Home to stay

One thing we missed - backyard grilling

Rockies game

I’ve been back in the United States for a week, and the routines of my old life are gone.  I’m in Colorado, savoring all the things I couldn’t wait to enjoy.  Time with my family.  Big, definitively clean salads.  Drinking tap water.  Non-boxed milk.  Beers with subtle flavors.  Customer-focused service at restaurants.  Driving along suburban streets.  Eating dinners in the backyard.  All the open and green space.  Hiking today without nursing a hidden worry that I could be attacked by a group of bandits.  (Awful but true, there have been multiple such incidents on Pichincha).

And I don’t miss much about Ecuador, besides the job and my students.  I liked it there, but two years was my personal expiration date.  Another year there would have exhausted me and possibly soured me on the country.  After two years I left on good terms, a willing ambassador of the beauty and charm of the place.  As time passes, those two years may easily become idyllic when I wade through the memories and jaw-dropping photos.  The Galapagos, the jungle, the pristine school campus, the apartment by the park, the joy of teaching those kids.  It’s easy to see all these features becoming narrative touchstones in a simplified retelling of those two years.  And that wouldn’t be a lie.  It was a happy, mostly stress-free two years.  But nor would it be the whole truth.  There were frustrating days, moments of isolation and loneliness, hours when I craved deeply for people and products that Ecuador couldn’t provide.  Yet somehow those moments, the Sunday evenings of life, never quite harden into memory.  I know, with absolute certainty, that I was overworked and tired for nearly the entire time I taught in Los Angeles.  Even still, I can’t help feeling nostalgic when I picture my old classroom.  I think back to students that terrorized me and the remove of years allows me to fondly recall their quirks and our daily battles.

Before returning to the United States, others warned me about reverse culture shock.  Prior to moving to Ecuador, I spoke with a former CMSFQ teacher who told me that coming back to the U.S was much harder than leaving.  Another current teacher, who once left Menor and has since returned, said the same thing.  These were framing conversations.  One just before I moved and one just before I returned.  And I’ve been waiting for it.  Expecting that sense of dislocation and foreignness in my hometown.  It hasn’t hit yet, and maybe it won’t.  It was jarring, in a way, to see everyone on their cell phones at the Rockies game.  Whole Foods seemed an impossibly clean and aesthetically pleasing grocery store.  These observations didn’t surprise or alienate me though.  Maybe I never entered deeply enough into Ecuadorian life.  The United States remained my standard basis for comparison, and two years wasn’t quite enough to flip that paradigm.  I’m not suddenly noticing all the ways that Ecuador illuminated the flaws of the United States.  Not yet at least.  I may very well get there when I’m unemployed and some guy in Philadelphia screams at me with that patented east coast disdain.

As for this blog, I’m not sure what to do with it now.  I’ve loved writing for this space, and I don’t plan on stopping.  But I no longer have the cache of chronicling a life in Ecuador, though the foreign-teaching blog is no real novelty at this point.  Still, relocating and job-searching aren’t exactly the most stimulating subjects.  Maybe I’ll just write my thoughts on NBA free agency, given that it’s all so under-reported at the moment.

Hiking and photography, two of my dad's hobbies

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