One big step

Lately (roughly the last month, minus IST), I’ve been feeling a bit blahblahblah. That is, a general malaise, marked by occasional spikes in my spirit, but for the most part, there’s been a decent amount of pathetic self-pity. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself – this experience has been much harder for me than I imagined it would be – but I feel as though in some ways I’m not living up to my own expectations. Ironic considering that all along, I said I had no expectations, but those little buggers just crept up on me, so insidiously. And now here I am feeling… just crappy. Self-doubts plague me: am I doing enough work? At the rate I’m working, will I really make any legitimate difference or contribution to this community? Am I trying hard enough to integrate? Will I ever feel like I have “integrated”? What will it take for me to feel like a success at integrating, to feel like I belong here? All of these doubts make me feel unhappy. Volunteers tell me this is normal, and that after about a year, things just click and you start to groove. Lately I've been doubting that wisdom - at one year, will things click, or will I just become complacent in my unhappiness? Lately, all of these thoughts have made me consider how nice it might feel to just give up and ship back home to the states.
Anyway, it was in the midst of these kinds of thoughts that I was sitting in my living room this afternoon, about to get ready to go to market, when I heard some ruckus outside my front door. I opened the door to find my two male neighbors, tearing apart my decrepit and badly-in-need-of-replacement wooden stairs leading up to my front porch. Awhile ago, the top step caved in (probably from rotting), so now you must make an almost comically large step up onto my porch to bypass the fallen soldier (impossible for my neighbor’s 5-year-old little girl to accomplish).
About a month ago, when it first crapped out, my neighbors commented that I needed to get it repaired. I know, I said sheepishly. I didn’t really know how to explain to them all the barriers involved to resolving this small problem: that I didn’t know who to go to get it done; how much it should/would cost; how to negotiate (indeed the headache there involved) with the landlord that I shouldn’t have to pay for this since the house should just have sturdy steps anyway; the fact that there are so many other problems with my house that this really seemed pretty insignificant by comparison (holes between the floor and the walls where I once found a tarantula, and where, I recently discovered, mice live; a leaky roof with heavy rainy season on its way; lack of ceiling throughout half the house; insect infestation; spotty electricity… the list goes on). The bottom line was – the mere thought of resolving the problem gave me a headache and it honestly wasn’t that much extra work for me to take a giant step everyday onto and off of my porch.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked my neighbors, who had already dismantled the steps and were now digging into the dirt to remove the pieces that were embedded in the ground.
“Fixing your steps.” My neighbour answered. It wasn’t even a question, “would you like us to fix your steps for you?” It was a statement. Almost as if saying, this needs to be done and since, for whatever reason, you haven’t done it, we’ll take care of it. As if I was their family, and not just their inept white neighbor.
Wow. I was dumbstruck and sat down to watch them work for a minute, not even knowing how to properly express my gratitude. I almost started crying out of appreciation. Did they know that they had just saved me probably a month’s worth of footwork in negotiating who would build new steps, who would pay for them and how much they would cost? Probably not. Beyond that, did they know that their actions spoke worlds to me, said more than they could ever have said with words? Maybe. Just when I feel like I can’t possibly fit in and despite my efforts, I suck at integration (indeed, probably my greatest fear at the moment), my neighbors go and do this. They go and remind me that I don’t need to go home to the US to be happy. I’m already home.