One thing to keep in mind is that even though I no longer volunteer, that experience will never leave me. It’s with me all the time, whether I try to help a co-worker with a translation or if I see someone drop some garbage on the street and keep walking. There are different levels of volunteering, just like there are different levels of involvement.

For a while I was scared that as time continued to go by I would forget the lessons I learned, or get caught up in my life here and not look back. But that is not the case. Certain events, places, and conversations have lost their sharp call back, but as a whole the experience is there inside of me, as it always will be.

Recently I became aware of a web site called Conversation Exchange. You can register from seemingly anywhere in the world and try to find someone who wants to learn your language and speaks the language you want to learn. You can arrange to meet up or have conversations online, thus both helping each other improve. This service is totally free and could be a good way to meet people when you are away from home, or to meet foreigners if you are at home. I’ll be trying this out soon myself. It might not be volunteering, but it is cultural exchange, which ain’t too shabby.

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One of the best ways I’ve found to bond with Argentinians is over a helping of mate. Mate is the local tea that, it is said, just about all Argentinians drink, though after spending enough time here, you quickly learn that the idea of drinking it all day is more of a myth. Some don’t even drink it at all. This drink, which has equivalent effects to coffee, can make you very jumpy and twitchy if you drink too much too fast, which I’ve done.

Photo by lrargerich

I wanted to get into the mate culture, if for nothing else than to learn about and be a part of something new. It is hard at first though—you have to gather all of the equipment together (mate gourd, yerba tea, bombilla straw, thermos) and learn how to drink it appropriately. There’s even a set of unwritten rules that accompanies this culture.

But aside from the ways of mate, what’s most interesting is how it brings people together. Friends will sit in parks and kill time talking while passing around the mate. I had wanted to be a part for awhile but really didn’t know enough people to join, and drinking alone in the park seemed so very sad to me. I thought, it’s unlikely that you’ll pick up friends drinking mate alone.

Then, this past New Years’ Eve, I went down to Mar del Plata with a co-worker and her friends, and throughout the entire trip we were on a kind of mate bender (I’m just glad it was tea rather than cigarettes or some other highly addictive drug.) I discovered that when the mate is passed around, any and all discussion topics are open. There’s joking but there’s serious conversation as well.

This is where the real cultural sharing comes in, because driving through the pampas, these wide open fields conjured up my image of the Midwestern United States. The mate was passed around, and suddenly I started teaching some English words, and watched them practice and try to wrap their mouths around words that I never realized were difficult to pronounce. I was sipping the metal straw and trying not to burn my tongue as they tried not to roll their r’s. There was laughing, it was relaxed, and I was just one of the guys, even if for just a few minutes. Then I passed the mate back, and we went around again.

For some reason, I imagined a packed classroom with students chattering nervously about wanting to study in the United States. Maybe I just caught them on an off day, or it could be that there are so many test dates offered in Buenos Aires that there’s no need for packed rooms, even in a city of this size. What needs to be said about the exam is simple enough: it sucked and I’m glad it’s over. So now that the awful monkey on my back has finally jumped to a new branch, I can focus on other things. I’m looking to get into more writing, and just recently a co-worker asked me to help with English lessons. I’m actually surprised it took this long for someone to ask.

Though I really wasn’t keen on teaching again, I actually look forward to giving some lessons in my spare time, if for nothing else than to chat it up with a co-worker some more. These lessons would obviously be pro bono, which is volunteering in some form or another. So just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. But the sky is blue and it’s nearly summer. I’ll smile and short of a karate chop to the GRE prep book I used, this day couldn’t get much better.

I never knew her brother, but I feel saddened nonetheless. And it has gotten me thinking about other things. When you separate yourself from your loved ones for so long, you miss out on so much. Whether you are volunteering for a year or two, or working internationally, you inevitably take yourself away from your friends and family that have been with your your whole life. Maybe you are like me, and hope that your experience as a long term expat will help you in the future and make you better appreciate those friends and family members. But unforeseen events happen sometimes, and you could wind up taking yourself away from those people as their time runs out.

You will always have to take the bad with the good, and I just hope that this doesn’t ruin my friend’s perspective on her time spent living in Ecuador. Those of us who travel and live abroad often take ourselves away from so much,  We miss out on reunions, we don’t see our little sisters grow up, and we can’t be there to forge new memories. But does this all have a worthwhile end result? I would like to believe so. Otherwise we are all just fooling ourselves, and all we have done is drain more sand from the hour glass. But this is how life goes, and living on the other coast of the U.S. instead of another continent changes little. We live with the decisions we make, and that’s that.

Turning a new corner

I’ve just passed the three month mark in Argentina, and I feel like I’ve turned a new page. I was down for a while there, what with the hard transitions, new jobs, saying goodbye to friends while trying to make new ones, etc. It’s never an easy thing to pick up and move to a new country, but somehow I fooled myself into thinking it was going to be all swell. It’s spring now, and accordingly, I feel like new beginnings are on the way.

Just recently, seemingly by accident, I met a new friend. An actual Argentinian, no less. While on a tour of El Zanjón, a complex system of tunnels in San Telmo, I chatted it up with my guide. We eventually got to talking more and more, and quite soon we became friends. It was oddly reminiscent of my time spent in other Latin American countries, whereby you instantly become friends with someone, and that’s that. I hadn’t found that to be true in Argentina up until that point.

My new friend has promised to introduce me to her friends as well, take to me other parts of the city which I haven’t seen yet, and help me adjust to life in Buenos Aires. She’s good to her word, and yesterday we went to her neighborhood, further north and away from the center. It was a quiet, residential neighborhood with mansions where ambassadors live, and just a few cafes. I couldn’t believe it was still Buenos Aires. And I realized that there’s so much more that Buenos Aires has to offer than what I’ve seen thus far, even after three months. No tourists will ever go to that neighborhood, and I won’t help them find it. I’d rather preserve it the way it is than let people know how they can disturb the peace.

Maybe this will be a new direction for me in Buenos Aires. One in which I’ll be getting more local, and getting a more authentic porteño experience. Only time will tell.

For a while I thought I might be able to manage it all and still pull off some kind of volunteering on the weekends. But just as you are settling in to appreciate Saturday, Sunday rolls around and you have to start thinking about the upcoming work week again. My opportunities haven’t totally diminished, but I need to focus on one thing at a time so I can make the best of what I’m already doing.

But I like the idea that I can take a break from volunteering. I don’t know if anyone can really do it on a never-ending basis. If you are one of those people, I applaud you, because volunteering is not a sustainable field. You have to either be born rich or just not care about making money at all. At some point, the majority of young volunteers out there realize that they need to make some money in order to continue doing so. Like me, many of these people don’t feel the need to have an over-the-top amount of money, but just enough to be comfortable and not starving.

I’m putting volunteering on the shelf for the moment, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never do it again. I’m very excited to get back into it whenever my time opens up again. That might mean waiting until I go home and working with an organization like Big Brothers Big Sisters or United Way. But this doesn’t mean I have to be cut off completely from the international aspect of volunteering either. One of the best things you can do is educate. In teaching whoever about my experiences abroad, I’m sure valuable lessons will be appreciated.

So I’m taking a break, and thinking that I’ll be able to come back refreshed and ready to do it all again someday.

That’s how I find myself with Ecuador right now. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been romanticizing it like crazy, and writing about it quite a bit to try to get it all figured out. I know things weren’t perfect there and it was a tough year of my life, as my blogs on the subject will prove. Still, I miss it, and my time as a volunteer.

As a volunteer, you are set aside from other travelers or expats because you are there for a specific reason and usually for a specific period of time. Whereas now I am working full time in Buenos Aires with no set return date to the States, in Ecuador I knew that at some point I was going home. Working 20 hours a week, I had time to do what I wanted and travel more often, especially with frequent vacations from the university.

I miss that life and as much as I remind myself how difficult it all was, there is a part of me that wishes I could do it again. If for nothing else then the mere fact that right before I left things started to get really good. I miss the friends I made and due to living in such a small city, I felt like I had a place. In a bustling city of 13 million, I don’t feel the same way here in Buenos Aires. I’m just another person who, if not speaking, may or may not be from Argentina.

I don’t know how I’d feel if I were at home. Instead, I’m creating new experiences and struggling through new problems, different as they may be. So my experience is different from most. But in some way, they always seem similar. I miss what I had now that I don’t have it.

And now I’m really kicking myself for it. As a volunteer I only worked 20 hours a week, and often struggled with finding things to do in the meantime. Now I work over 40 hours a week and might be adding tutoring as a side gig. All of this, in between trying to study for the GRE in December and applying to grad schools (which is in itself is a huge process to undertake). Additionally, I’m new to Buenos Aires and still trying to get adjusted here, make friends, and have some fun at the same time. It’s too much for one period of time.

Many people who volunteer for extended periods of time are doing it as a gap year, or until they figure out what they want to do with themselves. But that doesn’t mean that you have to sit around until inspiration hits. I would suggest, from my own experience, that it’s much better to be prepared and use that free time to study for an exam like the GRE or MCAT or whatever you might be interested in down the line. Even if you only have a slight interest. Because if you wind up in a situation like I now find myself in, you will know that you squandered valuable time.

My only hope now is that I can balance all of these things delicately, and come away successful, standing on the other edge with a job and a grad school waiting for me. So use that time volunteering wisely. It goes quicker than you think.

At the end of orientation in Ecuador

I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons to volunteering through an organization vs. going abroad on your own.

When I went to Ecuador through an organization, I wasn’t just another person trying to make it on my own there; I was part of a team working for something, with other volunteer friends around the country whom I could go visit if I needed a break or a pick-me-up.  When things got tough—if we didn’t like the work assigned to us or we took issue with the way things were organized—the sense of camaraderie pulled us through.

It also meant we had security in numbers. At the same time, while being in a group of other foreigners during orientation wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it could get awkward. How many times did we walk into a quiet restaurant with 15 loud-mouthed Americans? Going anywhere as a foreigner can bring attention, but rolling down the street 30 deep can really turn a few heads.

My life in Argentina is quite different from that. I’m not with an organization, and I’m essentially down here on my own. When I first arrived I had a friend from WorldTeach visit me for a couple of weeks. It was great to have a friend with me, but we still branched out and met other people. At her hostel, we became friendly with a Spanish girl who as it would turn out was from the same city I studied abroad in, went to the same university I went to, and worked in the Internet cafe across the street from where I used to live! Even after my friend left we continued to hang out. And without a large group, I didn’t feel obligated to have to go anywhere with large groups of people, freeing me up to do whatever I wanted.

Ultimately, I still look back fondly on the friendships I was able to make last year. Not only did it give me friends across Ecuador, but I now have friends across the U.S. too. I wish I could say the same about Argentina, because I don’t have another volunteer to hang out with or go on a weekend trip with. But that also gives me more freedom to do what I want to do – I don’t worry about breaking the rules of an organization or not fulfilling my end of the deal.

If you’re trying to make the decision between joining an organization or coming down on your own, keep those things in mind. Are you the kind of person that wants to meet other people with whom you can share the experience, or would you rather wing it and try to find opportunities on your own?

• Stay in touch with old friends. Whether it was your school director, host family, or fellow volunteers, maintain the contact. You can all vent together, reminisce, or find other ways of continuing volunteer opportunities, or even going back some day.

• Write it all down. However you’re feeling. Whatever is in your head. Just put it out there. Even if you never show it to anyone, just processing the thoughts you’re having will help you deal with things and sort out the reverse-culture shock or the anxiety or depression of going home. If you did keep a journal while you were volunteering, go back though it and read it. Add some new entries from a post-volunteer mindset. If you save it for years to come, it could really help you see how you evolved and changed once you were home.

• Get out there. Instead of staying at home feeling sad for yourself or frustrated in finding a job, just go to the local shelter, school, or community center and put in some time. Even if you’ve never done it before, at the very least it will help you in transitioning from a volunteer to just a regular person, no matter what you did as a volunteer. Look into programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters or the United Way. You’re experienced as a volunteer and they’d be more than happy to have you.

Continue chugging alone, and it will get easier. But don’t lose track of the things that made your experience so worthwhile in the first place. No one will make it easier for you, so you have to be the one who is proactive in remembering what you did.