A New Adventure, This Time with More Purpose

This Sunday-- June 12th, I leave for Guatemala. I will be volunteering at an educational center in Guatemala City called Safe Passage/Camino Seguro. It's a strange feeling, venturing off into the world again, and yet my pre-departure excitement/angst is a whole lot different than what I experienced right before I left for Chile, now almost two years ago. Blogging like this is something I haven't done since right after I returned from Chile, and going through the same simple little motions in such a different mind state is really making me realize that this trip to Guatemala is really different from anything I've done (if you're interested, you can browse my blog from Chile here).

The difference that I like the most about it is that these next two months will be the first extended period in my life where my primary goal is to enrich the world more than to enrich myself (although that is a goal too). I'll be working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week at the educational center, probably as a teaching assistant but I've committed to doing what they need me to do, and I will do it regardless of how much I want to at that given moment (my motivation is prone to waning at 8 AM). The only thing I might have dedicated a bigger chunk of my time to is school, but even that is a bit more amorphous and flexible. While I'm a little nervous about how exhausting 8 hours a day teaching in Spanish could be (if that's the job I end up with), I'm glad that it's a cause I believe in--ending poverty cycles through education.

This trip will be a lot less structured than just about every other experience in my life. Aside from free time during vacations, there's always been someone or something providing external structure for my time. While my choice to volunteer means that I'll be doing the same thing during working hours, all of my time will be spent doing things that I choose to do, and the choices don't fall within the established narrow path that we are encouraged to follow (elementary school to middle school to high school to college to internships/more school). I guess volunteering abroad really isn't that far outside the mold, but still there's something to it that's more independent, more outside of the career-development conveyor belt than anything else I've done. I don't really know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I think it will be closer to a taste of what I'm tempted to call "real life", by which I think I just mean real independence. On the other hand, even within the moderately structured exchange program I did in Chile, I felt pretty isolated and detached, particularly for the first two months.

I don't feel like there's too much I can say to make this tie together (especially without falling into the trap of sharing oddly personal things on a public blog, which my friends and I were just laughing about last night). I guess the bottom line is, regardless of how stressful or soothing lonely or enjoyable, this trip ends up being, I'm pretty confident that I'll be doing good things, and that the experience will be one that I won't regret.