And They're Off!

To my Doctor-to-be friends: I love you

I often think about how attractive working as a Doctor would be. I love the idea that no day is ever the same for a Doctor. They are not stuck behind desks but move around all day working up close and personal with a variety of people. Being a doctor is challenging, rewarding, and meaningful. Three things that are most important to me in a career. But there's a small problem with me wanting to be a doctor, I think blood and guts are icky. I can handle looking at flesh, but it doesn't excite me in the way my friends think looking at a fractured tibia sticking out of some one's leg is cool.

Doctors do such amazing work. After reading Mountains beyond Mountains, it makes me wish I could do work that makes such a difference as Dr. Paul Farmer did in the book. But I believe in working with the gifts god gives you. A person will make a bigger impact on the world if they are doing something that they truly love. I think I would have incredible bedside manner as a Doctor, but apart from that, I don't think my natural talents would make me very successful in the world of medicine. Why don't they employ people at hospitals and clinics that walk around talking to patients and making them feel happy? That would be the perfect job for me. Maybe the next president will fix medical care in the US to include this position. Obama 2008!

Thank you to Laura and Amanda for your expertise (or blossoming expertise) on the matter. I will always welcome your two cents on my well being. One can never have too many opinions when it comes medical advice.

Right now I am waiting for my parents to arrive. I just got off the phone with them as they were sitting in their first class seats drinking Pisco Sours in LA before take off. Nice, huh? I'm living the life of a Peace Corps volunteer and they mock me by flying first class. But they're happy and their vacation has already started while I pace around the room trying not to look at the clock too often.

I've been anticipating they're arrival for a while. Last week I told a Peruvian the exact number of days until they arrived. She asked how long it had been since I had seen them last and I told her a year. Then she told me that family wasn't as important in the US as it is in Peru. I was offended down to my soul and got a bit defensive in trying state my opinion on the contrary. I think I must have taken what she said very personally. As if she was telling me that my family wasn't very important to me because I was living so far away from them and didn't get to see them that often. I think I made my case to her and further fulfilled my peace corps obligations by teaching locals about my home and breaking stereotypes. But the idea that Americans value family less than other stuck with me and continued to bother me.

Then, I realized I was being a hypocrite. I didn't like the way in which this Peruvian was speaking about me and US culture as a whole. I regularly discus my general observations about Peruvians and Peruvian culture on my blog and make accusations along the lines of the one I had been offended by. People do this to me all the time though. They will say (never ask, but announce really) Americans are like this or like that. I have heard some crazy stuff like "Americans eat everything out of cans" or "black people are never sad". I usually take all this with a good sense of humor and use the opportunity as a learning experience. But I considered it a huge insult when this peruvian generalized about Americans and Family. It's like insulting someone's mother, which you just don't do in any culture.

I thought about this for a while. Yes, there are differences in the ways which families behave between cultures, but family is one of the few things that transcends borders. Families and our relationships to each other are what makes us fundamentally human. The family is the core of all culture and therefore different as its representative of the uniqueness of each culture. But to say that family is not as important in one culture versus another is just not fair. It's like saying these people are more capable of love than these other people. I think I'm obviously over reacting but this peruvian woman's statement was a learning lesson for me as well. It made me think of family as a more of a transnational concept than as a means to compare and contrast cultures, as I have been doing since the moment I arrived.

I'm going to be redundant and say that I am really excited to see my parents. I would try to explain why having them come visit me and my life here is so important and meaningful but that would sound so sappy and would even venture off into the abstract. I try to keep my blog a bit more grounded than that and less emotional. My next few updates should be about what it's like having them here and their reactions of this fascination country.