September 14, 2020
The hills are singing!” My co-intern and I exclaim as we grin at the sun-kissed Andes. To that golden chorus, my internship in Perú beckons me toward great expectations in, as Latin Americans say, el homblígo del mundo–the navel of the world, the nourishment of life, the beginning.
I remember when I first saw the mountains. Earth’s elevation peaked and our plane was soon sandwiched between the highlands and the clouds. A totally foreign world spread out before me, one that previously only existed on maps. Am I really here?! Lines of dirt crisscrossed cliffs that led tiny llamas and dots of people along, 5,000 feet below. The life down there was the quintessential picture of everything I hoped to see.
Steppes rose and fell, revealing tiny towns and city clusters until Cusco blinked into view. Reminiscing on my training with my supervisor in Salt Lake City, I anxiously wondered how the next three months would refine me. I yearned to distinguish myself from my colleagues and my peers.
The stakes were high: I was an aspiring professional, wholly committed to making this trip more than a study abroad with a job. As soon as the plane tires hit the landing strip, I planned to hit the ground running. I was eager to prove to graduate program admissions boards that I was their candidate.
After all, I was culturally endowed with an international experience in coaching people toward economic, educational, and financial resilience. This internship was my key to realizing some of my most meaningful aspirations. Like the sun, illuminating the peaks of an endless mountain range, my hope joined the chorus of the song of the hills. Cusco! Here I come! This internship will give me everything I need.
Or so I thought.
The sun is hot and oppressive. After a week filled with waiting, I finally get to meet my supervisor, and the first thing we do is take a city tour. Wandering up and down Ancient Inca ruins in Sacsayhuaman, I struggle to avoid confronting the obvious fact that our conversations about his family heritage seem to further delay a discussion about what I want to know most: what is my work agenda?
Soon, we’re on a tour bus, winding up terraced ridges alongside rich Andean flora. The world is beautiful, but that peace is again interrupted by the stressful whispers in my mind egging me to find out exactly how to anticipate the next 12 weeks. Hours pass. We meet up with my supervisor’s sister-in-law. At a restaurant featuring indigenous folk group dancers, I try again to direct the conversation toward what I will be doing on the internship.
Between bites of lomo saltado, Peru’s widely celebrated beef cuisine, I listen for directions about my internship, something as straightforward and measurable as our menú. Another folk dance parades across the stage, and still, no concrete assignments, just pleasant conversation and food for thought. I ask questions about my research project: when can I begin? He makes vague suggestions for who to contact. Finally, while walking home on Spaniard-laid cobblestone, he mentions details for a certification project my coworker and I can help with. Yes!…only to find out when I report my work to Salt Lake City, that, “You aren’t there to do that.” Apparently, it’s someone else’s job.
Constant and immovable, the golden Andes still sing their chorus. Every day, out every window, they are there, trilling their song. While their song fills the valley, disappointment muffles the tune of my heart.
With what’s left of my song shyly struggling within me, I muster my undergraduate strength and move forward drawing from what I learned in the classroom and from other experiences. I start by contacting candidates for my research project. Interviewing them seems like the only fruitful part of my efforts so far.
But interviews and processing the content only take an hour or two each day. I can’t shake feeling aimless; without the coaching I expected, I’m stuck with a pile of disconnected opportunities, and no direction on how to configure them myself. I balk at the thought of returning to the States with a mere stamp of completion on my resumé–a headline to congratulate my guided vacation. At least it taught me how to live at high altitudes and not faint! I imagine myself stuttering when the graduate school panel asks me how my internship in Perú helped qualify me for their competitive program. I cringe.
It’s another 4:50 a.m. sunrise, and the hills are singing again. I pull the covers over my face and clench my eyes. Don’t make me get up! Please! But it is from this state of mind and emotion that I know I have to rise. It’s to this challenge, to this gap of ignorance and trial, that I have to offer everything I’m capable of. And every day for three months, I choose to.
Tiny victories, like giving a five-minute speech at a kick-off meeting or surveying local leaders for their opinion on assessment documents, become my encouragement for success. I push through the monotony of transcribing interviews until 11 rich qualitative documents fill my Google Drive. I manage disappointment as focus groups and volunteers only show up half the time. My coworker and I strive constantly to endure a dearth of incoherent meetings, difficult objectives, and the seemingly unending need to establish new expectations and goals.
I start to see subtle changes. My persistent labor becomes a framework for purpose. The skills I hone from configuring tasks and opportunities to meet mine and others’ needs, without spoon-fed direction, might just be the greatest asset I can offer to graduate school. Maybe, my exposure to the messiness of life, to unmet expectations, and to the reality of this kind of work with people, is exactly the fodder I need to create meaning.
It still feels hard. But I stretch my personal expectations, and balance others’ priorities with my own. Slowly, my heart reaches back for its song–the one it sang when my eyes first set sight on a melting sun over the mountains. It becomes easier to be patient with the process, to find happiness wading through temporary frustration. I’m growing into a many-dimensional person. I learn how to manage my reactions to diverse cultural paradigms. I have learned how to collaborate through difficulty with stakeholders, and I have the grit and the patience to make sense of ambiguity as it comes.
Gradually—eventually—there are many days where I join with those Cusqueñean hills in singing.