Loneliness

Last night I ended up getting sick. I ate at a questionable restaurant for lunch yesterday and paid the price. Luckily, I didn't get as sick as some "gringos" that have passed through here, but none-the-less I was fairly miserable all last night and most of the day today.

Even though I was feeling ill, I woke up and headed back to the shanty towns to meet another Peruvian American who was considering working with the CLM. He had just come back from 2 1/2 years in Africa with the Peace Corps. He had a lot of interesting experiences with a tribal village there. His focus surrounded providing basic health care, and as a graduate from Brown in Economic Development, he was fascinated with the operation that is currently underway in his home country.

The guy that picked me up to take me to the shanty towns spoke english, but spanish and portuguese were his main languages, and the Peruvian American we met up with brought his Brazilian girlfriend. So I spent most of the day listening to conversations in portuguese. While the language is similar to spanish, I still had little to no idea what they were talking about 95% of the day.

Today was the first day I really felt lonely. I think part of it was how ill I felt, another part was how lonely it can be when you can't communicate with anyone. For someone who is used to developing a few deep relationships, it's very difficult to have many shallow relationships held back by a language barrier. Knowing so little spanish, I can't really make a connection about who these people are and what they're about until I learn more spanish. It's certainly giving me more motivation, but it's also very discouraging. There are some points during the day when I get frustrated and think I will never learn this language and I end up speaking english to the few english speakers around here.