El Telégrafo reported that Todd Stern, a special counsel on Climate Change for the White House, traveled to Quito this week to discuss the US’s possible participation in ITT.
Stern said there have been differences between the two country’s opinions about climate change, but that he was there “con el espíritu de compartir pensamientos y escuchar las perspectivas.”
I wasn’t expecting this.
Last night was the graduation of the seniors whom I’ve taught since I arrived here. Today was my last day of work at Colegio Americano. I will leave for Brazil next Wednesday and return for a brief day to Quito and then fly to New York and begin another part of this life.
What I wasn’t expecting: sadness. I’m sad. I feel the kind of “miss you” nostalgia for my school and my students and co-workers that, frankly, I didn’t think I’d have. This is the end of an experience, I suppose, and these people were the characters that acted it out with me. They were there when I went through what I went through, their faces and voices, the shape of the buildings, the bathroom where I went to seek refuge, the particular kind of light that comes in through my classroom windows, the administrators’ ambivalent glances as they walked past.
I feel for it somehow.
What I feel is the actual ending of something that has impacted me in ways I don’t understand yet. Only in the last month, as people have asked what I’m going to do, asked me my thoughts about my experiences here, have I begun to see the extent of the difference these two years have made on me.
When they ask me if I’m ready to go home I say, “oh yes.”
When they ask me if I had a good experience here I say, “it was difficult.”
“But was it good?” they follow-up.
I pause.
“I can’t remember what it was like to think before I came here,” I respond.
I’ve said this a few times, in just that way. I can’t remember what it was like to think. And it’s true. I can sense shifts in the apparatus that helps me interpret the world. What I look for when I’m looking for significance, how I look for it, the kind of significance that results–it’s all different now. It feels different. I’ve learned another language. I’ve learned to care about global justice, the mechanics of history, economics, suffering as the result of social processes. I’ve seen what it means for a culture to be different than mine. I’ve seen the effects that different cultures have on each other. I’ve felt the effects that cultures have on the individuals that compose them.
I may’ve rationally recognized these things before. Spoke the language openness I was taught. But I didn’t have that understanding. A first-person series of images to connect and interpret and describe, to narrate to myself in my own memory. A solid mass that’s called up to the front of my consciousness when someone says the words. I didn’t have that. Now I do.
And so many of the things I’ve seen here, directly experienced, map to experience in general. It’s not just a series of moments spent in another place. It’s a series of moments that have left a residue within me that have changed the very structure of the me that arrived here at the beginning.
My memories of myself before I came here are images, but of a different character. I look back at them with new eyes. Before the story I told to myself about myself was a cohering whole with standard interpretations. But now that my apparatus has shifted in its axioms I interpret my own story differently. I rethink the foundations, the fundament upon which my goals have always rested. There’s an interpretive haze where there once was certainty.
Does my life, the things I’ve done and the things that’ve been done to me, still mean the same thing?
The answer is yes and no. It still means what it once did. But that meaning must move aside for a new meaning. Make room for another possible significance. For there are others that do things differently. Others that lives their lives differently.
There are people that kiss each other when they walk into rooms and kiss each other when they leave them, no matter their relation. There are people that live in clapboard homes five hours from the nearest town, the only way of getting there by bike. There are governments that turn off the lights of entire cities because there isn’t enough electricity. There are buses so full of people such that one’s neck may be pressed into metal bars. There are people that will tackle you in front of your house and hold you by the neck, dump the contents of your backpack on the street, and walk away laughing. There are families that always spend Sunday together, that never move more than ten miles away from each other. There are people that will hold a knife to you and take your father’s camera. There are people that wake up at three in the morning to drink tea and interpret dreams. There are bugs the size of birds that perch on power lines. There are schools of people who believe they are entitled to have others clean the urine they fail to urinate into their toilets. There are houses with electric fences around them. There are uncontacted tribes that kill invaders with spears. There are cities built into mountains.
These are some of the moments that come to mind when I think about how I cannot remember what it was like to think before I came here. This morning I found myself ranting about how natural resources and labor are merely nature and humanity, and how an individual in the self-regulating market treats these as entirely different kinds of things than a human individual outside the market might. This week I’ve been writing an essay about development, the history and politics of Ecuador, and environmentalism. This year I’ve been reading political philosophy, anthropology, history.
These were not the kinds of thing I read and wrote and did before.
I see a sandwich now and I ask where its contents were grown, who harvested them, what was the price of those contents, how was that price fixed, how did it get to the market that sold it to the restaurant that’s selling it to me, did the creature(s) it was made from suffer, did the people who made it suffer. I ask if it’s right to eat the sandwich. I ask if it’s right to participate in a system that produces the sandwich. I ask what I can read to understand that system. I ask what I can ask others to think more about that system. I ask what I can do now that I understand what I understand about that system.
Before it was just a sandwich.
But it never was just a sandwich, was it?
All these things were there all along, breathing without my knowledge. The people, the questions, the colors–all existences while I led mine thinking I knew something about something. I’ve come to see that I only have a part, a finite sight of the qualities of a thing. That there is an infinity of qualities to each sandwich, expression, law. Further that there is a freedom to being, that every necessity was developed as part of a history, a story put together by a free flow of events. I do this, you do that. We have histories acting upon us, forming what we believe to be necessary, but all upon a cloud’s basis, upon air’s weight, upon empty space’s solidity. Things aren’t necessarily so.
I wasn’t expecting this.
But here I am on the other side of two years, returning home in a matter of weeks. Returning with a new set of eyes. I wonder if what I’m returning can properly be called home. The colors will be similar. The people will remember me. The streets and the smells of the streets–the stimulus will be similar. But the significance will be different. What it will mean will be different. And these eyes will see vibrantly new things, an infinity of aspects to sift and understand and accept. My friends and family will see a body and recognize it, but this body’s eyes will see my friends and think them different. Changed. Not the same. Levels upon levels of complexity haunting the simplest familiarities. The definitions of words slipping, shaking at their limits.
So with that I end my time here. I plan to go back through the posts of this blog and see what it was I actually thought, as I have a conveniently thorough written record of my experiences. I plan to pinpoint the times of change, the before-during-after of this time I’ve spent. Put my finger on how it is that this happened.
That this happened.
A discussion board picked up my post about Angelina Jolie accepting an offer to become an ambassador for the project. A short discussion of this ensued on the message board, proof that celebrities can help inform the public.
Angelina Jolie visited Sucumbíos province this weekend and had an hour-long meeting with Correa. Here’s a picture of the two of them. During her visit here she accepted the title of “ambassador” for the Yasuní-ITT project and said she was interested in making a movie in South America.
Found the PDF here.
