Life can be rough, but appreciate the ride
Maite Uranga
Life in Africa
Last night I saw one of my best friends in the Peace Corps give a concert. In his former life he was an acting major and writer who aspired to be in pictures in People Magazine and to create art his audience could understand. Now he lives in the village 45 minutes away from me.
When I was at home I saw my college roommate, and for the first time since we met six years ago there was not even one night of debauchery. I am turning 25 in six months. Soon I will be closer to 30 than to 20.
I have sat in the desert for over a year and somewhere in that time my friends and I seemed to have grown up. Serious relationships have come into the picture. Others have been continuously single for the first time since high school and finally get to spend time with themselves. I finally came to terms with the fact that applying to law school does not mean that the adventure is over. My brother is taking a year off of medical school because in much simplified terms he figured out life is not about the destination.
Everyone has heard these clichés. And it is highly likely that most people have experienced a lot of them. But within the vanity of the mid-twenties age group, an individual and a group of friends think that they are discovering the world as it has never been seen before. We think we know it all because we are at a top-25 university and spent a semester living somewhere else. Our friends live in other cities, states and countries, which makes us worldly. Our parents do not know where we are on Friday nights and do not know if we ever go to class. We think we are independent.
Then we graduate. We realize a liberal arts degree is hard to sell, especially with an economic downturn. We understand the fast track to the corner office requires a lot of time, but more challengingly a lot of sacrifice. And friends who knew they wanted to be a doctor since they were two suddenly decide to apply to MFA programs instead. Friends start getting married. Friends start having children. Friends get divorced. Suddenly your life-long friends from college no longer seem to be life-long when you have not talked to them in six months and then two years.
Amidst all this, largely because of the pretentiousness that education provides, we search for ourselves. The world is tragic and we are idealistic. We can solve the world's problems although no one ever asks us. The Sahara, the isolation, the distance and the time have helped me grow up. I have not lost all of my idealism and arrogance, although some of the innocence floated away in the three years since graduation. Perhaps because I did not see my brother and friends for so long, when I finally did on vacation home the same thing seemed to have happened to them amidst the chaos.
After trying to escape the influence of two lawyer parents, I resigned that it also happened to be what I wanted. Even more shocking is that my need for continual roaming seems to have been greatly appeased. The actor who lives 45 minutes from me loves theater and everything it involves. He will end up in New York. For now, though, we enjoy the freedom that being away from it provides. My brother still wants to be a doctor but decided a year in Spain is also a great option. My college roommate and I did not want to waste our precious time together in a bar and talked more in five days than we did for a month in college.
One day the actor and I reflected over our Peace Corps experience. Over a year ago, we decided our lives in Mauritania could best be summarized as, "This sucks. We live in hell." After nearly a year and a half I think we still think we live in hell. But what the hell if we don't like hell. Sure, there are rough days, but at least we know that sometimes you've got to go to hell to get to heaven. And on those long hot days when everything seems to be going wrong and the world is going to fall off its axis, I have grown to appreciate the ride.
Maite Uranga graduated from Notre Dame in 2000 and is currently serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Mauritania. Her column appears every other Monday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, September 30, 2002
