Amy Langrehr coming home after learning to live in Honduras
Life Support: Coming home after learning to live in Honduras
Monday, January 17, 2005
By Amy Langrehr
After two years with the Peace Corps in Honduras, you come home.
Worry wriggles in your stomach (and this time it isn't an intestinal infection). You have nightmares about lifeless tortillas and sweet dreams about that special someone you left behind. There is no doubt. Your conscience is geared up for a big change. You are living in your native country again.
When you go out to a restaurant, you are amazed at how fast the food comes and how everyone else is getting up and putting on coats just as you are ready to order another cup of coffee and chat for a while more.
You are overwhelmed at the size and selection of everything, everywhere, far beyond your choices in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.
Somewhere, sometime, in that Central American country, you started to think in Spanish. You chatted with neighbors in the streets, on the town's bus, and on the steps of local stores. You ground corn every morning with the women and little children.
Home now, you express a part of yourself that has been on hold for two years. You goof off with old buddies in northern Virginia with whom you plotted elementary school pranks and survived those awkward years.
You celebrate holidays with your family, not your host family. There are amazing blues, jazz, theater, movie and arts festivals to attend. Thai, Greek, Indian, Italian, deli and snack foods (conveniently wrapped) seduce you.
You feel relieved when people ask you what you do instead of "Are you married?"
You knew this older part, this gringo part of you, before -- and you will know it again, but in a different way.
You step into a posh coffee shop that conjures up memories of red coffee berries drying on roofs and patios, of friends hiking up muddy pathways in their flip-flops to pick those berries.
In Honduras you learned how to hitch a ride on the back of a pickup truck and that "the bus will leave any minute" means "the bus will leave sometime, probably today."
On arriving home, you miss the handy neighborhood kids, always available to send on an errand, and you feel slighted when neighbors don't visit you daily.
You rush to the post office to mail an important letter before its door is locked promptly at 5 o'clock. In Honduras, the nearest post office was the mailman's living room. You went any time, and often stayed for hours, joined by neighbors to watch programs on his television.
Home again, you carry a secret pouch of recollections to try to express by anecdote that you are different from the 22-year-old girl who left the United States two years earlier.
Those who never leave may never understand.
You have lived in another country and made it your home. Now blessed with the experience of maneuvering in two distinct cultural settings, you are relearning the familiar. You readapt, readjust and work a fast-paced schedule.
This time, though, your routine is tempered with fresh insights. You carry the memories of Honduran friends, framed in a language you now use mostly in "ethnic" food stores where you go to smell the plantains in the air and hear playero on the radio. Selecting from an assortment of pan dulce, you stumble on some Spanish words and receive quizzical looks from other customers, Latina immigrants who don't recognize you as one of them and wonder why you are so happy to see semitas and polvorones.
Honduras and its people have taught me an alternate -- neither better nor inferior -- way to find rewards in my life. I can switch back and forth between my two cultural heritages, choosing from both. I've stretched and grown.
(Amy Langrehr, of Arlington, Va., now works with immigrant day laborers as a staff member of Reston Interfaith Inc. She may be contacted by e-mail at amyelizabeth20170@yahooo.com. This article is from Hispanic Link News Service.)
