Taking stock

I have three weeks left in Honduras. A week ago I told my friend I was ready, antsy, like the last two months in secondary school, finished making the most of the place and feeling I had overstayed my welcome. A week ago I wanted to take the next plane home.

But that was the loneliness talking, and now I'm more used to living alone, I'm entering the inevitable not-wanting-to-leave stage. Since I know I'm not trapped here with no alternative prospects for the rest of my life, I have a better handle on the positive side of my life in Honduras.

I was miserable when I got here first. I didn't understand my job, I didn't understand the blurry politics that I was expected to analyse. I used to sit in meetings squinting, making a physical effort to make sense of the melee of gossip, bitching and key essential information, all in a Spanish that I could only just follow (when my colleagues would tell me I needed to "read between the lines"). Anything worth knowing isn't reported in the media, so trying to track the process of the government's poverty reduction strategy is a matter of coded conversations and listening at doors. My boss would flap into my office in the morning to update us on what she found out at a World Bank party the night before: I would surreptitiously take notes so that later I could try to unravel who all the names referred to, and what those slang Spanish words meant. I have never felt so lost or stupid in my life.

Over the course of the year, I've experienced a massive breach between my learning curve (dramatic) and what I was expected to know (twice as much as I ever did). So that in spite of killing myself, I never felt like I was half good enough.

So work was a struggle. And everything else that happened was framed by work. It's taken until now for work by itself to be a reason to stay on. Suddenly (and though I can't point to a moment of epiphany, it has been a sudden, and complete, reversal), I have a clarity about what we're at here, and instead of feeling confused and inept, I get excited when I visit organisations. I have thick, interesting conversations with my colleagues. I'm getting it. I'm beginning to get it.

And in 3 weeks I'm leaving.

So now I have the luxury of regretting, or at least feeling sad. I hadn't realised how much I had internalised Tegucigalpa, or how accustomed I'd become to this funny ex pat life. The 5 minute commute to work, the perfect climate, the never needing to think about what to wear. The closeness of our work life, an office fizzing with energy and politics in equal measure. Slow, sweet Honduran smiles. When you ask a Honduran how they are, they unfailingly reply "pues, aqui, saludandote": "well, here, saying hello to you". Or rather, they unfailingly say nothing. I'll miss our (almost) effortless bilingualism, I'll miss taxi drivers asking if I'm married, I'll miss the view up to el Picacho so much I think it will hurt. And the mountains and the pine trees, the highway from Tegus to San Pedro that I've trawled in countless buses and the ocassional pick up. Dancing with the girls from the office. Dancing with sleazy boys trying to grind against my leg. I'll miss the music - the awful, terrible repetitive music - so much. Truth be told, I probably have no idea how much I'll miss.
But none of this, honestly, compares with the prospect of living with simp again, and being a reasonable distance from my family. So I'll remain pleasantly tortured, which is what I am. I am so happy, so lucky, so blessed: I've had an amazing year here, and I got out of it a stronger relationship and a proper job that equals, at last, something approaching a career.

Off diving for the last time next weekend, but I'll keep plugging away at this from time to time, as interesting things occur. And I might see you in October.