Fair warning:  This is quite possibly going to be a completely ridiculous post.

Meaningful, hopefully.

But ridiculous.

Yesterday I read Havi’s brilliant post about Bolivia, and I must admit to having a v-e-r-y strong reaction. Please read her post, if you would be so kind. Read it a couple of times, because it is truly amazing. I love it.

The post talks about Bolivia, but also about choice. My Bolivian-ness has become a huge part of my identity, so much so that I can’t really remember what it felt like not to be here.

Understand that I didn’t want to come, at least not when I did. I thought I would be much better prepared.

I was not prepared at all.

The thing I wanted to point out is that, prepared or not, part of my choice happened after my arrival when I needed to figure out I was going to do. The choice was not in going to or not going to Bolivia. It was what to do once I had arrived.

Does that make sense?

I think that is probably similar to the experience of many people, no matter what their destination. They are taken somewhere. Sure, they might get on one plane or another, but they will eventually end up in that place.

They are not prepared. They make the best of things. In the process, they realize that the destination is not good or bad. It just is.

You see, journeying to Bolivia and being here amid everyone, has now become who I am. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t come.

Sure, it is because I am now Bolivian that I rarely get a complete night’s sleep. It is the reason I am revisiting the horrors of sixth-grade math and why my living room looks like I’m doing research for Mattel. It is the reason my shopping list includes ridiculous amounts of cucumbers (which I detest), why my spaghetti sauce is full of ground-up vegetables, and why I am constantly in search of socks that match. It is why I know that “Camp Rock: The Final Jam” comes out tomorrow.

There are interruptions (which has been oh-so-hard to adjust to). There are other people to consider in everything — from something as simple as “what’s for lunch” to something more complex like “what will I do for a living.”

There are now things that I cannot do.

Limitations. Ugggghhh.

I cannot work in a traditional nine-to-five structure, because I have to spend my afternoons frisking people’s backpacks and monitoring play dates. I have a mini-van. Ugggghhh again.

My first trip into Bolivia was unscheduled. I had always wanted to go there, had planned to start preparing, but then one day I just found out I was going. I didn’t really realize that I wouldn’t actually come back — for some reason, I thought everything would just go back to normal once I arrived.

The trip was awful — filled with unexpected health ickiness and a final landing in which I threw up repeatedly. Fortunately, after the landing everything went relatively smoothly.

Of course, there is the hilarious story of the bear:  Good friends had sent us a Teddy bear. They also sent a darling jacket for the bear, which was shipped separately for some reason. I thought the jacket (which was real and lovely) was for… well, you know… and when it didn’t fit I spent over an hour on the phone with the store trying to figure out how to get a different size until a manager finally revealed to me it was a bear jacket. I’m sure they still tell that story and fall off their chairs laughing.

There was a subsequent trip that was planned — quite carefully, in fact — and that didn’t happen. That one was particularly difficult because almost no one else knew it was scheduled to happen. It was hard to convey why I was so sad at the time.

It was also at this time that I realized my work (as a bureaucrat) wasn’t really where my heart was, since I had such difficulty explaining and justifying why I needed more than a couple of days off to deal with the unexpected return.

I had begun to accept my innate Bolivian-ness, and to recognize that it was more a part of me than I thought.

Right around the time of my final trip, I realized something very important — that my way of changing the world has to do with my work that has developed since I came to Bolivia. Little things that are an extension of myself, like how we really and truly love others, are now what I spend much of my time on. Figuring out how the practice of “nonviolent communication” happens amid sharing toys or eating ones’ vegetables is my larger challenge.

I say all this to let you know that, Bolivian or not, we are all at times given passage to places that are unexpected. We knew we might end up there someday, but it’s not where we planned to be, at least not now. We don’t want this now. We expected to be well prepared, to have completed [insert important thing here], and to be packed and ready to go, with all the supports that we’ll need.

I know from personal experience that’s not how it works. We end up where we are. Sometimes we fight it tooth and nail, wanting to get back to where we were and to the freedom we once had.

For me, the significance of the trip has not been the choice about whether or not to go to Bolivia. The real issue has been making the choice to accept where I am.

I’m only now beginning to stop fighting to leave, and to make the choice to be at peace with this place.

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