WSC Debriefing: Released into the Wild

Here’s a question: if I go living my life and doing things, but don’t blog about it, do those things really happen?

Home, sweet home. My city, Kansas City. 

This is conflict that I am faced with. I mean, for Pete’s sake, my blog is called “Adventuras en Peru” (Adventures in Peru) and I haven’t been in Peru for over a month, yet I continue to blog. But, with my World Service Corps time now being completely over, it’s hard for me to justify still using this blog. Perhaps another day there will be another blog, devoted to education or travelling or something; but for the time being, I’m going to go ahead and say it: this is my last post.

After SPEC, Katrina and I headed back to my home in Blue Springs. We had a free Sunday inbetween SPEC and World Service Corps debriefing, so I spent the day showing Katrina a little bit of Kansas City. We nerded out at the Liberty Memorial, strolled through Union Station, toured Kansas City’s own Boulevard Brewery and stopped by the large fountain on the Plaza. We topped the day off with a barbeque dinner with my Dad, eating so much that we felt slightly miserable afterwards.

The WSC Reps when we started this all, one year ago. 

Monday we dove into World Service Corps training. We had worship services, received some resume tips and learned about ways to stay connected with the church post-World Service Corps. Throughout the week we had the chance to chat with other reps, which was my favorite part of the experience. We got to banter with the short-term reps from Chile about the cultural differences between Peru and its neighbor to the south and, naturally, all of the reps launched into their worst bathroom stories; to me, cranking your poop up in the compost heap in Hawaii took the take.

We also tackled the question we’d all been finding difficult: “How was your trip?” Everyone recognized that the question was often asked as a nice gesture, but many of us expressed our frustrations with it; how are you supposed to define your trip in a quick, sentence long response? How do you explain someone something they can never fully understand? And how do you address their expectation that everything was fantastic—always.

Temple Sanctuary Selfie! Is that wrong?  

Monday to Wednesday we spent the entire week together, sharing meals and chatting about our different assignments; each one seemed to have their own vibe. Eben gave a lot of tours in Kirtland, Ohio; the reps from Hawaii attended a lot of camps; the reps from Detroit worked a lot with children; the girls from Chile attended some protests; the reps from South Korea regularly hiked mountains; the girl from Tahiti attended a baptism inside a hidden cave. Everyone came back loaded with stories. In college, I’d always found it interesting that all the international students hung out together. Very few of them were from the same country but they still had the same, unspeakable bond. I still don’t understand it, but I felt it among the World Service Corps reps. We had all gone different places and seen very different things—and somehow, that made us the same.

Where all the WSC reps were, just a few months ago. 

Wednesday was our big finale to World Service Corps: our Presentations and Sending Forth. I liked to call the Sending Forth our “release into the wild.” To an extent, especially among the long-term reps, it was like we’d forgotten how to live as adults in North America. How to work, how to socialize, how to operate in English. The most basic things, like how to eat, we had to learn again. What do you mean rice and potatoes don’t come with this meal? Why aren’t there any dogs running the streets? Why are we so far away from the ocean?

As Wednesday evening fell, each rep shared a five minute testimony of what they did and what their experience meant to them. Each presentation was powerful in its own ways. The girls from Chile’s voice cracked as they talked about how they’d bonded during their experience. The girl from Tahiti lamented that she couldn’t stop comparing church in the States to church in Tahiti. Katrina and I focused on specific stories, both from Huanuco, where we’d struggled, but learned that things would always be okay.

The WSC gang on our first day of debriefing. 

And I think, going forward, that was what we needed to talk about and we needed to remember; life after World Service Corps does exist, and it’s all going to be okay. As presentations finished, the reps slowly filed out of the Temple, heading their own ways: going to college to clean out dorm rooms, road tripping to Florida, preparing to fly to California. Like that, it was over. Like that, it was done.

The next morning, real life came too quickly; I had technology training for my teaching job at 9 a.m. and Katrina had to leave for the airport just afterwards. We said our hurried goodbyes (I was still operating on Peru time and running late), both understanding but not knowing how to express it—the two of us were the only ones who could really understand what Peru, what Honduras, what SPEC, what all of it really mean to each other. I sped off to work and Katrina headed out to the airport. And at the moment, we could no longer deny it: World Service Corps was officially over.

Goodbye for now: my last picture with Katrina. 

World Service Corps Program Coordinator was sure to tell us that nobody ever really stops being a World Service Corps rep. Your time in the program comes to a close, but you carry that experience with you always. There are parts you wish you could leave behind and there are parts you wish you could cling on to more tightly; but no matter what, we carry it with us. And it’s a load I’m more than happy to bare.

So with that, my World Service Corp term and “Adventuras en Peru” come to a close. Even if you just came here and looked at pictures—I thank all of you for reading. Blogging has been a wonderful way for me to process and share what this year of my life has meant, and seeing my page views go up made me feel like people were right there, sharing these experiences with me. So thank you for reading—I’ll see you when the next big adventure arrives.