Done.

Well, I had a little moment the day before yesterday. Really, it was a little bit of a hissy fit. I blame it on two consecutive days of bus travel, excessive heat, a little dehydration and landing in a very craptastic (and stinky) hostel room for the evening. But, every once in a while, one needs a hissy fit, no? It’s cathartic.

I re-read my thoughts this morning, and found them humorous and a little enlightening, so I thought I’d share.

—

Done!

F’ing done with shitty hostel rooms that charge too much and are still disgusting. Done with being hot. Done with being ripped off. Done with being stared at. Done with being scared of dark alleys and groups of young guys, and done being harassed to buy ugly trinkets and being made to feel guilty that I don’t want them, even though the people selling them aren’t wearing shoes.

Done with 50 minute friendships. Done with seeing dead bodies on the cover of newspapers. Done with stores that are closed on weekends and in the mid-afternoons.

Done with chipped plaster walls, questionable sheets, hard beds, saggy beds, beds with springs poking me in the hip and shoulder.

Done with drinking water out of plastic god-damn bottles. Done with bad service. Done with eating over-priced gringo food because I’m afraid the other options will give me food poisoning. Done with people littering right in front of me. Done with garbage and dog shit everywhere. Done with skinny cows, skinny dogs, and skinny kids.

Done with having my space invaded. Done with searching for the right words. Done with explaining our trip. Done with daydreaming of home and of salads and sanitary pillows. Done with never having privacy.

Done with turning my underwear inside out. Done with wearing thongs in the shower and always carrying TP in my pocket.

Done with never having a place to put things. Done with searching for places to stay, to eat, to sit, to read. Done with not having a bra that fits or earrings that I like. Done with never looking nice.

Done with colonial towns, central parks and catholic churches.

DONE WITH THE HEAT. Done with the sweat.

Done with barking dogs and squawking chickens. Done with florescent overhead lights. Done with bug bites, stained clothes, dull razors, bad smells and shared bathrooms.

Done with worrying about currency exchange rates and whether or not the ATM will have cash. Done with feeling guilty for my opportunities. Done with feeling undirected. Done with feeling nervous every time I’m in a cab or walking down the street by myself. Done with distrusting people as a default.

Done.

—

I’m a little embarrassed about my hissy fit, but I know that these things happen. And, those feelings, those frustrations, are honest ones, so I’m just taking a moment to sit with them.

It’s easy for me to understand being tired and done with those physical feelings of discomfort. Being grumpy about and being done with the heat, the bugs, the crappy beds are frankly pretty normal and although when they hit you all at once they can amount to a whole lot of grumpiness and the desire to change the return date of your ticket home, they’re also the easiest to find ways to work around. You get a room with a fan. You treat yourself to an ice cream cone. You take the AC bus rather than the local bus. You watch some mindless American television. And all of a sudden… those discomforts seem a little more bearable.

The ones that I didn’t realize were weighing on me so are the things that I have less control over. We recently took busses through the sketchiness of Tegucigalpa and Managua, and we’ve heard some very scary stories about the daily violence in people’s lives here in Honduras and Nicaragua. I knew that being in this part of Central America felt different, but I didn’t realize until I reread my stream-of-consciousness rants just how tired I was of feeling a little unsafe pretty much all the time. It’s tiring to always be vigilant, to always actively make choices that protect your safety, to always be distrustful first, rather than my default of being friendly. It’s not how I want to treat people, and safety isn’t something that I want to have to actively consider all the time.

Along the same lines, there’s something really tiring about having lingering feelings of hopelessness and cynicism all the time. For example, we went to the shores of the enormous Lake Nicaragua recently, and were greeted by sewage pouring into the lake and the “beach” being literally covered in piles and piles of garbage. This made me sad, and it made me angry. It made me feel like people weren’t respecting their own home, like people weren’t proud of where they came from, like people were actively making choices to destroy things of beauty. Within minutes, Garrett and I had devised a multi-pronged clean-up plan that would reengage the community and give them a lakefront that they could be proud of.

And then the hopelessness hits as you realize that having a dirty beachfront are really the least of their problems. It’s sort of hard to worry about recycling, when people feel unsafe in their own homes, when people don’t trust their own government not to steal from them, when having the police knock on your door, might mean that your family will never hear from you again.

Thinking thoughts like this certainly give you perspective on the world, help you make good decisions and make you want to be an active participant in solving problems in your own community, but that doesn’t mean that these types of internal dialogs don’t lead to some emotional exhaustion. Of course we want to run away from it every once in a while, or maybe even permanently. We have to step back and retreat from being horrified by it all. The running away, the being DONE with it (at least for a while) keeps us sane enough to live to fight another day. And, as Garrett reminded me last night, it’s good for us to have this experience too. it makes me furious that people, even in America – the land of the free, feel unsafe in their own communities. Now that I have experienced even a sliver what that feels like, I find it unacceptable. I’m not just compassionate towards other people who live that way, I feel a fire growing in me, a sort of burning need to find ways to change this for others.

For the record… I’m MUCH better today, Campers. I’m still, for the most part, done with all of the above, but not nearly so grumpy about life and it’s circumstances. It’s a cool(ish) early morning here. I’m sitting on our second story balcony looking down at lime trees and a bright red hibiscus plant. There’s a nice breeze. I’m not actively sweating. I have no new bug bites. Yesterday morning, we immediately moved hostels (which we’ve learned can make a dramatic and immediate change in attitude) to a place with two fans, a clean bathroom, soft sheets, a closet (so we don’t have to stare at our backpacks all the time) and a TV, and which (drum roll) did not smell like mildewing death. We spent the morning visiting a colonial monastery that had been turned into a museum, for about twenty minutes, and then proceeded onto a gringo restaurant where we spent about two and a half hours chatting over waffles and bacon and pineapple smoothies. The rest of our day was spent wandering around town, and when it got too hot, we took a siesta and watched “Two and a Half Men” and “the Simpsons” episodes in the darkness of our room with the fans pointing directly at us, while eating mangos and cucumber slices that we had chilled in our refrigerator. We eventually stole ourselves away from the TV long enough to go for a nice evening stroll and partake of a watermelon smoothie (for me), a few caipirinas for Garrett and some chicken fajitas. We had a relatively early evening, and I work up this morning feeling pretty excited about round two of waffles and bacon.

Oh the difference a day can make.