Meeting new people and people who have known me since I lived and worked here in the past is a great pleasure. This morning I went into town to do some shopping and to arrange some affairs. I usually take a ‘collective taxi’ into town, an uphill route, but I start walking from there in order to maximize social contact in my time away from home because people walk a lot here.
Bicycles are not popular, because Juigalpa is quite hilly which does not make for a relaxed bike ride. Town buses are few and run irregularly. Collective taxies are a reasonably fast option, but for many people a luxury they cannot regularly afford.
It seems I must have left behind good impressions and memories when I was here years ago which now lead to easy spontaneous chat. This really adds to my sense of well-being here, as I feel surrounded by a network of friends and acquaintances. I also have the luxury of friends and contacts outside Nicaragua, including my daughter and family, by all of whom I feel supported.
Another aspect of my sense of well-being is that we shape the project as a team. We are all on a very worthwhile mission, and I feel like a fish in water, swimming with other fish!I am grateful for the good things that happen, and I try to learn from those things which do not go well at all, or are painstaking. There is no success without adversity. Ghandi said, ‘Important aims require spiritual effort and the power of the soul.
My meditation time is important to me, and I’m trying to make ‘daily life’ my training ground, a time to meet God and to more and more resist the idea ‘My Will be done…’ It scores high in my Top 10 of elements contributing to my well-being here.
Which experiences are my ‘woe’? Living and working are very much intertwined. So being able to take time off is an issue, even more so because the people we work with are still being trained. Inherent to living together is that one has to give up certain wishes or preferences. And because my home is the Ruach community home I certainly need to find a solution to my having no quiet place to whichI can retire on days that I am off duty, to have some time to myself without other people around.
Finally, a few sentences from the Dutch pastor and author Hans Stolp:
The choice is not the road, because the road chose you.
The choice is how to go on that road, with obstinacy,
because of the potholes and the rocks;
blaming the sun because it can hardly reach your road through the gorge;
or with the determination to be milder and wiser at the end of the road?