Katerina Parsons (’15) graduated with a double major in English writing and international development studies. She lives in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where she works as the Director of English Communications for the Association for a More Just Society, an organization that fights for peace, security, and anti-corruption in Honduras.
But sometimes I am lonely, so lonely that I can’t take this solitude as a gift. It feels embarrassing or unfashionable to admit this, that after almost a year, I feel untethered and empty sometimes, even despite support systems and good friends.
This was my mistake. I tried to tell a story without knowing the lives behind it, without caring. I did not publish that story, however remarkable I still find it. It was not mine to share.
People aren’t talking about the twenty-two-year-old case workers crying in their cubicles at the end of a particularly hard day.
I remember being so overwhelmed and lost three months in. I can promise you—it gets better! How long have I been here? Almost a year, actually. Well, okay, six months. But coming up on a year.
“Say nice things to me,” I pleaded with him once in desperation. “You’re beautiful,” he told me, which had once been enough, back when he was the first to ever tell me, “…and smart?” I felt myself slipping away.
English’s hegemony is causing the rapid and irreversable death of less-spoken languages, and with the death of these langauges die rich histories and cultures.
18. Use sunblock. 19. “Like” friends’ and acquaintances’ engagements on Facebook without texting your sister “I am going to die alone.” 20. Make your bed for once.
I coach him through the formalities of a job interview. “Why should I hire you?” I feed him. “I am a good worker,” he sounds out. He is nervous. He rubs his neck. I can’t take my eyes away. I can’t stop thinking someone tried to kill you.
Yet ugliness and beauty frequently hold hands. I think of great literature, art, and music—there is dissonance in the sweetest melodies, conflict in the bravest plots.
Hector saw the storm coming before we did and he pulled the truck over and handed us a tarp. And suddenly it was raining in the way it does here: buckets of rain, sheets of rain,
It is a story about power and colonialization, but also a story about bananas and our insatiable appetite for them, as many as twenty-seven pounds per person per year.
As I flipped through a hundred faces, ground rules quickly emerged. I wouldn’t talk to anyone holding a dead animal, no one posing in front of a truck, no shirtless pictures.
It is not so hard to learn the language of a people, the food, the customs. It is so much harder to understand a people’s spirit.
