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. |
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.
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.
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. |
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.
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.
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.
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