One of my fellow volunteers here at Tashirat is having a hard time. She’d never been to Mexico before and crossed the border with ideas of “efficiency” and “order” that just don’t apply here, let alone in a struggling nonprofit organization. I love her presence because it’s helped me realize how far I’ve come from when I first arrived to Mexico, when I was simply dumbfounded by the fact that a friend could show up an hour late to where we were meeting without an explanation. Now, years later, I could easily be that friend. It’s not that I’ve become unreliable, it’s more that I’ve accepted that sometimes you don’t have the power to be somewhere at a certain time. In fact, most of the time it seems like we don’t have power over most of the things that we do and the key is to realize that that’s okay.
Sometimes life isn't what you expect, sometimes it's better!
Yesterday, I woke up at 7 a.m. in a small town a couple hours from Tashirat, eager to return to my work. Unfortunately, my bank had blocked my debit card for suspected fraud (sigh) and I couldn’t get cash advances on either of my credit cards because all of the banks were closed for a national holiday. Of course I realized that I had to be at Tashirat to work at a certain time, but I also realized how little I could do and that stressing over it really couldn’t change anything. After a friend of a friend was able to loan me enough money to get the bus back, I thought back on how years before I would have been so frustrated about missing a whole day of work just because of bad luck. Not anymore!
One of things I’ve loved most about living, traveling, and working in Mexico has been the gradual acceptance of the mystery in life. It may sound simple but coming from a culture where modern science aims to explain and solve all, it was quite the shock (and then relief) to accept that some things in life aren’t simply unknown: they are unknowable. Yep, you may never know why your friend was an hour late to meet you and she’ll probably never know why the bus was an hour late to pick her up. And the bus driver may never know why the street was blocked or where all the traffic came from. Is there really any reason to ask now that you’ve got to your intended destination? And even if you didn’t, look around: maybe you ended up there for a reason?
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- The Perks of Being a New Volunteer - January 29th, 2010
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