Voices can ring loud in the mind, unchecked for years on end: Too slow. Too awkward. Too dumb.  Not good enough.  Those refrains have dripped into me like a mental Chinese water torture. I encountered them first in a weak moment, powerful and overwhelming amid that earliest brush with depression, and they’ve trickled into my consciousness in the years since. Even in the best and healthiest seasons, they’ve never fully disappeared.  It didn’t matter that I got my first full summer job at seventeen and have been asked back to every place I’ve worked since then. It didn’t matter that…

When I walked off the airplane, nothing could’ve reminded me I was really back in Texas like the Buc-ee’s t-shirt in the customs line right in front of me. With that first sudden plunge back into the United States, reverse culture shock began. Trashcans are everywhere… and they’re huge.  People all around me are mostly speaking English. The only meal I can buy for $2.50 is a McDonald’s hamburger.  For those first days back, every ten minutes, every place I went, every direction I turned, I slammed into reminders that I was not in Ecuador anymore as I started relearning…

[April 2017] There’s this eerily creepy scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel trades her voice box for human legs. In losing her voice, her main power of communication, she loses her ability to define herself to the world. She can no longer explain where she came from, elaborate her thoughts and feelings, offer her insight, convey her needs, or share where she’s going as she wants to. Without her voice, she’s at the mercy of the perceptions of whoever happens to be standing around her. And Ariel turns out to be one of the lucky ones, because out of…

[March 2017] It’s a five-minute walk to the biggest store in town, with fresh greens, live tilapia, toilet paper, and sandals all lining the walls of the open-air room. Another two minutes and you hit the big blue Catholic church; two minutes more and you reach the school on the right, the sports court on the left. There’s a soccer tournament held on that turf every weekend, and families gather to watch mothers, uncles, sisters, and cousins show their skill. The air’s buzzing with activity as my program friend and I join the families cheering on their players. A kid…

I spent a week in the Galápagos and brushed against the infinite — or, since you can’t exactly brush against something that has no boundaries, you might say I sort of wafted into it.  How do you describe the exhilaration that rises over you as the sea and sky blend into a single blue that looks like it just might be the edge of the world? It enveloped me like the sand between my toes and the clear, cool salt water on my sunburned skin.  All around, this blue. The color of trust. The color of faithfulness. The color of…

The calls of birds – they called me wide awake, though I had left my bed some hours past, their world awash with green, the sun to take inside those leaves, that life might grow and last.   The air filled rich and damp into each lung – the clouds to permeate my very skin, replenish life diverse, from water wrung, throughout the forest, harmony within.   I stepped into this realm but as a guest, the system’s balance well complete. I come – oh, let me enter not disturbing, lest I, careless, trample equilibrium.   To witness, tend, protect,…

“So this bus does go to the North Station? For sure?” I asked in Spanish, again, glancing out the window at the unfamiliar surroundings. “Yes, yes. Certainly,” the man responded. But by the time the bus pulled into the final stop, I wasn’t too surprised to step out and find myself at the wrong station, one I had never seen before. I’d been in Quito less than a week – little enough time to take the wrong bus and have no clue where I was going, but long enough to realize that I was in a completely new part of…

Every culture is a collection of unique individual communities. If, as Max Weinrich quipped, a language is merely a dialect with an army and a navy, then what we call a country’s culture is merely the sum of microcosmic social expectations that acknowledge a given ruling authority. For me, much of this past week has centered around both entering and establishing communities. What exactly are those communities? Of course, there’s the obvious single answer – Ecuadorian society – but a second evaluation quickly reveals a more nuanced response.  The main micro-community I’ve entered this past week has been my study…

Twelve hours till takeoff. Why do excitement and anxiety go together so well? I’m running over the items in my luggage again and talking myself through what will happen if I forget anything. Three and a half months. Three and a half months in Ecuador. Three and a half months away from Texas. I’ve never been away from home that long. I’ve never been out of North America. Boarding pass, immunization records, passport, visa documentation. Check, check, check, check. Clothes, medications, toiletries, shoes, a whole bunch of me-friendly snacks. All packed. International SOS registered. Laptop, camera, phone. I even gave in…