January has been a month of change. The first big change was Medali (my best friend and partner in crime at work) finished University here in Huánuco, and moved back to Pucallpa to be with her family. While, I don’t blame her for moving back home, I was incredibly sad when she left. However, God gave me Laura (Laaaura in Spanish). Laura is a volunteer from Colombia that will be helping myself and the other psychologists for one month. I was excited to learn that Laura would be living with my host family and I, mainly because making friends in Peru has been a bit of a challenge. We have a joke in my family that my dad used to pay my friends in high school to be my friends…. I’m starting to think it’s true.
But having Laura has been an incredible blessing. She likes to laugh and joke around as much as I do. Plus she loves to get out of the house and explore, something I find hard to do alone. I’m only sad that she will only be here for a month!
In Huánuco there is a really fun tradition called carnival. For all of January and February, if you are walking during a Saturday or Sunday, your chances of getting hit with a water balloon are very high. It is super fun tradition, and half the time you have no idea where the water balloons came from, only that you are soaking wet. What I didn’t know though was that some people use paint in the water. Needless to say, Laura and I both got hit with buckets of purple water. My Duke Nursing shirt, is a little on the purple side these days. Don’t tell Jacob! But we had a lot of fun just walking around and enjoying the tradition.
Not only has Laura become a great friend in the last week, but she has already reminded me of an important lesson. While working together the other day, Laura stopped and asked me how I felt about people in Latin American and South American countries disliking people from the United States. I asked her to clarify what exactly she meant, and she told me that if I were to walk into a University in another country, most people would most likely not want to talk to me or even be near me. Simply because I’m from the United States and we tend to be looked at as a spoiled, oil-sucking country. I told her I was sad to hear this and wanted to learn more. For over an hour we sat and talked about politics, religion, and just personal beliefs. What was amazing to me was that Laura and I have basically the same ideas, the same opinions, and the same way of thinking. We believe in peace, we believe in love, and we believe in living within your means. We are the same, just from different countries.
The thing that sticks with me most from the conversation is that Laura told me she was skeptical when she heard she would be living with a person from the United States, but that after talking to me she is starting to think that people from the United States might not be so bad after all. I have always known that there had been some judgment towards people from the United States, I would too if “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” was the only thing I really knew about them. And I won’t lie; I have had my own judgments of other countries. But, it’s important for me to always remember that people will have their opinions of me because I am a gringa, and because of that that I must always try my best to break those stereotypes through my actions and words.
Laura and I
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” –Maya Angelou
