Posts filed under ‘Family’
Toronto, Detroit, Ohio, Chicago, Kauai
We are developing a sort of splatter-painted sense of place this month.
We are back! Sort of.
We are back in the country, in our culture. Back where tap water is served endlessly in restaurants, where it’s okay to throw toilet paper in the toilet, where it’s easy to find those long-missed things like drip coffee, Thai curry, Mexican anything. Back in a landscape that is suddenly unbelievably beautiful and true and us, of old clapboard farmhouses with silos off the highways, old brick buildings in small towns, Amish carriages, a golden eagle, deer. Back in a beautiful Midwest winter, (instead the end of a southern hemisphere summer), lovely silhouettes of bare trees against a white sky and snowmen melting in front yards. And you can drive past it all listening to radio stations that play gospel, country, Billy Joel, NPR. So many beautiful, simple things that you forget to miss.
In that sense, we are back. But we’re still traveling, too.
We flew to Toronto, Canada because the tickets were by far the cheapest, and because our car in Chicago wasn’t too far away. Joel picked us up at the airport and drove us to Detroit, where we were able to begin our homecoming visiting family for the week–my aunt, my cousins Travis and Lisa and their beautiful kids, and even down to my Grandaddy and his lovely wife Ida Jo in southern Ohio, with its lovely woods and wide rivers. After sharing a couple of days with Joel and Steph in Ann Arbor, we took our last bus of the year (I hope) to Chicago, and we have been here all week with the Smirls and the Pieronis. We are even bizarrely wired and mobile again: car up and running, phone still functional, laptop completely addictive. Which means I am call-able, email-able, and even visit-able, should you be in the Chicago area. Lewis? Lewis is another story. Lewis is in Hawaii.
Several months ago, just after we had decided to buy these tickets back, his old boss contacted him in need of a short-term provider with a disabled client he had worked with the year before we left. In other words, Lewis is attending a wedding, eating at luaus, and taking helicopter tours over Kauai with a great family he enjoys working with. And getting paid for it. I miss him like a turtle would miss its shell, but he’ll be back next week, and then we’ll be driving out to Denver sometime in early April.
This all feels like a whirlwind, of course. We had grown attached to the friends, places, and feelings of Buenos Aires, and so leaving that city was initially felt more than the big picture, the departure from a continent, a lifestyle, a long adventure together. Our life in South America lasted 2 weeks short of a year, 5 months of which was in Ecuador, 5 more in Argentina. In a sense each leg of the journey had had its own conclusion, its own culture shock on entry and exit. So even though this was the last big move, I think we’re processing and reflecting on it alone, rather than the entire hurrah. It is hard to believe the whole thing is over. Or maybe we just won’t ever view it as a single trip, but as a series of places and people in our life. And there are new places and people to come in that series.
What has become of us in this year? It was the year that Lewis turned 26, I, 28, our marriage, 2. The clothes we arrived in are stained and worn. By November we had both completely worn out our shoes. Traveling down the South American continent, we went almost twice as many miles as the continental United States are wide. And for the record, 4000-some miles as the crow flies, including any number of detours, came out to more than 350 hours in buses. Between us we read around 60 books, including a triumphant few in Spanish in the last months. We were never robbed or threatened, never had credit card problems, and rarely felt more unsafe than we do in the States. People from all over the world were incredibly gracious in conversation about United States politics, open to hear our thoughts, quick to set opinions and emotions aside for friendship. We did not get more sick than we do in a normal year at home. We did not see Macchu Pichu as everyone is “supposed to,” or Bolivia, as we had wanted to. But all that we did see, do, and experience was absolutely irreplaceable.
In some ways, the ‘culture shock’ is slight—Argentina is very much developed, diverse, European, clean. It was more overwhelming to arrive there from Ecuador and Peru back in September than to arrive from this larger geographical jump. So yes, it is an adjustment, but the wealth, the consumerism, the cleanliness of a developed country isn’t the shock to us you might expect. What initially affected me most was the language, of all things. Even after a week, I still felt a remnant of hesitation when I talked to strangers: it has been over a year since I spoke in English to order coffee, to pay for groceries, to say “excuse me” on the street. My brain finds it hard to believe that someone could understand my native tongue, and I find that just as I was beginning to be able to speak Spanish thoughtlessly (on occasion), I suddenly have much more awkward intentionality when I open my mouth to speak in English.
And what did travel do for us, to us, with us?
I’m only beginning to reflect on the whole thing, but I know that we have been changed immensely, and that we want to change even more immensely.
I think we humans are, by nature, comparers. We’re terribly self-focused, which is of course a combination of prideful and insecure at the same time (those two are offspring of the same beast, aren’t they?). We tend to line up an enormous series of standards to which we hold ourselves and everyone else, and to rank accordingly. We do the same thing with our homes, our nations, our politics, our cultures. Subconsciously, of course, until something shocks us into really thinking about it.
And travel is one of the things that does this quite well: it shows us ‘other,’ and thus shows us ourselves. Better, worse, different. Walking through streets, entering homes, living briefly under a government, or hearing a distinct belief or emotion challenges you to reconsider all that you thought was the norm or perhaps the ideal. It creates a contrast that you don’t normally have and forces you to question why you, your family, your culture, your nation do things the way you do them, and why they are worth something or nothing, are to be proud or ashamed of. It is easy to forget and live with any number of injustices, lies, bad habits, if they are never challenged. If we compare, we can decide to remain distinctly different from what we have measured up, or to change. That’s not to say we always change for the positive, or that we always can. But it is when we realize how versatile life is from examples around us that we consider how it might be improved. And don’t get me wrong: As many beautiful things I saw that I seek to embrace in my own life, or long to see in the future of my country and culture, the contrast also gave me many reasons to love my life, my values, and my beautiful nation. But it was wonderful to see another side of the world, to think of the common denominators of humanity and consider what potential we all have from that point.
P.S. Those last two photos are of the people we grew closest to in our final 6 weeks in Buenos Aires: The first is us with Diana and Ezekial, the second with Pablo. We learned so much from them–about Spanish, about their country, city, culture, about living with passion, with kindness, with an open heart and mind to the world.
Buenos Aires, Argentina II
December did not much feel like a holiday season to us, in the usual way at least. In another way, though, it was more festive that Christmas could ever be: What better way to spend any month than to celebrate well with so many whom we love so much? First with our old friends and recent traveling companions on their departure–Joel, then Phil. Next, to meet up with family–from both sides, at that!–and to share life throughout so great a city. It was hard to believe it was Christmas, but it was a special month, nevertheless.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
On a world map, it seems to me that the distance between Ushuaia at the bottom of the continent and up here in Buenos Aires is roughly the same as that between Denver and New York City. We broke up the 48 hours of busing between the two as best we could. When we headed north from southern Argentina with Phil, he had a flight out of Buenos Aires only a short week later. We all wanted his last days in this journey to be distinct, and also truly Argentine. Our last stop up the coast was in 2 smaller towns that lay across a pretty, tree-lined river from one another: Viedma and Carmen de Patagones.
I think it was the simplicity and Argentine normalcy that we enjoyed most in this area. Though lovely places, these towns lacked a central novelty to draw the flow of tourists their way. To us, a lack of other tourists and overdone tourist attractions is an enticing novelty in itself. People were happy, open, kind. And they were surprised to see us, which is always fun. This was the first time we could feel summer’s arrival in full. Suddenly there were strawberries and dark red cherries for sale in every fruteria, and the warm night air was swarming with hundreds of large dragon flies (libèlulas) on our first night there. (I don’t know why, but they almost entirely disappeared the following day).
Our days were spent at the local riverside swimming spot watching kids and dogs jump into the water, groups of friends sharing mate and sun. We crossed from town to town in the tiny tugboat-like ferry, and talked to locals about American TV shows we’ve never seen, or about their lives on this Atlantic coast. We took a local bus through flat brown fields with ostrich-like rheas running every here and there, arriving shortly at a beach backed by brown cliffs flocked by thousands of loud, green parrots. We walked several kilometers on the hot sand to watch a couple of elephant seals and several hundred sea lions bellowing and lumbering about. In the water they were fast and graceful, on land, awkward and heavy. As far as I can tell, they spend the majority of their days sticking their noses straight up towards the sun.
The few weeks since that lovely time have been a hurricane of departures, greetings, feelings, and oh, that flurry-frantic-fun city of Buenos Aires. On Phil’s last full day with us, we rode bicycles through a hundred streets, some charming, some terrifying, to see the city block by block. We reflected on what had been and what was to come, laughing, dining, sipping mate in a happy little park. We knew relatively little of Phil before he met us here for this 2+ month extravaganza. He has encouraged us enormously in his head-long dive into Spanish (which got him incredibly far in so short a time). He and Joel both made us think, feel, and laugh in new ways. They are each such unique men in their intelligence, kindness, and embrace of the world. Their company made our trip more reflective, more interesting, and more silly. I suppose our friendship with them, then, adds those things to our lives as well, doesn’t it? They are much missed already.
You may have heard about the shootings in Colorado in December, one of which occurred at a missions organization and school called Youth With a Mission, or YWAM. I mentioned in my last post that my brother Daniel is associated with YWAM, and narrowly missed the recent incident at this base, where he was scheduled to teach the following day. Some of the students who had been on the base during the incident had been planning their outreach trip to Argentina, intending to leave the following week. They indeed arrived in the capital the same week that we did, and in a random series of events, my brother joined them to teach and add extra support. Suddenly, bizarrely, my brother and I were able to meet up in the middle of Buenos Aires and marvel at the strange circumstances that lead to this wonderful early Christmas present! We were able to spend several days together, catching up on life, on family, on what it is to be Christy and Daniel, brother and sister. Lewis and I were so thankful for the time, and so blessed to be able to hear about Dan’s adventures of late, and to show him a bit of our nomadic life, too, before seeing him off to make it back for Christmas with my parents.
Very late on Christmas Eve, Lewis’s Mom Gemma and Aunt Gina arrived to meet us in the gorgeous home in the Palermo Viejo neighborhood that we got to share for a couple of weeks. With them, Lewis and I were able to experience a side of Buenos Aires we never would have been able to, otherwise. There were indulgent meals, new wines, funky galleries, small museums, and antique shops. In braving the heat wave, we became acquainted with dozens of taxi drivers, taking refuge in their air conditioning as they maneuvered us through the city. We also took full advantage of (and fell in love with) our air conditioned refuge. Gemma had found a rental condo in which we could live like kings, one of those places you usually only see in magazines. It was full of art and architectural details, all exposed beams, stained glass, and tall windows onto open patios. If you would like to get a small glimpse of how spoiled we were, click here.
And here we are in January, in 2008 at that. Lewis and I are on our own again, although we are soon to return to Buenos Aires to pick up our dear friend Amanda. Supposedly we will all be whisking ourselves off to the beaches of Uruguay together. For now we have attempted to escape the heat by heading to Villa General Belgrano, close to the city fo Còrdoba. The heat has evidently followed us, though, and although this small, green town was historically settled by Germans, it is now apparently settled by hundreds of Argentine tourists. Still, our campsite has a pool, shady trees, and a hill-top breeze, and we have discovered that when you’re really, really hot, that is about all that anyone could need to be happy.
Daniel
Daniel is my only brother, my little brother, and now Lewis’s only brother-in-law. All of the sudden we are both adults, or at least we are both in our mid-twenties. The more I get to know him in this part of life, the more I realize how alike and how different we are. There are things we will always share, ways only we two can see the world, because we grew up in the same house, with wonderfully imperfect parents. Sometimes I will come upon one of these anamolies, but most of them I will probably never realize. We are the Colorado Shannons, who grew up with a big yard with a great swing, who love a Welsh Terrier named Abby, who fought like cats and dogs, who know one another’s childhood like no one else ever will.
My brother is one of those few and far between who can and will stand in front of a crowd and calmly speak to them for a couple of hours on a subject. Really I have no idea how easy this is for him, but I know that he loves to speak, to share his experiences and thoughts with 5 or 50 individuals, and that he is good at doing this.
What are his thoughts and experiences? Many of them stem from his time working with Youth With A Mission, and more recently, speaking around the world. He meets all sorts of people from and in dozens of nations, and hears about Jesus’s love in their lives. His schedule includes flights between multiple continents within a month or two. Still, he is my brother. My Colorado brother who misses the snow, the Christmas traditions, the familiarity that is our home. I look forward to knowing him more as we get older, and being perhaps more geographically distant, but somehow closer, too.
