I struggle with social media as I think it often becomes a means to “show off our best.” You read it and everyone is having the best holiday, the best vacation, the best marriage, the best kids… Well, my life isn’t always like that. My life is messy and hard and beautiful and amazing… it’s real.

So, being the real me, I am sharing that these past few days have been hard. I miss my family, I am tired of living in poverty, I am sick of eating rice (which has been served at every meal since I got here), I am frustrated that (while my Spanish has improved) it’s still not as good as I hoped it would be, I am tired of worrying about mice in the house… I have hit a low point, and I am OK that I did.

Because, this was not supposed to be easy. It was supposed to turn me inside out and upside down- how could it not? I have stepped away from everything I know and love to step foot into everything that I don’t know and may not love. And, in doing that, I have had to look at my own life, my values, my believes and reshape them to absorb this experience and that brings with it real struggles. Add in that I have always been someone who spends a lot of time thinking (and now my brain doesn’t know whether to think in English or Spanish) and sometimes my head just hurts from all that is is taking in.

One thing I have really struggled with is that there are many things that I love about Hilo Rojo, but there also are many things that I disagree with. While I love that we give food to the poor, I wonder why we aren’t giving more instead of letting it go bad in the storage closet. While I love that we work to educate kids, I wonder why we switch classrooms constantly so that the consistency of education never happens. While I love that we want to help these families, I watch us make decisions “in the best interest of the child” which go against the parent’s wishes, and I wonder if we really have the right to do that. And, the lack of organization- I might just lose my mind!

I have found it interesting that the volunteers from Canada, Australia, and the USA (only me) seem to struggle with this much more than the volunteers from the other countries. I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think it once again comes down to our cultural values. We are all countries which value “fixing that which is broken.” We believe in hard work, early to bed and early to rise, focus on the problem and solve it. And, while we can’t solve the problems of poverty or illiteracy here, there is an element of control in seeing these smaller issues and wanting to solve them. But, that’s not how things work here as here much of life is about acceptance as opposed to improvement. Cultural or poverty? I am not sure, but I have had to step back and realize that is OK. It is not my place to instill my “American dream” values to life here- the value of work harder, do better, fix the problem- as those are not the values of this community.

So, this goal oriented, overly organized, solution focused woman has had to be OK with a life void of these things. Has that been hard? Harder than you think as our values shape so much of our lives. But, here is not my life… it’s a moment in time which I get to step into for for a few weeks, I get to grow and learn and give back, and then I will go home. For the people living here, this is their life and this will continue to be their life once that I go home. So, I’m trying to put aside my American values (as hard as that is), to ignore the many things that I believe (right or wrong) need fixing, and instead focus on all the things that Hilo Rojo is doing to make a difference for this community.