The last several
months have been a whirlwind. We had our close of service conference in Lima and are slowly packing up our things in preparation of leaving. It has been an exciting and emotional past few weeks.
Throughout my time here in Peru I have
struggled with being able to communicate what our life is like to our family
and friends back home. As I read over my blog posts from the last 27 months I
am struck at how I have barely scraped the surface. Since early on living in La
Jalca, the abyss that separates where we live from where we are from has seemed to continuously widen.
To condense a few
weeks here into a few paragraphs is a formidable challenge. Sometimes reflecting on how to communicate this experience to others makes me resent
blogging all together. As the months have grown between posts, I’ve realized
putting such a personal journey into words isn’t something that I always want or am
able to do. As profound changes are happening to us personally,
professionally and emotionally, sometimes it’s all we can do to just hang on
for the ride and live it.
I assure you this experience has been so much more than travel and work
projects. Over the last two years we have built a life here. We have fallen in
love. We have been inspired. We have crashed to rock bottom. And we have never
been so incredibly happy.
As this adventure is
coming to an end, we are struggling with the finality of leaving. Our friends
here have a hard time understanding why we are leaving. They say don’t abandon
them, that we are Jalquinos now, we can buy a house, have a farm and have a
family. To hear these things from people here is at one time the greatest
compliment and at the same time breaks my heart a little. For us we always knew
we would go after two years. But in those two years our barriers we came with
have been totally deconstructed. We gave
it our all. We opened ourselves up to people as they opened their lives to us.
It is a comfort to know
we will keep in touch with people here. Thanks to the internet a goodbye
doesn’t have to be so final. We know we will come back someday, although under
very different circumstances and only temporarily. In the meantime we are
looking ahead to the next adventure(s) and new beginnings.
Thank you from the
bottom of our hearts to those of you who kept us going along the way with your
patience, love and support. I struggle to think what we would have done without
the cards and letters, skype calls, and amazing care packages with comforts
from home.
“I came here searching for Peace
And it came for me in the chaos”-me
