I didn’t pack my life into a bag.
I thought I was going to, but I didn’t.
Because if these material things that are in my bag are my life, my life has taken a real beating in the past few weeks.
My life does not fit in the bag. Neither do the things that I actually tried to shove into it either, I guess, but that is irrelevant. But my life is much bigger than the stuff that I put in the pack. My life is where I am from. It’s where I am going. It’s where I am.
Until now that was mostly Indiana with my family and my friends. It’s in Loogootee with all of the things that I have known my whole life. That I know like I know myself. And in Central America. And Asia and Africa. With all of the people I have yet to meet and all of the moments I have yet to experience.
And now, at the beginning of this journey, it’s in Xenacoj Guatemala.
Right now, my life is waking up in the middle of the night to terrifying noises on the tin roof of our little concrete house. It is opening my eyes in the morning to sounds of dogs barkinga nd firecrackers booming and trucks and motorcycles and horses passing three feet from the front window right beside my bed. My life is a barrel filled with water every other morning when we have it so that we can flush our toilet and wash our hands and clean our clothes. It’s openingthe door to the smell of the smoke-filled air to walk about two blocks to our hosts’ home for breakfast.
It is being a little colder than I was prepared to be.
It is helping a mother and her five young children move across town to a house with electricity and watching your teammate nonchalantly brush the evidence of a rat off her shirt.
My life is kids on the street, yelling “Hello!” in a language they do not really know and knocking on the door to as us to take photos of them. It is kids giggling at our Spanish when we ask them for their names and running to get their friends.
It is walking all over town to visit widows in their homes and get to know them a little bit and pray for them. Pray with them. It is sitting with a woman who is lonely or working or worn out. It is offering them rice and beans and a hug. In their tears. It is seeing something in them that is familiar. Something I have known before in someone that was very close to me.
My life right now is watching a chicken disappear under a bed or a rooster standing on a stove while we talk to a young widow and her four children. It is planning to help that woman clean her house only for plans to change when her youngest son needs to be taken to the hospital. It is watching a ten-year-old boy who watches his siblings and does laundry and takes care of the house all day while his mother goes into town to sell clothes. It is a that same boy who smiles when he talks about going to school and does his homework while we all eat lunch together. A boy that will probably have to give all that up to help his family since his father died last year.
I cannot put all of that in the bag, much less try to carry it around the world on my back.
I have been playing in the park with kids who may not have anyone to go home to after school. And trying to understand their names when they say them. And trying to remember their names and faces for when we see them again. It is asking them if they speak English and getting a “Yes. How are you?” along with a sheepish grin.
And it is a teenage boy coming up to our group in the park because he is excited that he can use his broken English.
My life is sharing a cold, dimly-lit, little house with seven girls that I keep forgetting I only met in October. With whom I have only actually spent approximately twenty days of my life. And loving it. And still wishing a little bit that my best friends or my sisters or someone that knows exactly who I am and where I have been was here with me to make it all a little more comfortable or me a little more myself.
It is not even the end of month one, and I am shedding stuff from my bag. But I am not shedding my life. Just this stuff that I thought was going to be really important a month ago.
