Subtle Changes

So I've now been home for just over three weeks, and as almost always happens when I travel from one continent to another, it's been difficult to integrate the two worlds. While you're in one place, the other feels like a dream, or like another world, which I suppose it is.

So for instance, while I was living in South America, I slowly began to forget the kinds of food I ate in North America, my favorite TV shows, or that it was the opposite season back home (winter in Peru = summer in US). Now that I'm back, my memories of Peru are still vivid, but they feel so out of sync with my current surroundings that they're getting pushed to the background. Perhaps this is why I've had so many dreams about Peru and the people there since coming back – that's the only place I can really feel immersed in it.

I do, however, feel like Peru has changed me in subtle ways, and I see differences even in the few months since my last visit home at Christmas. I automatically view everything through a double-lens now, with both the American and Peruvian points of view. For example, at the grocery store, I notice both what is available and what is missing here compared to Peru. I find myself checking the labels to see where products are from (turns out most of the bananas sold in Houston supermarkets are grown in Guatemala). I wish I could show all my Peruvian friends what's available here, including an impressive array of imported Asian groceries. But I also wish we had Peru's cheap, fresh tropical fruits, delicious chilis (or aji), and huge, ripe avocados.

Thanks to this double-perspective, many problems in America now seem less scary to me (gas prices high? At least we can afford to eat! I'm serious, by the way), and there's lots of amusement to be had when you look at our culture from an outsider's perspective. For example, the 24-hr news channels where anchors regularly make mountains out of molehills. (A terrorist fist jab? Really?) Or, a Dixie paper plate commercial I just saw where a mother proudly declares, "Rather than spend my time washing dishes, I choose to put my kids first." (Any Peruvian mother would be absolutely horrified by this kind of wastefulness/laziness as a model of mother-love.)

I'm also enjoying being able to listen to, and follow along with, Spanish-language radio and TV for the first time. (Even with my previous Spanish studies, I could never keep up with the motormouth commercials before.) Since these are geared toward the immigrant community, people like the ones I've met in Mexico and Peru who now find themselves fish out of water in this country (just as I was in theirs), I feel a new sympathy with them. The broad sitcoms on Telemundo, the Latin pop ballads, and the immigration lawyers or English-learning services are now strangely nostalgic for me.

A number of Peruvian students at the mission's English language school were applying for visas to the US, including two older ladies who were in a weekly Bible study with me. One often cried as she told us about her husband and son who were far away in New York City (Flushing, to be exact); she didn't know when she'd be able to join them. I wonder when they'll actually immigrate, whether I might ever bump into them again, and how they'll respond to their new life, here on the Other Side.