Well
- my last letter. What do you say in your last letter?
Today will be the last time that I will have to use a public computer. Two years of letters from you guys. Im a spoiled child. Thank you family.
I
was talking to my companion this morning about how we spend two years
trying to help people that for the most part don't really want to be
helped, We try to show them how to progress but most are fine with
where they are. After pushing against that rock for so long it puts
in us a strong desire to progress and be helped. But it takes time
and it requires a lot of patience. Here on the mish, most of our time
and effort is focused on others. Now that I am going home, that
desire can be directed almost exclusively towards my own progress. I
am looking forward to exercising, reading, and working on some other
stuff.
The
mission has been a lot of what everyone had told me it would be.
Difficult, dirty, fun, boring, satisfying, trying. Really good days
and very hard ones. Its weird to almost have it in my rear view
mirror instead of my windshield. I am pretty sure that looking back
on in several years I will see that I will have received a lot
more than I gave. On this end of the adventure Im glad that I
gave it everything that I had and feel complete gratitude for the
many great people here that often gave more than they had to help my
companions and I.
My
dad always told me that "people are not the means to an end,
they are the end of means." That life is about people.
That has been very true about my mish. The people are
everything, and it has been worth everything to have been able to
help out an old widow, or the young family that has almost no money,
or the self destructive man that has every vice there is.
Things
that have changed about me
- I chew mint gum now. (every other type still makes me nauseous)
- I'm now not grossed out by using dishes washed by hand
- I have eaten every part of a cactus.
- I wash clothes using just stick and a pop bottle
- I speak with the ñ and double rr
- I eat everything from popcorn to peanuts with salsa and I pretty much always have had a tortilla in my hand
- I can make some sweet cement mix on the street outside your house
- I know pretty much everything one can know about dog behavior
- I have a pretty good idea about what my mustache would look like...if one day I can actually grow one
- I have eaten fried pig skin
- I have seen how to prepare intestines for a good ol´ taco
Mexico has been a home away from home. A very spicy, and well armed, and dusty home, but I really have come to love my hermanos here. And I guess like many of those great hermanos, my time has come to cross the border.