It´s all and then it´s nothing

Wow. I´ve been out of civilization for a while and coming back into the world of electronics, lights, internet can be a little overwhelming sometimes. To be honest, I´ve been putting off checking the email and posting random blogs. Overwhelming because it reminds me a different life I had in a country about a million miles and a century of technology away.

My life is different. Not bad different, not good different (Though at times it can be both), but just different, different.

I´m struggling to learn two languages at once and feeling like I´m failing miserably. Yeah I can get by in my site on my Spanish. But, once I hop off my lancha, the people speak faster and I end up feeling that the language will never come and that I will always walk around with a puzzled look on my face. Always listening, trying to catch that one phrase or word I know, and yet somehow not comprehending.

I´m trying to live up to being a Ngobe mari (woman). But my skills fall obviously short. Like coconut peeling machete skills, fish scaling with a machete skills, splitting wood with a machete skills....okay, really it´s my machete skills. As in I don´t have any at all. Yeah, it might help if I actually had a machete and practiced with it, but I don´t. Maybe that´s something I should start with first.

First machetes, then a culture.
Poco a poco
I´ll get there eventually
Some days I just want
to stay inside
Hide in my haven
Of yellow net security.
Listening to familiar
but yet vaguely distant music.
And escaping through
another book of tales
that for a little time
trick me into beliving
that
I am somewhere else.
But on the days
that I do emerge
I am constantly surprised
by the questions
by the food
by the culture
and slowly, slowly
by the hints of friendship
that are being created.
One day I will
be that super Peace Corps Volunteer
not this day,
not the day after
but some day
Two years are waiting.
Waiting to discover all this
and more.

Hasta,
Jamie