All here

I’ve been home for a little less than a week.

My life has switched from teaching in the bateyes and painting murals in mountain villages to picking my niece up from school and picking Legos up from my nephew’s toy room.

In another week I’ll be back in New York and preparing for another school year.

A mentor from high school used to tell me, “wherever you are, be all there.”

Ive kept that close to my heart for years. But it means more to me now than ever before.

I was in DR for one month. I was all there.

I was in Colombia for two weeks. I was all there.

I will be in Indiana for two weeks. I’m all here.

I will be in New York for life. I’ll be all there.

It took me years to learn to be content in my given situation. To not wish for home, or travel, or routine, or variety, or whatever I don’t currently have.

I practiced contentment this summer.

There were moments of angst. Moments of discomfort. Moments of frustration. Moments of homesickness.

But I embraced those moments, leaning into them, and learning from them.

I realized that whatever I was experiencing was temporary. I realized that my home would be there, waiting for me, and I would be there soon enough. I realized that I might not ever have the opportunity that is in front of me again.

That helped me to be all there.

And yet, while I was all there, and while I am all here, those kids are still where they are.

They are still hungry.
They are still thirsty.
They are still without clothes, shoes, and basic necessities.

I am all here, in order to be fully present in my life.

But they are all there, without the option to go elsewhere.


I’m not sure what to do about that.

There is need everywhere. And you can’t be everywhere.

I feel like I’m living where I was called to live, doing what I was called to do, loving where I was called to love.

I have to think that that’s enough. That being fully present in everyday life is what my world needs.

And that by moving towards wholeness in my own spirit will bring wholeness to wherever I am.

So that’s it. That’s the end of my blogging life.

I hope that we can be fully present. Together. Hopefully face-to-face, over a strong cup of coffee.

Being Gringo

I will be home(ish) at this time tomorrow. Closer to home than I’ve been in six weeks, at least.

I’ll be on my way to my sister’s house after 43 days of Latin America. After 43 days of new lands, new people, new culture, new plants, new everything.

I will return to the familiar, to what I’ve known my whole life, to hot showers, brightly lit signs, a land of commercialized products, advertisements, and the other amenities (for good or bad) that coincide with life in a country of abundance.

It’s difficult to fully process the trip while I am still gone. I think several weeks, perhaps months, of life at home will help me understand the impact of being here, of being away.

I do, however, have some partially cooked thoughts that have been bouncing around my mind.

I think that I will miss living in a world where the culture is not my own. I love being the foreigner, the minority.

New York, specifically Washington Heights, has its own culture and I am not the majority in my neighborhood, but we are still in the states and that changes the dynamic.

The combination of not fluently speaking the language, not fully understanding the culture, not being the same color, having lighter hair, and generally being different has given me an odd freedom that I had never known.

I can get away with infinitely more than I can at home.

I am a bit of a square peg and don’t always fit into the conventions of the society around me. But when I speak the language I am forced to explain myself.

In Latin America, however, I can simply shrug my shoulders and give a confused look.

The “damas” single stall is occupied and I just drank three bottles of water so I use the “hombres” stall.

Sorry. No hablo español.

I go to the beach and sleep on the sand. No blanket. No sunscreen.

Just the weird white (but a much darker shade of white) girl.

I draw all of the time. Everywhere I go.

Weird white artist girl.

I love it.

There is no expectation of explanation for not fitting into the mold.

I will miss that freedom. I don’t like having to explain myself.

Conversely, it’s been so frustrating to not be able to communicate when I actually want to. Very few people will slow down, use their hands, and be patient enough to understand a confused non-native.

That was difficult for me. That was stretching.

You can only say, “mas despacio. Deeeeeessssspppppaaaaaaciooo” so many times in one day.

That’s when my face starts to tell the story and I can’t hide my frustration.

Paciencia, Kelly, pacencia.

I think that seeing both sides of this coin helped me to see my students in a new light. I have several students that do not communicate well in english. I have students, at times, that do not speak any English.

I realized that there are situations when theses students know exactly what they are doing, but it’s easier to shrug it off and play the language card. I did plenty of that.

I realized that there are times when these students desperately need to be understood and simply cannot communicate. I felt this way often.

If nothing else, seeing, feeling, and experiencing both sides of the coin will make me a better teacher to my second language students.

I think it will also make me a better New Yorker. I think I’ll notice the drifter much more quickly and have a chance to speak slowly, in patience and love, to a wandering soul.

Much more is bound to come from my time here. More lessons. More applications.

More time to process.

Patience, gentleness, and discernment seem like decent places to start.

collecting moments

We ended our week long art camp in Bogota today. We celebrated our projects with the community.

We shared our work. We sang and laughed and danced.

My class painted a mural in a lot that had been used for trash. It was a reclaiming of space. It was transformational.

My kids stood in front of their neighbors, tall and proud, to share their dream world, the subject of the mural, with their real world.

I stood back and watched through tear-filled eyes as they explained the process and told what they learned.

Adults from the community came to the stage, in an impromptu mic share, to express their gratitude for the newly renovated space.

We took a group photo.

It was a monumental day. I will never forget it.

All week long, though, nothing that we were doing felt significant. We drew pictures of our worlds as they are and then of our dream worlds. We picked up trash. We scraped chipping paint off of a dirty wall. We sanded it. We primed it. We drew on it. We painted it.

None of those tasks felt deserving of recognition. None of them felt noteworthy.  I wondered if I had wasted my time, wasted the kids’ time. I wondered if they would have rather been riding bikes or playing video games.

I wondered if the finished project would mean anything to anyone but me.

All of those not-noteworthy tasks ended up being noteworthy.

All of the pieces came together to make a new picture. I couldn’t see it in the moment. I could only see the pieces.

I do that sometimes. I get lost in the middle.

I forget that the details matter, the days in January when it’s difficult to get out of bed. Those days are actually the substance of the school year. They are what we stand on when we get to the days in June.

I forget that the middle is the rich part, the part that holds the flavor.

They matter. They mean something.

They make it possible to have the final projects that are so easy to recognize as mattering.

Today, my kids were proud of their work, the community was proud of their work, and I was proud of them.

We marveled at the finished piece. And I remembered that it was merely a compilation of tiny little pieces that don’t always make sense in the moment. I remembered the value of the moments we are constantly collecting as we move into the future.

I remembered the need to be fully present in every situation, to live in the now.

I remembered to not get lost.

We took a picture. Maybe I can look at it in January and remember again.

Tribes

I love anthropology.

The history of people groups, the study of their development, and the analyzation of their culture is beautiful to me.

I have such a fascination with native americans. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Northeast Ohio where Native Americans originally settled the land and, despite our bloody conquistadorian history, attempts to pay them homage are weaved in modern culture. I took field trips in elementary school to the Cuyahoga River, named for its crookedness by the tribe that settled there. Our baseball team, The Cleveland Indians, was named in a much less politically correct time.

I don’t know if it was fourth-grade social studies or not, but I have always appreciated the natives of a given land. I think that they have so much to teach us, more today than ever before.

My most recent musings on indigenous culture were spurred by a project in one of my classes last fall. We were to analyze our cultures and recognize modern tribes within. I chose “The Organics” and humorously mocked their culture, in my own right, in that I am one of them.

Just after the project, I started looking at my own life and the tribes that I see, am a part of, or have been a part of at different phases of life. I reflected on times when I was tribeless and floating in the abyss. I analyzed the world around me through this lens. I analyzed myself.

It’s easy for me to be alone. People require energy. They talk. They have opinions. Then, to make it worse, they want me to talk and they want to know my opinions. It’s terrible.

The worst part, though, is that I need people. I can’t live without them. I have tried. I got so sick of people that I isolated myself from all things that annoyed me. All that I found was that I eventually annoyed myself back into community.

The key for me was finding the right tribe. The right group of people to share life with. New York is an easy place to be unnoticed, especially if that is your goal. It took me seven years of cycling through fluff and anonymity, but I eventually found my tribe. I eventually found people that I trust. I eventually found people that I sincerely want to be around. I eventually found myself.

I thought about this again when I got to Bogota. I had been in DR for a month, essentially without a tribe. There were people to share life with. Good people. But i was relating to them with the understanding that I had not planted roots on Dominican soil. This is not to say that I did not make authentic friendships. I know that I did. We did not have shared experiences in the past that allowed us to process the present in the same context. We were working on those experiences while I was there.

Then my professor came to observe me. A familiar face in the airport. A few days of summarizing, reflecting, and debriefing. A healthy close to a month of intenseness.

Then we flew to Colombia. I saw my other professor in the airport. I saw the rest of my class at a restaurant. I saw some of the faces that I had been carrying with me.

I saw one of my tribes.

This specific tribe, this group of urban studies students, is so incredibly unique. We are devoted to the arts, to philanthropy, to sustainability, to resiliency, to hope, to faithing, and to one another in a way that I have never experienced before, at least not with more than one person at a time.

We’ve been together, as a tribe, in Bogota, for a few days. We laugh together, we dance together, we build together, and we process together.

The contrast of this experience with my month of solidarity in the Dominican has reaffirmed what I already knew. I need people. I need to process life alongside close friends that validate and support and challenge me. I need to do the same for them.

Sometimes I have to force myself into it, but I know myself well enough to know to do that.

I’m still figuring out balance. It’s never been my strength.

But I’m headed in the right direction. Towards wholeness.

With people.

It’s community. It’s the good life.