At the end of your Peace Corps service you get a nice chunk of change that’s supposed to help you pay the first couple months of rent as you scramble to find a job, reenter the workforce, and start your life back up again.
But, the more common way to spend this money is a lot more fun than that: the COStrip.
So, my friend Anna and I planned a trip that took us by bus down through Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and eventually I flew home from Lima, Peru.
I got a GoPro for the trip, even though I had 0 idea how to use one and even less patience for finding out how. In fact, I spent the messy and disorganized last few days of my service breaking every electronic item I had that hadn’t already succumbed to the heat and humidity of Chinandega. I’ve had the footage sitting on a memory card stashed away for a long time, and its been a long process to make one sad, sloppy video. (In the process I fought with imovie, one drive, a sad macbook that ultimately was stolen out of my bag on campus, a new laptop that’s way too sophisticated for me, slow wifi, a broken wifi card and a broken fan… etc. etc. technology truly does hate me).
BUT even if technology does hate me, I refuse to hate it back. During my time in the Peace Corps, struggling to learn Spanish, and then in grad school trying to maneuver several new languages (academia/ foreign aid/ SQL etc) I’ve learned that learning isn’t about doing it all at once, or becoming a master overnight, but about the slow painful process of cramming one thing into your brain at a time.
Some people say to learn a language you should focus on just learning 1 new word a day. This sounds crazy, you’ll never be able to speak a language at that pace. But after one year you will have 365 new words in your vocabulary, and that can actually get you pretty far.
BUT even if technology does hate me, I refuse to hate it back. The secret to mastering technology is to:
- Read the instruction and slowly and patiently try to work things out (my jamming-all-of-the-buttons-as-quickly-as-I-can approach is less than ideal)
- Never let it know you are frustrated.
The point is to get where you recognize you know a little bit more than most people and a lot less than everyone else.
The same thing is true for learning about a new place, and one of the biggest thrills for me is how your perspective changes as you go from being completely disoriented to having a map etched into your mind that always keeps track of exactly where you are.
This year, I’m doing a fellowship that is almost completely focused on learning and developing new skills, so when we jump into project management next year we already understand the systems and fluently speak the language my organization uses. I try to remember that each day is a process, skill development doesn’t happen overnight, and it is each small, incremental step that eventually helps you to reach the goal of mastering a new language of any sort.
All this to tell myself to keep learning, even though I feel like a 26 year old who isn’t really an expert in anything, but maybe in another 26 years I’ll get there? So anyway, here’s some video footage of me swimming around and not worrying about learning anything at all.
A Way in the World 