This is the way I live!

June 8^th

Oh my, how this place is different than that other place-that other heart and soul place, that other life and green place, that other smell and sight place, that other home and hearth, that other heartbreak and alone place, that other heat and death and warmth and light.  How this place is different.  Different?  Different!  I wake up, heart slowing me down, blankets all around, bed swallowing me up like its meaning to eat me alive, thoughts running slowly slowly through my head, slow motion like life here.  Adrenaline leaving me as quickly as I think the thought that it might be approaching me.  Heartache?  Elephants?  Sweat?  Skin and whiskey and hot rain and rivers and genocide and freedom and bugs and bugs and love and oceans are a fast thing of the past.  So fast they leave me, so far behind they run from me.  Here I smell like cold dirt, here I feel like I am being built upwards and outwards, not inwards and sideways.  Here is slow slow slow, energy and heartbeats enter and exit in my dreams and even then, it takes me layers and layers of eyelids to push past them, wake up and see that this place, oooh this place has slowed me down.  How is life here, life here in Ollantaytambo, so…steady?  So steady.  I am here and I am not going there, there to that place and this hostel and with those people to this restaurant at this time with these drinks and then to see that temple and then on this night bus I am just here. 

In comparison to Mae Sot this place does not compare.  I do not feel dangerous, I do not feel harshness, I feel warmth leaving as soon as it enters my body.  As soon as I leave the warm circles of water in my shower, I am back to being cold.  I feel a lack of adventure, a riskiness come and gone.  (am I growing up?).  I saw a need and filled it.  I work to provide people health services.  I network to begin a mapping project in our communities.  I discuss the utility of obtaining domestic violence and sexual assault statistics in high altitude regions to begin an awareness campaign.  My roommate and I talk about, over breakfast, how I can implement a program whereby our promotoras teach his program participants about reproductive health, and in exchange they can translate for us and get free food.  I have never worked this hard in my life.  This pace of life is slow, so slow and so easy at times.  I wake up, make my bed, eat breakfast, hike Incan ruins, go to work, work about 10-12 hours, then drink a beer, or not, make dinner, or not, and go to bed.  And I think I love it so far.