Let it be...

*For your additional amusement, I have placed the titles of 13 songs sung by the Beatles or their members within today’s post. First one to find them all and list them wins my utmost respect  :)  UPDATE: All the titles are now highlighted.

As of this Saturday, I’ll have been in Honduras for 9 months. 9 months. That’s a long time. As you can imagine, a  lot of stuff can happen in 9 months. One can become pregnant and pop out a little bundle of joy in that amount of time. But no, that’s not what’s happened in my life, don’t worry. My friend Rebecca and I joke that we are about 7 years, reproductively speaking,  behind our friends from high school. Anyways, time has gone fast, time has gone slow. But it’s at about this point that I start looking back and trying to see what I’ve accomplished and what has come together. I can’t help it, I’m an MPH, we’re a results oriented type of people. We like to measure outcomes and compare them to our initial objectives. If that’s the case, I’m doomed. I haven’t really produced results.   

               

Last week I was chatting with a local Peace Corps volunteer and I asked him how much longer he had here in Honduras, he replied 8 months. I then asked him how he felt about that. He proceeded to tell me that he was just really happy all the time now. His first year here was rough and he felt discouraged, like he wasn’t doing enough. But now he realizes that a lot of it was his own naïve expectations of what he could accomplish. When he came to terms with it all, he was happy. He went into the Peace Corps thinking he was going to help save the world. I told him that the world doesn’t want saving, it wants to be saved.  Don’t call me cynical, it’s true. That whole intermediary process of change is rough. Getting from point A to B not as easy as one would expect. Change takes time. Change is very often met with distrust and skepticism (just ask Obama).  Change is painful and can be a long and winding road. A community may want certain changes in their town, but upon learning what will be required of them, they very often lose interest or become discouraged. They want to know that it won’t be long before they see results.  They want to see it NOW, not later.That includes me.

So maybe it’s not about producing results right away. Maybe it’s about that challenging process of change and transformation.  Remember when you were little and growing?  Remember how painful “growing pains” were? I remember that I would cry my eyes out at night when my knees hurt and the only results I saw were growing a fraction of an inch. It didn’t seem that much at the time, but little by little it added up, and now I’m an impressive 5’ 3 ½ ’’   :)

Yesterday was the 30^th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I read an article that said people had gathered in Strawberry Fields Park in NYC and were singing his songs as a tribute. 30 years is a long time to be dead. But you would never know it. Yesterday as I was sitting in the town’s park and drinking a lovely cup of coffee, I suddenly heard people singing and it caught my ear because the words were in English.  There was a group of four men who normally sing typical Spanish love songs. But yesterday was different.  Yesterday they were gently strumming their guitars and singing Beatle’s songs.  What’s even more surprising is that it was done in perfect English. It was right about the time that they were singing Hey Jude that I started to feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It felt like scene from a movie. It made the world seem a little smaller.  For a few minutes I felt like I was in the States, not in Central America.

Na na na, na na na na, na na na na, Hey Jude. Na na na, na na na, na na na na, Hey Jude. Hey Judy judy judy judy, judy judy!!

It’s truly amazing the effect a single person (with a little help from his friends, of course) can have on the world. Even 30 years after they've died.  If a singer/songwriter can change the world, why can’t I? It wasn’t an overnight revolution, he needed to meet Paul McCartney and George Harrison first (sorry Ringo Starr, you didn't really contribute as much).  So maybe I won’t produce grandiose results here, but I’m sure it’s preparing me for something else, one day. So for now, I’ll just let it be…

aceituna, over and out. 

quote of the day:

"In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work.  It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years" - Jacques Barzun