La vida chapina: 02

10 de noviembre, 2024 

Today is my last Sunday in Magdalena Milpas Altas. This town on a hill has been my sweet little home for the past ten weeks. I’ve run up and down these streets, into the forests, and around the nearby aldeas. I’ve frequented its cafés and panaderías with my friends who I feel like I’ve known forever, learned which stray dogs to avoid at all cost, and built relationships with my host family. Truly, I have felt blessed to be entrusted with pieces of their past and honored to have broken bread alongside them these last few months.

I am ready though, to go. To move out (again) and set down roots (again!) in a new place. I hope to invest more in the locals of my town—find a sports team, run club or hiking group—cook for myself more, meet my work partners and make my lil space into a home. It all feels very adult. And slightly daunting, if I’m being completely honest. But I am excited. For the running routes I’ll find, the kids I’ll meet, a new host family con quien puedo convivir. There is beauty in the unknown, certainly. In trusting that I am exactly where I need to be and that all there is left for me to do is to take the next faithful step, moving forward in both hope and humility (to borrow a phrase from a dear friend).

Right now, I am at the park, and a family of three boys just showed up. The oldest is perhaps ten and the youngest is only a toddler. He waddles around the fountain, still unsteady of his two little legs. He attempts to grab the ball from his brother, tries to scale the yellow metal fence, but he is limited by his size, unable to do all he wishes to do. Hold this thought.

I read a book in college that talked about this idea of faithful presence, which, at the time, felt like a rudimentary and anticlimactic diagnosis of how to be in the world and enact positive change. But now, as these two years of service loom ahead, it feels like the right sort of posture to embody. Perhaps the work I am given and find for myself will be dull sometimes, or hard, or I’ll be confused, lost and unmoored. Those realities I hope will not take away from the power of presence and consistency, of being invested in community, showing up in the spaces I’m invited to. I might feel like that small boy in the park at times, climbing a fence that is too tall or letting a plastic ball someone hands me slip through my hands, but if I remember that the goal is presence and strive to walk through the world propelled by those dual forces of humility and hope, I think I’ll be just fine.

where to next? I am sending out this update a week late, so I am actually already in my new home of Cantel, Quetzaltenango, and I am settling in quite well:) 

vocab: 
Aldea: little town

con quien puedo convivir: with whom I can live and share alongside of