The Third Goal

When I first began my volunteer service here in Honduras last June, my job responsibilities were clearly laid out for me by my project trainers, based on my organization´s mission statement drafted in the JFK days. According to the U.S. federal government, my employer, I have three goals. First, to provide technical assistance; second, to be a model citizen to serve as a positive example of the U.S. here in Honduras; and third, to take my experiences back at the end of my two years and share them within my own community to broaden awareness of the rest of the world, especially in those who may never see Honduras or may never even leave the country.

I had always thought of the third goal as the easiest. It´s just story-telling, after all. But it is not an easy experience to live here, and I am starting to realize that it will never be easy to explain. How will I be able to teach the dance steps that 17-year-old Sandra has taught me? Or recreate the mischievous smiles that old men on the street give me when they jokingly ask me to marry them and take them to the States? How will I be able to repeat the rapid-fire inspiration in my sitemate Lauren’s voice when she tells me about the group of high school students she organized to teach prisoners in the town jail how to use condoms to prevent AIDS? Or mimic the intensity of the stares that I get wherever I go, so intense that they sometimes still scare me even though I now know they only mean curiosity? How will I be able to express the restlessness of my French friend Stephanie on nights when she chain smokes and wonders out loud in her thickly accented Spanish how she is going to make a life with her Honduran boyfriend who is still studying in Cuba? How will I be able to adequately describe the acute loneliness of living in a culture that is completely unreferenceable to that of my native country? And how will I be able to deal with the equally acute loneliness of returning to a place I call home, but where most people will never understand how I have lived for two years?