When Life Strikes

A few weekends ago, as I breakfasted with my host family (and was taking fire for being the chico light and choosing sleep over late night activities), some tough news arrived to the household. An uncle of the family--who was also the host father of a former volunteer and someone whose house I would visit once every month or so last year--had passed away. Though not particularly close with him, he was someone I had interacted with often since arriving down here and had even planned on visiting the week before he died (but had forgotten).
I don`t want to make it seem like all I thought about after this event was my own feelings and reactions (obviously, it was incredibly hard for the family and their emotional rollercoaster and attempts to process his death and burial was very moving), but I did feel particularly moved in ways that I had never experienced before.

One particularly odd moment of the day was when I found myself, dressed in a suit, with six other people in the back of a pickup truck, holding on by one finger for dear life, sweating because of the nervousness of preparing for reading a letter at the burial, and generally just emotionally overwhelmed as we made our way from the funeral mass up to the cemetary. I had been given the job of presenting and reading part of a letter from the volunteer who had been down here two years and become part of the family. My reading followed the family´s own discourse at the gravesite and I both felt incredibly sorrowful and out-of-place. I accomplished my task without any big mistakes and I do feel appreciative to be able to have done something for the family on that day, but I could not help but ask myself why I was there, with all the attention, and trying to do service to the incredible life of a man, who in contrast to the many friends and extended family there that day I barely knew. In retrospect, I believe that in some way it reflected even more on who he was (since he always opened his home and took in many at first ¨random¨ people to share and celebrate with).

Nevertheless, in my limited experience with death and the discomfort at times of being an outsider down here, I felt very torn at the time. If anything, those emotions speak more to my own doubts and my American culture; I don´t think there was a moment that anyone there felt that I would have been out of place. So many of the Peruvians we know have come to see us as one of the clan--and I feel incredibly blessed for that acceptance and inclusion. I myself have been inspired to write some heartfelt letters to my own host family, who is so giving, so joking, so inclusive, and just generally so happy to share with me. They will never replace those for whom I care and love in the States, but they have also made me feel a shared humanity across spaces of cultural and distance that I never had thought possible before.

On that note, happy Easter to all, and my you all pass it well, in good health, and in the good company of family and friends.