Ten Years Since Chile

It's Been a Decade...Write What you Know

End of March 2015.

Around ten years ago I found out I was going back to Chile... it was not my full idea to do it, but I had planted the notion with my wife, who had then acted on this wistful thought that I had shared with her sometime in our almost five years of marriage; she proceeded to buy the tickets to go there without my knowledge. She got the tickets for ourselves and two children, maybe in April, and we flew at the end of June.

2005. The year of transition for us. It's all transition, after all. It's all new and old.

I had suggested there was a town in the South American Republica de Chile that was ideal: it was not too big or too small, but it had the right balance of rural and urban. I had been there for four months as a church volunteer and had really enjoyed it; I was hoping to have three more months at the end of my mission there but I was transferred out to a much smaller town.

I had enjoyed living in Chile twice in the early 90s. Chile was a country in transition; it presented things to me that were valuable. Opportunities for growth that I did not think were possible in my home land of the United States. It is harder to be a prophet in your own land: that curse was upon me to some degree in Indiana, or Utah, or California, or whatever other home state I found myself in. It was being in my home earth in general. It did not offer enough difference, I guess.

Chile proffered a different place, clime, attitude, language...a different me. Same but different. Better? Worse? Different. New. Preferable. We all seek something new or different, and even though it is not in actuality better, we feel that the change itself is best.

It can happen to us: to be bored with our old selves. Or it seemed to happen with me.

Chile was a land of escape for me, back when I was 19. It worked, to be a different land and language, different culture.

Culture. Big stuff.

Little stuff...Just a person. One individual.

TO BE CONTINUED...