La Vida Idealist

Kiva warned me about this. Three times a year during training, the Kiva Fellows Program issues its new recruits some counsel: at some point in your fellowship, you will fall into the Trough of Disillusionment. It’s a dark and scary place. You won’t like it there, but you can’t stop it from happening. But will these starry-eyed and idealistic Fellows heed KFP’s cautionary tale? Not likely. Because when you’re sitting in the cozy Kiva headquarters, stuffing your self-satisfied mouth with delicious chewy bagels and sipping on Vitamin Water, you’re on top of the world. The “Trough of Disillusionment?” You laugh, scoffingly, through bites of cinnamon-raisin. You think, “That’ll never be me!”

Confident and starry-eyed Kiva Fellows at training

But after two months, when cinnamon-raisin-bagel breakfasts are a thing of the past and you dine solely on runny grey granola stuff seasoned with powered milk, the first cracks appear. It might start with a single bad salsa lesson, where you are chastised for cussing in English every time you screw up your enchufla y giro. How embarrassing. Then maybe, you get pick-pocketed on the bus. You lose your pepper spray. Then you get pick-pocketed again, but this time, they take your Burt’s Bees chapstick!

Then you start to notice that no-one will make eye contact with you. Market venders and taxi drivers are constantly overcharging you. Your package from the States- containing your contact lenses, prescription-strength deodorant, and mom’s homemade cookies- never turns up, even though Mom wrote “Jesus está mirando!” (Jesus is watching!) all over the outside. Is the whole country working against you? Wait- did they get Jesus to turn on you as well?

Then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. It takes just a single long day, in which your coworkers are hours late for a meeting and at 7:30 p.m. you find yourself hiking the hills of the campo in pouring rain and lightning, ferreting out particularly elusive Kiva borrowers. When you finally give up your search and start your descent from Thunderstorm Mountain, you slip. You then slide face-first and spread-eagle through the mud down the hill (effectively ruining your only good work pants because laundry never really gets clean here), kind of like the way a bird looks when it hits a glass window and sliiiiides down the glass really slowly. Lying at the bottom of the hill in a gloomy puddle of filth and your own deflated hopes, and you begin to suspect that the lost client has actually absconded with your package and is currently sitting in the warm and dry Kiva headquarters, chuckling, wearing your deodorant, and eating your mom’s cookies. Then it hits you: you are in the trough, and it is indeed a dark and scary place.

A group loan meeting, two hours late in starting, takes place in the dark

I feel awful admitting it. Particularly when my fellow Fellows spend their days suffering coinciding ailments of typhoid and malaria or battling poisonous spiders the size of their heads. Not to mention the daily struggles of Kiva borrowers and the insurmountable obstacles they work to overcome. And my complaint is: what, a bad salsa class?

At some point during his or her tenure abroad, every nonprofit or volunteer worker inevitably stumbles into the trough of disillusionment. When we leave home, we make a conscience choice to leave our comfort zones. But certain surprises crop up along the way and make this challenge more challenging yet. Your adored (ex) boyfriend cheats on you, say; or a Kiva borrower steals the one package that keeps you from smelling like a chancho (pig) in July (kidding). ‘Hiccups’ like these can make the everyday inconveniences of living and working abroad feel way suckier. And kind of like every single person in Ecuador is systematically trying to destroy you.

So how did I rise from the trough? How did I re-illusion myself? I read a lot of Paul Farmer and Amartya Sen, whose infinite wisdom flogged my petty complaints and reinstilled my sense of gloriously naïve idealism. I booked a private room in a hostel with a hot shower, which cleansed my non-deodorized armpits and washed away my cynicism. And I downloaded an embarrassing teenage television drama set in my beloved New York City, which brought me familiar images of Washington Square Park and home, while simultaneously making me thank my lucky stars I’m living and working in Quito, Ecuador for a wonderful organization like Kiva (and not living the life of an heiress on the Upper East Side).

Don’t get me wrong- I am not proselytizing bringing down a hundred jars of peanut butter and only hanging out in coffee shops and pseudo Irish pubs. Please, please don’t do this. But I guess having an occasional reminder of home helps you remember why you came out here to begin with.

Kate Bennett is currently living in Quito, Ecuador and working as a Kiva Fellow for Fundación Alternativa. This is not is not an official Kiva Fellows blog. The views and information presented are Kate’s own and do not represent the Kiva Fellows Program, Kiva.org, or any of its partner organizations.

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