A Step back

Sometimes its funny to see where you have found yourself. Its easy to get caught up in the details of your life at any one particular moment in time. But if you take a step back, all those moments you were caught up in once upon a time feel like distant chapters in another life time.
Perhaps I feel this even more being as removed as I am from the culture I grew up in, but nonetheless my troubles, worries, and disastrous relationships seem as if they were apart of another life time. I find it funny, but yet quite alarming that friends back home are having kids and getting married while I am chasing away goats from my banana tree, digging holes for latrines, and raising chickens...some how the disparity seems a bit unreal. Its almost as if the world has continued without me. The economy continues is cycle, politicians persist, global warming still wages its war, and yet here I am changed in so many ways, yet very much unchanged from a year ago when I arrived in country. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around all of these thoughts. My life is just so disconnected from the life I have always had. I no longer have those reference points. Perhaps the more intimidating but exciting thought is that if my life has turned out so different from what I have imagined it to be in the past, then who knows what the future holds.

The two years here, seem like a surreal experience, so removed from the rest of the world I am out in this remote village of Africa that few know about, and even fewer have experienced while the rest of the world is listening to the sounds of heels click on tiled floors, every person armed with their laptop, the incessant sounds of phones and horns, the 24 hr bustle of the cities. Here that world only exists in movies.

I sometimes crave the problems I had back home, the struggle of traffic jams, relationship issues, time constraints, because at least all of those are somewhat manageable. Here however, there are problems that I have no idea how to go about them. How do you organize a camp of 3,000 displaced people? How do you stop girls from dropping out of school because they were pressured into sex and felt like they had no choice because of the culture? How do you prevent the transmission of HIV or spread of Malaria? The problems seem so much larger, and so much more foreign. I miss the struggle of what to wear, or eat, or Friday night plans, or commuting....they at least seemed a little more manageble.
I suppose this is all very good perspective for me despite how surreal life feels at times when I think of home.