Where is My Mind? or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chaos

This is another piece I did for the Peace Corps Colombia newsletter.

I am not a particularly verbal person, which means that here on the Coast, nobody ever listens to me. Ever. So I am usually left with only my thoughts throughout the day. Here are some of them:

• What is that banging outside the window that has just woken me up at 5 am? Oh it's just my host mom cleaning off the bars on my window by hitting them with a rag. OK then, back to sleep.
• Good morning, Mr. Butcher Man. What a great day to be cutting meat on a stump of wood. Mmmm, smells great. I'll see you tonight for dinner, random cut of meat sitting out all day.
• Come on, school doorman. I've been out here knocking for five minutes. What could you be doing right now? Your job is to open the door for people, not too hard, right? Please open the door; it's so hot out here. It should be a crime to be this sweaty before 7 am.
• I'm just going to wait outside this classroom until my co-teacher shows up. What's that, little student? You're inviting me inside? Do you hear the noises coming from inside the classroom that sound like animals fighting over a carcass? No thanks, I'm good out here.
• Ah, finally my co-teacher shows up. Now I can go in the classroom. Let me just take a seat at the desk and- hey, wait, where did you go? You were just here. Got me with the old Bait and Switch again. Clever girl.
• Oh textbook, how I loathe thee. We are required to follow you, but you teach these children words like wakeboarding, minestrone, croquet, and Personal Digital Assistant before they are able to conjugate in the simple present. Really? They stopped making PDAs over ten years ago.
• You want me to do what activity with the kids? No, that's a stupid idea...but since you never told me what we were going to teach today and I have nothing prepared, I guess I'll have to go along with your pointless activity. You win this round.
• Man, that kid is really going to town picking his nose. He's about two knuckles deep and he couldn't care less that other people are watching. Atta boy. You go on with your bad self. Your kind of gross bad self.
• All right teachers, it's time for our planning session. I don't know when you all decided that this would start off as a game of hide and seek, but you guys are good at hiding. Getting all the teachers in the same room at the same time is like herding cats, and I only have two co-teachers.

But despite all this, I am finding the balance between things I can change and things that I just have to go along with. And it's important to find this balance, or else you'll start to lose and mind and before you know it, you'll be nailing pancakes to the wall. It's happened before.