Journal entry turned artist contract

What follows is a journal entry that I wrote a few days before heading home to visit family and friends towards the end of last month. As I sat, sharing a room with a few friendly, sleeping bats and a beautiful trickle of late afternoon sunlight, this journal entry took a turn for the better. I often like to sit and reflect about the challenges and the triumphs that living and working in a foreign culture bring about. However, on this day, I decided that the reflection was not enough. Commitment to persevere and new promises needed to be written. So after signing and sending in my official contract to continue working with ArtCorps and FUNDAHMER until December 2009, I post this journal entry turned artist contract to share with you all a bit more about what it really means to me, to be an artcorps artist.


Today is Tuesday, tomorrow is Wednesday and Thursday I go home to visit my family for 10 whole days!! I can barely believe that I will be leaving El Salvador to go HOME for this time. I will be away from the community, FUNDAHMER and the hectic schedule and the friendly and not so friendly people who have become my immediate reality. It’s funny, because I know exactly what to expect in terms of seeing my family, but in terms of being home and the feelings it will bring about, I have absolutely no idea what to expect. Robyn says it feel s padded and at times very disconnected. I can already imagine that.
I simply cannot wait to see my family and to love and hug them. It is going to be unreal! But it is also going to be a challenge to explain to them the decision I feel that I have already made. Just reading the second year contract that Suzanne sent me yesterday, made me even more certain about the decision. One of the sections talks about the creative experimentation that is so much a part of having a successful year with ArtCorps. The freedom to experiment creatively is possibly one of the aspects I value the most about the organization. I have learned to adapt new techniques as if they were something I had been using for years and I actually see results!
As with the uncertainty that I have about what it will be like being back to the states, there is also no way of telling how this next year would be. Things are bound to change dramatically; the situation, the projects, me. But I can almost be certain that I will continue to learn and grow in the same profound manner that I have since I arrived in Guatemala on January 2nd of this year.
During this time I have been dreadfully ill, I have been bitten by a million and something mosquitoes, I have been a teacher, a student and an improvised actress, artist and facilitator. I have been hugged, loved, pushed and shoved. I have made friends and hopefully few enemies. I have made leaps, jumps and fallen backwards. But through it all, I have held my own hand. I have been my own motivator, my own critic and my own teacher and friend. My inner monologues have brought me frustration, happiness, sadness and tranquility, while also getting me through some of the toughest challenges.
It would be lying to say that my family and my new and old friends have not helped. They have been such an integral part of the maintenance of my sanity. They support me, challenge me and ask questions that I often forget to ask myself. They help me reflect in ways that my own mind would not independently reflect. They feed me with new materials to read and techniques to try. But, nobody understands me better than me. And if the lessons I have learned about myself over the past 8 months were the only thing I had gotten out of this journey, I might even consider doing it all over again just for that. But, they are not, and I am certainly not finished learning about me, this culture or this line of work.
I woke up this morning under my mosquito net, in the bedroom that I share with a sweet, 16 year old girl named Kenny Yessenia. As I tried to shake off my “spanglish” ridden dreams and snap into full on Spanish mode, I found myself already thinking about the things I needed to organize for the women from the women’s committee who would be arriving within the hour. I ran around rather frantically boiling my “platano” breakfast and getting the coffee going for the women. I gave myself a very quick bucket bath and ran across the street to where I store my materials to get things together for the morning meeting.
To my surprise, for the first, maybe second time since I have been in El Salvador, they arrived early!! Two of the women arrived on the 7:30 bus and I hadn’t been expecting them until 8:00. I left them sitting, chatting on the couch as I continued to prepare.
Teresa (the woman I live with) would not be present for the meeting that we were going to have that day in her home. She had, had to travel to the city to serve as a witness for a family that has been trying for months to get a visa to move to the United States.
So here I was running around, forgetting to remind myself to slow down, when Yanet, a woman from the committee told me I was being something, something which I didn’t quite understand at the time. The word was one that I hadn’t heard before, but I think I understand now what she was trying to tell me. She told me to sit down and have my coffee and my “pan dulce,” so I did.
I caught my breath and as we chatted I began to fully enjoy their company. I began to listen and observe, and the course of the meeting came to me through conversation and reflection. I had already planned out the main points of our meeting, but I had not put them in order, nor figured out exactly how to introduce them. I often find myself with the impulse to teach, because that is what I was trained to do. But these days, I continuously remind myself that I am just as much the student and by sitting in the circle and absorbing the company and sharing the breadth of knowledge and wisdom that we all possess, we will learn much more profoundly together.
So, in this reflective journal entry turned personal contract, I promise to ArtCorps, my family, my friends, the communities, FUNDAHMER and to myself to continue a second year working with these two organizations that have opened my mind and heart and to commit myself to continue reflecting, learning, and implying new methods of popular education, old habits of human kindness and to continue seeking out creative and revolutionary approaches to social action through the arts and to share them with the people and communities that I meet.
Thank you for this opportunity,
Sincerely
Laura Smith