Missing

Friends and family back home often ask me if I miss home or if I get homesick here. The simple answer is yes, but the reality is a bit more complicated. I miss home in small ways every day: sometimes I daydream about the sound of cereal clinking into a breakfast bowl, or about how luxurious it would be to stand on a carpeted floor and walk barefoot around a clean house. The idea of going to a wine bar or having unlimited "free" texting and calling to people I want to talk to can captivate my imagination for a good 15 minutes.

But these are all silly things, things that are so trivial it's almost fun to miss them, and to imagine how exciting it will be to re-experience them when I return to the dreamland that is America (seven months and counting!). The serious missing - of people I love and of the beautiful mountain-and-water-filled city that I call home - that's not so fun. If I let myself dwell on how seriously I miss these truly important things, I would probably not still be in Peru. I love my life and work here 100%, but to cope with being so long and far away from home, I have to avoid thinking about all the "missing." On a day-to-day basis, all those feelings stay buried down deep so that I can concentrate on enjoying all the wonderful parts of the path I've chosen. But when all that missing breaks through the layers of avoidance I've packed it in, it's like seawater rushing through the gap in the levee: serious waves of emotion. Thankfully, this doesn't happen too often, but occasionally an absurdly slow week of work, a particularly unfortunate combination of tiredness and infuriating Peruvian machismo, or a conversation that reminds me how much I miss someone at home can trigger such a wave, and then all you can do is ride it out.

So to answer the basic question, yes I miss home. Usually not too much, but once in a while so much that it hurts. But the missing is just one piece of the big Peace Corps picture. Luckily, it's usually eclipsed by one of the more positive pieces: brisk mountain sunshine, the smiling faces of my students, friendly greetings from small-town neighbors, random celebratory parades, etc. etc. - and that's why I'm still here.