the summer closes

So, sorry everyone for not being so consistent with my blogging habits... The fact is, writing up fieldnotes every night for the past 3 months has practically given me carpul tunnel and I didn't really find much motivation for rehashing things out in the blog too...sorry.

I officially finished my research time on August 20th, and worked on saying goodbye to the host families and other important influences in my life from the villages and left for the Capital with the principal of La Salle on Tuesday morning, August 21st. I stayed the night at the Residence of the La Salle brothers and they helped me get to the airport Wednesday morning for a full day of traveling back to Utah, arriving on Wednesday night, August 22. It was a couple of flights where I ran into a group of elders returning from South Korea. Thinking about their upcoming re-entry into American culture and seeing their inability to speak in English as I struggled to do the same, I started thinking about the upcoming month and h0w little time I really have before I jump on another plane headed for South America...

I am now back in the United States and facing a mad-dash month of preparations to get me down to Paraguay at the beginning of October and my Guatemala focus is sliding to the background. I still lots of work to do with the research I carried out in Guatemala but the time in which I have to do that is going to have to spill into Paraguay because of paperwork and bureaucracy requirements. All in all though, I don't think it's every really possible to compartmentalize one's life to completely transition from one place, one lifestyle, or one ideology to another. Being the in the States doesn't mean that I can automatcally switch on my American mentality and in fact it is a lot more difficult to re-enter than to leave a culture. Facing familiar faces, visiting familiar places, and speaking a supposedly familiar language while trying to digest all the non-familiar places, faces, and experiences is like that parable of putting new wine in old bottles only the analogy would probably be backwards--putting old wine in new bottles. Either way the combination just doesn't make sense. Being changed by the world to change the world is difficult when you get surrounded by people that are uninterested in changing either themselves or the world. Reentry culture shock talvez. Whatever it is called, the fact remains that the world remains for the changing and the individuals within it are the only thing stopping that from happening.

So, life goes on. A third field season has come to a close but the "characters" or "research subjects" or "informants" keep on washing their dishes in the morning, drying their clothes in the afternoon, and building their lives day by day. I, too, keep on waking up each morning and lay down to sleep each night. Aside from platitudes and Tzou-inspired dogma, life really is about people and the lives they lead. Truth lies not in the economic theories, the governmental model, or the language barriers. It lies within the construction of the human soul as an extension of an incomprehensibly complex yet divinely orchestrated system--a construction we ironically enough have nothing to do with and have no control over. It is that construction that is left out of the research tomes, ignored in the scientific method, and misunderstood by everyone as we compete with our own deficiencies. Life simply goes on and we stumble around trying to understand our "differences" or "similarities" while cursing our biological necessities and economic annoyances. And such is my reality.

I don't know when I could possibly return to Guatemala. I pray that it won't be accompanied by other field study students or any other type of student for that matter, I pray that it will be in a capacity of change and hope beyond the limitations of "objective" research, and most imporantly I pray that it be soon enough that I can still find all the wonderfully important people that touched my life this time around.