rock, and any chippings that fall off, no matter big or small, must be saved, and returned the next year in order for your prayers to come true. And so as we approached the wall, more prayers were said, beer then poured out onto the wall and the ground in front of it, a tribute to the pachamama, or mother earth, a Bolivian tradition that is done frequently when consuming beer, because it is to the Pachamama that we owe our gratitude for life on earth.

For the next thirty minutes, my family hammered away at this wall of stone, collecting every little chip, big or small, that broke away as a result of their hardwork. They worked tirelessly at this task, explaining to me that you just can not pray for the things you want, you must in some way work for the things you want as well. Es fe, cuestion de fe, I hear over and over until it is engrained into my own head: it is a matter of faith. I look at my host brother, hands red with his own blood, face wet with his own sweat, and realize that this rich culture that has found a way to maintain its cultural native routes while blending the Catholic religiosity that defines so much of Latin America perhaps has a thing or two to teach me.

And as much as I would love to have the story ability to more effectively tell the story of this sometimes exciting, sometimes bizzare journey, but I realized through this experience with my host family, I can´t tell it. It simply has to be a matter of faith that those who need to understand, do.

The Morning After: Point for Bolivia

Bolivia has a way of tempting you to enjoy all it offers late into the night, even in a way my college days could not rival. In college, the bars close at 2:00 AM, but here, here the night goes well into the morning. Perhaps it is just the Latin American culture that has us playing by these crazy rules, or perhaps it is that a full Litre of beer costs a little less than US $1.50. Whatever the reason, inevitably you are spun up into the night life, enthralled in the newness and excitement of it all. Before you know it, your night out has turned into your morning journey home, desperatley hoping to catch some sleep before the sun wakes from its own slumber.

But unlike those late college nights that at least offered quality sleep well into the afternoon, mornings in Bolivia are anything but friendly to the late night socializer. Take my morning for example.

First there was the three phone calls that went unanswered in my house between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM. Then again, the dogs that aimlessly wander the streets have a habit of howling and barking at all hours of the night and morning, as was the case at 8:30 AM but this time, a rooster, dwelling somewhere in my urban neighbourhood joined the harmonious cacophony. I wish I could say it ends there, but minutes later, another early morning favorite of mine made his pressence known: the young and ambitious paperboy, walking up and down the street shouting ¨Los Tiempos¨ over and over, louder and louder, as the urgency to compete with yet another morning distraction becomes a bigger goal than newspaper sales itself. For at the same time, the old and rickety fruit truck comes bouncing down my unpaved, stone laden street with a loudspeaker similar to those from the free concert I attended last night, but this time, the announcements are anything but music to my tired ears: oranges, papaya, apples, bananas, and more.

I roll over, reasoning, logically in my sleep induced state, that if I just turn my head away from the paper thin wall all the exterior noises will cease to exist, and sleep, much needed sleep, will again be mine.

I wish the story ended there, but sadly that is not the case. The neighborhood rent a cop station is one house down. I can´t explain the reasoning, but here in Bolivia, the cop blows a loud and irritating whistle nonstop. Again, why is beside me, especially in these early morning hours. And so I decide it is time to rise out of bed. Point for Bolivia and all its distractions day and night, and no point trying to catch sleep in the midst of it all.

Later in the day, tiredness sets in, and I long for my bed, but distractions this time come from within the house: three little nieces that need me, a dance instructor with no dance experience, an entertainer perhaps entertaining only because he is foreign and at this moment not equipped with the language skills to talk his way out of the situation which will eventually wear him down even more.

But somehow, it gradually all comes together. The noise never ceases, but somehow, when I need it to, the exhaustion does and I find myself swinging my favourite 5, 6 and year old around the ballroom floor that is our living room. There is no music, not even an ounce of experience, only words I can not understand, but words that are accompanied with laughter and joyous screams, followed by the best laugh you could ever ask for.

This time, I smile as I think: point for Bolivia, and for me, point taken.