Leading a Double Life

I´m at a point in my Peace Corps service where it´s hard to figure out which life is more real, the one I´m living here in Ecuador or the one I left behind in the States. I can´t seem to reconcile how life here can be harder but simpler while my life there was easier but more complicated. Regardless, life has become strangely familiar as I´ve settled into a routine and grown accustomed to the pace of my small community. As I walk down the dirt road on my way to work in the school my mind distantly recalls the pushing, shoving and waiting of a NYC subway commute. Maybe I´ve been watching too many telenovelas, but I feel at times I´m leading a double life. I´ve fled the crowds and concrete and traded them in for pollos and platanos but all the while I try to maintain an acrobatic like balance between who I was in the states with who I am here. This life feels just as real as the one I left behind, so what will I do when it´s gone? What would Maria Jesus do?

It´s like all this amazing fruit here that is so exotic I often need instructions on how to eat it. Daniel is up at the top f a Guaba tree throwing down ones that are ripe. Everyone wants one. I break open what looks like a giant pea pod and pop a seed covered in what has the texture and color of cotton but is certainly sweeter tasting. I spit the large seed onto the ground. David asks, ¨You´ve never had one of these before?¨ Like with many fruits here, not before living in Ecuador and probably not after. And even though you can go to a supermarket and find pineapples I would maybe buy one once a year. Here, I´m given one practically every week. What will I do without a free daily supply of fresh fruit once I´m back in the States?

It´s hard for friends and family stateside to understand these things. My Dad calls and as we´re talking asks ¨Is that a rooster crowing?¨ As if that´s something unusual. ¨I thought they only crowed in the mornings.¨ They do. But also in the afternoon, evenings and at 3 o´clock in the morning when you´re trying to sleep. It´s some cartoon version of life on the farm where roosters only crow for their 6am wake up call. But will I miss the constant crow of roosters when they´re replaced once again by honking horns?

When I fill up my basket with dirty laundry and lug it down to the river I distantly remember pushing a cart to the laundry mat in the dead of winter. In both my lives, I find doing laundry is a huge pain and I avoid it as much as possible. But at least when I´m beating my clothes against a rock I get a good upper body workout. I´ll come back to the States with laundry muscles, which may come in handy for pushing my way through the rush hour crowd as I try to catch the train home. But will I long for the days when I could hitch a ride home in the back of a neighbor´s truck?

And more importantly, which Ecuadorian habits will become permanently embedded in my personality and which will fade away? Will I say it´s going to rain when it´s already started raining? Will I eat every meal with a giant spoon? Will I borrow things and give them back months later, if at all. Somehow I know that the tightrope I walk between these dual lives will have to continue indefinitely.