My letter today is coming directly from my personal journal. I am just typing up some excerpts from one of my entries... I do not usually write this much in a day (I wish!). I just happened to have a lot of time and thoughts this particular day...
Tuesday, Otober 9, 2012
Today we paid a grand total of 8 pesos to hop onto a colectivo and travel about 40 minutes out of the city to the Guaycolec wild animal reserve. Sol came with us and she prepared a delicous picnic lunch of swiss chard empanadas and ham sandwiches. We also brought an ice cold thermos of pear-mango tang (they have every flavor of tang imaginable here in Argentina!) that kept us going all afternoon.
Driving out into the countryside I was able to enjoy a little more of the natural landscape of Formosa. This land really is beautiful and greener than I imagined. Lots of lowlying scrubbish brushland dotted with tall slender palm trunks that explode into a firework of fronds and leaves. Every once in a while the vegetation became thicker and greener and a smill windy riacho cut through it. The weather was pretty perfect—hot but breezy. The sky a brilliant blue with tall white puffy clouds.
The reserve itself was a little empty and unkempt. Entrance is free and as we walked in we crossed paths with the hermanas from another district who were on their way out. Other than that, the whole place felt rather abandoned, and we were the only ones there.
A friendly guide smelling heavily of beer and cigarettes showed us around to some of the nearby cages—big scarlet parrots, a lovely happy little toucan, a funny rodentlike animal called a carpincho (they eat them here!), a little deer-like animal—then the guide gestured off in the distance to the path we´d have to take to see the monkies and jaguars and he returned back to his station (and presumably to his beer and cigarettes).
The monkies were my favorite. We could walk right up to their cage and stare at them nose to nose. They fascinate me. I think it´s because with their perfect little hands and facial expressions they seem so much like little furry humans. We spent almost 40 minutes staring at them and watching as they ate orange slices and climbed and jabbered and screeched.
On two separate occasions as we walked around the park a GIANT black and white iguana-like lizard creature darted across our path. I am not exactly sure what it was, but it was not caged in and it moved FAST, unlike what I usually expect from giant lizards.
On the way over, the colectivo dropped us off right in front of the reserve, but on the way back we had to walk back along the highway about a mile or so, crossing a bridge to a tiny busstop near the entrance to what seemed to be a rural farming village.
The walk was pleasant (we still had plenty of pear-mango tang) and when we reached our little out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere bus stop (seriously, there was just a little shelter with benches and then endless highway streching out for miles and miles cutting through wildnerness), we sat down and waited patiently for our bus to pass.
We ended up waiting for HOURS and getting back to our area an hour late, which was a stressful experience, but the bus never passed when it was supposed to. Still, as we waited I was overcome by the beauty of the landscape, the sky and the changing light, and I felt peaceful and happy. At one point a cow escaped from the pasture lands and several older fully-decked out Argentine “gauchos” (aka cowboys) came to corral it back in.
Sitting there, I had a lot of time to reflect and I began to think a lot about my mission and my short time here in Argentina which, wow, before I know it, will come to a close. When I first got here I thought all the time about home. For almost the first time in my life I struggled with feelings of being legitimatelyand painfully homesick. I didn´t write much about it here but I longed to be home, probably because it was familiar, beloved and much more comfortable, secure and altogether a lot easier than being a missionary. Now that home is closer in sight, I can feel my attitudes shifting. It is not any easier to be a missionary but I love being here, right where I am. I love this land, these people. I lately am struck by feelings of extreme tenderness and appreciation even for small moments—a child calling out “hermana!”, directing hymns in this tiny branch, drawing pictures of the plan of salvation. So many little things.
And lately I am starting to realize that “real life” and coming home to make very real, life-changing decisions about life and the future isn´t easy either. They are just hard in different ways. One thing at a time I suppose. I will cherish this while I still can and then move on to what´s next.
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