100 Days!

I realized today that four days ago I should have had my “100-day celebration.” You know, that party you had in kindergarten or first grade when you celebrated the fact that you had reached your hundredth day of school. Mostly a chance for you teacher to make you practice counting to 100 again, it was also fun to pick one particular object and take 100 of whatever it was that you chose to school. Cereal, race cars, jelly beans, POGS, marbles, stickers….of course the coolest kid was the one who chose the biggest item available in their house (of which they had 100) and toted them all to school. What did I take on my 100^th day of school? I haven’t the faintest recollection. Clearly this classroom celebration was an integral part of my academic formation and adolescent identity. 

I mostly note the benchmark of how long I’ve been in Argentina not because 100 days is significant in and of itself but, in fact, because I’m already nearing the middle of my eight month grant. My “Mid-Term Grant Report” is due to the Fulbright Commission at the end of next week, and I will be spending all of next week in Montevideo, Uruguay for our Fulbright-sponsored mid-term seminar (to be held with the English Teaching Assistants from Argentina, Uruguay and Panama). In three and a half months that I have been here (and truly in just over two months of teaching), I [think] I have: improved my Spanish (including learning plentiful Argentine slang), connected with new communities at my work, a church, an athletic club, a local town, etc., driven many of my students to think more critically, respect one another and their class environment, and explore a more diverse perspective of U.S. culture, ….However, I think my list of goals for the coming months remains much longer: sign up for a membership at the local library where I met a super-helpful librarian, figure out how my participation on this club team fits in with my original proposed project of organizing/facilitating team sports among girls and young women, get a bank account (?), conduct in-depth interviews with individuals about research questions that I have been developing, learn to cook a bit more “Argentine,”  travel to the southern reaches of the country (?!), continue meeting new people, see the sun rise a few more times after a night out of dancing, and not allow my students to remain in their “comfort zones” with the lesson topics I pick out for class (among a growing bucket list of other things…). 

Of course my “to do” list of things is much longer than the review of things that I have already accomplished. Since I was very young I seem to have had this sponge-like inclination of soaking up everything around me: facts to learn, things to read, ideas to consider, people to meet, places to explore and cultures to learn. A blessing at times, a curse only occasionally, it has inevitably shaped who I am today and the direction that my calle sin nombre will run in the future.  And yet, it is dangerously easy for me to get lost in this second list of things to be accomplished, without clear direction or purpose toward which specific goal(s) they should lead me. I guess that’s one reason that school/my undergraduate years were so great. There were dates for everything: my next exam, monthly Residential Life programming, term papers, turnover of academic years, internship applications, basketball seasons- you name just about anything I was doing, there was a benchmark for assessing accomplishments and progress. Welcome to real life where I seem just as much responsibility but fewer authorities looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m headed in the right direction. Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t babysat for at Denison nor am I free (or ever will be) of certain authority’s requirements. However, there is something to be said for the self-driven motivation that I was encouraged to develop during my college years and how I live out these same principles in different ways beyond the campus I called home for four years. I have the skills and knowledge, and usually the motivation too, to push forward intellectually, professionally, personally, spiritually, etc.; I only need to avoid the forgetfulness that can sneak in with the routines [and sometimes monotony] of daily life.

Anyways, my point is that I was kindly, if not humbly, reminded this week by my mid-term Fulbright report completion that revision of goals is so important in the process of assessing what I’ve accomplished and where I’m potentially going. Other exciting things that happened this week included having classes of rich discussions with students on Title IX and the evolution of the telecommunications industry, deciding for certain that my parents and I will travel to Córdoba at the end of July when they visit, and receiving a birthday card that’s been floating around in the mail system for nearly a month. As this week in particular had its share of lows rather than highs, here’s to my first 100 days full of minor accomplishments and, God-willing many more to come.