My parents adopted my baby brother when I was in 4th grade.  Although it would appear to be obvious, most people avoid talking asking about it. A couple of years back, someone had said some weird comment about if my mom had a secret lover, and that’s why me and my brother do not look alike.  I told them “Well , my brother is adopted”.

People gasped, and others reprimanded me “How dare you tell this secret of your brother’s origins”??”

But the truth is, my brother being adopted is a non issue in my house. It’s just a fact. I will never forget when my brother was 4 years old. We were in a children class, and one of the little girls, Maryam, was telling us how her baby brother was coming home from the hospital.  Maryam was telling people how all babies are grown in the stomache, and that’s how you get a family. Lucas stood up, red faced and said “Well that’s a lie. I was picked up from the hospital and that doesn’t make me less of a family than you, just different”

Couldn’t have explained it better myself.  When people have the nerve to tell me “Has he met his REAL family yet? ” It always gets me ticked off, because we are his real family.  I can’t speak for my brother, I am sure that he might have liked to have siblings closer to his age but this assumption that you are not a real family is not really true.  I am sure at some point my brother might want to meet those people who gave him up, but that doesn’t make them family. Family are those who cared for you, who you grew up with, and while blood ties help you know who you are it’s not the only thing.

So next time you know someone is adopted, don’t be afraid to ask.

“You know Maryam,  I hate it when people associate me with all these damn Ecuadorians here. I am not like them, they are all ignorant, and stupid and deserve all the prejudice that come their way.  Spain is just so vastly superior….”

And there you have it, one of my biggest pet peeves.  The type of person who denies where they are from, and their “people”and is under a Eurocentric notion that  somehow if they do this they will be accepted into that little circle of privilege that has been denied to them.

This has a farther reach than we believe is possible. Because this very notion, that somehow Europe and the United States and whiteness is superior becomes entrenched in the country’s psyche.

El Salvador is a small country,  a country tarnished by war and bloodshed, but has great hidden gems in it. But it is a country riddled with the notion that somehow “outside”is better, and that El Salvador has nothing to offer. This contributes to a vicous cycle…

To deny the problem, to try to blend in, is something that is created by an Other dichotomy which I do not understand.  Denying such an intrinsic part of yourself is so painful and harmful…

I always hated this notion. And it isn’t like if you are skinny you do not have countless scrutiny. I have been ” fat” for a couple of years now, but at times I have felt more at ease then I did when I was ” thin”. Because truth be told, I was never thin enough. I was never good enough, and if I was subjected to unsolicited objectification and attention , of silly competitiveness among women and other mindless things that we are programmed to do and think as a society.

I gained weight for a lot of emotional reasons, and I guess what unnerves people more than anything else is the fact that those who have extra weight it is almost as if they show their problems to the world. They cannot look perfect. Or the ideal.

In Spain, where fat is a very small minority, I got used to people staring at me or insulting me for no reason. In the United States I blended in, and in England it was not a big issue.  I guess after awhile you tend to tune out the negativity because if not that’s all you hear.

People find ridiculing people who are fat extremely amusing, from young children to adults. It isn’t their fault, somehow someone fat has become a comical farce, but it does feel like you just want to bury yourself deep inside , and disappear.

I am not sure why we are a society so obsessed with material looks, which is subjective anyways. Beauty is important, but I don’t think it should be everything.  I remember a teacher of mine telling me that in order to get ahead you had to be pretty, and that looks DID matter. It certainly seemed that way with some jobs. I refused to play that game, and I guess it was a term of rebelliousness.

What I find strange how unlike other problems, it is the one thing that solicits people telling you how to lead your life. I am wondering if we would do the same thing with someone who has another problem which is less evident.

Another thing that I find curious is that commercials , movies and television shows teach us that somehow, if we lose weight this solves all our problems. People miraculously have the perfect life.  Once, I lost seventy pounds and I did it mostly because I thought if I did, the boy who I was in love with would love me back. Guess what? He didn’t. Because this is not the magical key.

To be honest, being a super procrastinator that I am, I think I have used being fat as a crutch to not do a lot of things I have wanted to do.  So, I realized I am not going to be ” fat girl” anymore.  Sure, it might take a bit of effort, and it will be super boring, but that’s just what it has to take.

It is also super painful, because in doing so, there is no way to run and you have to confront your issues. I think the best thing to do , if anyone decides to lose weight, is to do for health reasons. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that somehow, this makes everything better.  Or that other people are somehow less of a person because they are less than perfect.  We shall never achieve perfection, but we should try to achieve coherence.

Whether or not I achieve my goal though, does not diminish who I am. Ultimately, this is yet another facet of our society entirely obsessed with individualism and our own actions. If we forgot ourselves, then perhaps we would be encouraging instead of diminishing other’s faults, we would see beauty instead of ugliness and we would arise, to hold each other’s hand when things get tough.

The biggest question I get asked is ” Where are you from?” Which always harbors an annoying debate of whether that means that by default where you are born is where you are from ( even if you only spent six years of your life there) or where you grew up.

My problem is not that I have any qualms to say where I am from, but that mot people have some qualms on telling me that  I am NOT from this place or that or I AM from this place or that.

When I grew up, I was forced to recite the salvadorean anthem, but was told I could not put my hand on my heart because it was not my country.  When I went to college,  most people could not believe I did not know the american anthem or that I did not know the names of the American states, even though I went to a British school in a salvadorean country and was brought up by my Scottish mother.  In England, I was asked constantly why I had an American accent.

The constant questioning gets tiresome, but I only jot it down to people being curious.  I never understood patriotism, and instilling exteme love for our country vs other countries. My American relatives would someties tell me ” America is the best country in the world, it has the most freedom, opportunities, etc”.

Some people express that certain countries are barbaric, or are ” third world” and therefore poor and violent.

We grow up in a world that constantly erects fences between countries, between our homes, between races and cultures.  Our educational system teaches us half truths which do not give us the whole story,  and this makes us paranoid about some unknown ” other”.

Around the world, certain countries are ” ideal” whereas others are not so idyllic. When I say, I live in Europe, people light up and want to know more, but when I say a third world country I get some looks of confusion.

We seem to think that marks of land somehow makes us who we are, and in some ways it might. But it also blinds us to knowing that behind those barriers are other ways of doing things, other lives, but they are all human. Somewhere along the line, we lose this sense by marking what passport we have.

I wonder why we have to  think , at the cost of other nations, that somehow we are better than others , we are more beautiful, we are more ideal.

Extreme love of one’s own country I don’t believe leads to anything but blinding ourselves to what other places have to offer. It gives us a distinct sense of self inflicted isolation.

In El Salvador, the opposite happens.  Most people I know , when asked , do not have much of an answer to say about what there is to love about El Salvador. This notion has also bled into the high level of pollution, violence and other sociological problems. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, if we believe that a place is no good, then we treat it as such.

I think that there has to be a balance between all this extreme nationalism and the extreme self loathing of a place. It comes from trying to celebrate the uniqueness that each place has to offer, and trying for everyone to succeed together.

But I guess if we cannot achieve even a neighborhood to become united in a common purpose, it is even hard to envision a world without barriers between countries.

There is beauty everywhere, and there is laughter, and also pain and suffering too. But if we choose to turn our eyes away from it we will never see it for what it is.

I wonder though, if things always totally remain the same. Each time I come back to a place I have lived for a certain amount of time I find I have a tough time fitting back in. Your life has to completely adjust to what was at that time . You have to adjust to customs, dangers and realities.

I just came back to El Salvador after some serious soul searching, realizing that the best thing for now is to go back where I have some family. But the return has not been simple as a lot of my friends have now left El Salvador. It is also hard to get back to the habit of not walking at night, of not being able to move around as freely as I did in Europe. That’s the thing though. I always feel like wherever I am , I feel like I miss the place I was before . I tend to have selective amnesia or in the words of How I met your mother ” graduation glasses” , as in a sense of tinged nostalgia of what Once Was. I forget what IS.

It is at times hard as well when people do not want to know your experiences you have had in other countries, and feel only an interest in anything that has to do with where they live. But what happens when your accumulated experiences , your life stories , your vision has been realized somewhere else?

What happens when you cannot speak of the feeling of walking through the Prado Museum and seeing the Guernica, or the Thames river eating sushi and watching the moonlight drip over the river… Or the color of eyes that one of the gypsy girls who went to the children class, or the sound of the flamenco guitar , or the strange dialects, or different friends from diverse lands I met along the way. The taste of Ehtiopian food, and how long you have to walk to get to the Gaudi buildings. What people are like in different places, the friends you made in Portugal and all these different places.

BUt mostly, people do not want to hear this. Some from Europe are not interested in Latin America, and some from Latin America are not interested in Europe. They grow tired of these stories… and what can a writer offer other than stories?
So I grow used to listening to their stories, and seeing their lives, and reconnect in this way. Because true souls, even if change has happened, will continue on, and if they do not, well I hope that we meet in the Next Life.

A guy from high school told me some wise words on my yearbook ” LIfe has it’s turns that are unexpected, you better buckle your seatbelt for the ride”. It’s true.
Unfortunatly, when we leave places, some people DO forget you. SOme people DO grow out of your friendships. I can only hope that our roads will cross again.

I was always the one leaving , leaving leaving. But I never expected that on returning, I would find more and more desolate lands. I remember my two closest friends were sad about me leaving for France a couple of years back. ” I feel like, you are leaving… and everything is gonna change for good”. My best friend , whom I had been friends with since I was seven told me.
I thought at the time, that she was being silly, but really after that in 2006 , I went for a couple months to France and came back to El Salvador and everything HAD changed. My best friend became engaged and moved away to Canada. My other friend, for reasons only known to her simply lost interest in our friendship and no longer bothers to keep in touch…although I hear she is getting married soon. Just like that, the trio was dissolved.
A blink of an eye.
And this has happened numerous times, albeit perhaps in more subtle ways. Friends who get married, friends who have children, people you are in love with whom no longer love you back. Family members who spend a lifetime without seeing you no longer bother to write.
This is the sadness of distance. Of being in a thousand places at once. And no matter how much I try, I feel like one thread or person falls away in different times. I can only hope that somehow, we will find our way back to each other.
Some people we love, after a long time of not seeing each other, realize we no longer have anything in common but nostalgia. Others were never really that close. Others simply are bright stars who you see in certain times and then they disappear.
But it’s simple, if your love was a true spiritual bond, you will see them again, somehow. And if not, they were there for a reason. Every person in our lives were there for a reason, and we should never forget that.
So tonight, I think of those 1000 of people who have passed through my life. Those that I laughed with, those that I cried with, those that I yelled at. Those that perhaps I do not know existed but love me, those that didn’t love me.
But all this, it is not important. What matters is that we are all connected, we all are growing together, we are all one body, one song, one heart. And I thank God for each and every one of them.

As I have mentioned before, I arrived here with an expectation, or perhaps an arrogance, that I knew everything there was to know about Spain. After all, I had visited it before and how different could things be?

I very rarely experience culture shock.  I usually weave in and out of different countries without feeling it, but this time it really came as a shock to me.  This is probably because as human beings we think that our shared experiences mean that we experience things exactly the same and nothing can be further from the truth.

I firmly believe that there is only one race, and that´s the human race. But we are unfortunatly still defined by our set experiences. We make the mistake of thinking that everyone thinks the way we do , and that can only lead to a whole series of misunderstandings.

It is not in the large things that cause our greatest misunderstanding but in the small ones. Take , for example, the concept of things being ” organized”.

Sure, we all think that something as organized, we know the definition, but it became clear to me that what I saw as clean was totally different from what people whom I lived with considered clean.

On the first week I came to Getafe, my roomates pointed out that I was being messy. I was stumped. But I had washed the dishes, I had put things away… what did they mean?

Well, in Spain , at least with those I lived with there is a motto ” Everything has it´s place”. If you go into a typical house, you will see that the counters and surfaces are completely devoid of  papers, boxes, cereal boxes, or anything else that would give any indication that thigns are ” lived in”.  The floors are spotless. The bathrooms are always wiped clean. In fact, I would have a tough time seeing a difference between a hotel room and a house.

The bars however are a completely different story. There are no trash bins and people throw papers on the floor. There is dog poop wherever you walk as dogs are completely free to go wherever they want and usually do not have leashes.  Parks are rarely super organized either.

It is completely distinct from British society , where the parks and restaurants are immaculate and the houses are well ” lived in”.

Needless to say, I learnt all this the hard way by going through a series of misunderstandings but one thing I noticed is that if both parties are willing to talk it out, you can understand the othe´’s perspective.

Granted I am certainly not the poster child for organization. As a woman, I am expected to know how to be orderly for some reason, but it´s a trait I have yet to master. I secretly envy women who with a great ease are able to have a smooth sofa and wrinkle free closet.  I can barely fold a t shirt.

I grew up with a housekeeper who was clearly more adept at doing those things than I was, and whenever I intervened she would just shake her head and say ” Please, don´t even try “.  I am sure I have a complex on it somewhere, but the point being is that despite my best intentions I won´t be named the next Martha Stewart anytime soon. ( I am a really good cook though)

All of  us are marked by our own unique experiences and we shouldn´t assume that how we do things are the same for others. 

Other things were interestingly different in small ways. For the first month I couldn´t figure out how to close the windows and they had these weird metal shutters that had a string to it.   The plumbing was different so you had to take out t he gunk from the shower and the sink manually instead of letting it fall into the drain.

All these mundane small things, which apparently would be the same, aren´t . It´s like living in a slightly different parallel universe : You expect it to be the same, but it isn´t.

Madrid is remarkably a self contained place. Although people might travel a bit, things are mostly very Madrileno. Perhaps it dates back to teh time of Franco and the isolation, but it is a society which sometimes is very hard to pierce through if you are a foreigner.
In these tough economic times it is even harder as more than once I experimented  some hostility the moment I opened my mouth and spoke in a latin american accent.

But there are some very lovely things as well.  How can i describe sipping tea in a morroccan household or watching my gypsy junior youth sing flamenco?  To roam about in the parks and large towering buildings, to hear the old men marriage proposals, or to eat tapas at the bar. Yes, all of it held interesting possibilities.

It is a place where I found great hardship and great joy. Where somehow I found myself looking into the mirror and knowing how to change, but also to be comfortable in my own skin.  Because when we see things that are so different from us, we encounter how we need to change and become better.  Difference is beautiful that way.

The couples and the impending nuptials of about three couples I know reminds me for the umpteenth time of marriage and coupledom.  This year alone, there are 40 people I know who contracted or are contracting nuptials.  Countries ranging from Portugal, to Spain, to Canary Islands, to El Salvador to Ecuador to United States to Canada. Couples who are persian, american, portuguese, spanish, australian, chinese, taiwanese, etc etc etc.

And marriage, along with graduation and babies are the kind of thing that while it may be slightly exciting for some people around you, it marks a quintessential right of passage which is believed everyone should go through…

But I was wondering if marriage, or the idea of ” getting married” has become the end of itself. Just like money,  marriage should be a means towards something, and it isn’t just the American Dream.  There is something profoundly awry with our current definition of ” getting married”. We base it on romantic notions : Of fear of not being alone, companionship, love. Which, in essence are profound and great things. to have.

But we also make it a sort of status symbol. In Latin america, since I was 18, people sometimes look down on you if you haven’t gotten married. As if, somehow you are less of a person, or your accomplishments are worth nothing because you have ” single” stamped on your forehead.

The funny thing is, even if they are totally wrong for you or even if they want a green card out of you, I have had people tell me to ” take a chance” as if, somehow the reasons they wish to be with me would miraculously change.  So inevitablly, after all my travelling I get asked WHY I am still single. I can’t give them a coherent answer other than the fact that, things just didn’t work out. There are things beyond my control… And I do get the ” if you lived in one place maybe it would happen”.

Here’s the thing : If you really want to work things out, it will happen no matter the location , the timing, or any other obstacle. I think the willingness to create these relationships and create bonds can be done- albeit in more complicated forms- if you are willing to do it.

However, I don’t think we stop and think before we fall in love. We just go over the deep end and let the current take us. Especially westernized notions of romantic love, teaches us that these relationships are something that we do not have control over . This leads us to take a passive stance, which is dependent entirely on timing, circumstance and feelings.

I have trouble understanding relationships that are so consuming you end up forgetting your friends, your goals, your family. True, you are becoming a ” We” but I don’t understand the dichotomy that would make you entirely break off from people who have cared and known you all your life.

Furthermore, I think marriage and building a family should be considered teh bedrock of constructing a new [part of society. Think on it. If all of us, consciously , tried to rid ourselves of our patterns of the past, if we built a life where we tried as a unit to serve others around us and build relationships based on trust and growth… imagine the long term repercussions of this.

I came from a broken home and grew up mostly without a lot of positive male figures in my life. I am not alone, as I would say a good majority of my friends will say the same thing. … I truly can’t even think of a truly united household.

That’s because we have to recognize that the way we consider marriage and family is a broken one. We need to reconstruct it . We need to stop seeing marriage as a status symbol.  I loved when someone commented that marriage is like pearls and corals. Pearls are made based on the sand clashing with each other over a long period of time, and eventually it becomes pearls.  One layer of coral dies for another to be reborn.

I have no idea what or how this looks like, but I think it’s one of the most profound concepts I have ever come across. What is missing there is a willingness to work together for that to happen.  And that’s where love and willingness comes in.  Finding someone isn’t like going to the supermarket, it takes time and patience.  And personally, if I look back I am glad for the relationships that didn’t work out because they were totally wrong for me.

So you just have to trust in God, take a deep breathe and remember to keep living your life and not waiting for your life to happen when you get married,  because that is the biggest illusion of all.

I get the question a lot : So… why are you in Madrid? ( This will soon be the past as I am preparing for yet again another move). As I write this in sevilla trying to find a more detached way of describing my experience it is still fresh on my mind.  A lot of people tell me, that I have a real problem because I don’t appear to settle down anywhere. To which I reply ” What, exactly is settling down anyways?” . My family and experience have made my existence nomadic, and a series of very unpleasant things happen in certain places that do not allow me to have the luxury of staying anywhere for long periods of time.

My family moved to London, and I moved with them but after two years they moved back to El Salvador. Given the exorbitant price of living in London on a freelance writing salary, I was forced to either : A) risk going completely broke or b) move someplace cheaper. I also wanted to serve in a community where I could participate in community life and build up the neighborhood projects. I wanted to work with junior youth and I wanted to be near friends who would support me. I had a steady income, so all of it made sense.  Besides, Spain was the closest thing to Latin America in Europe right? I mean , really how different can it be?

Because of my lingering guilt on not moving back to Latin America, I also chose to live in Getafe and not Madrid. Getafe is a small city town on the outskirts of Madrid and no one can accuse it of being pretty. It’s a pretty normal lower middle class industrialized town filled with all kinds of immigrant families.  It was not what people imagined when you go to Europe, in fact I probably lived in far better conditions in El Salvador.

Pretty soon, and very quickly I found myself completely diminished of all preconceived notions of Madrid when I moved there. Madrid was NOT El Salvador by any means, shape or form. People were not welcoming, and for the most part you were left to fend for yourself. It wasn’t even the same language almost.  Madrilenos would yell on the streets , there was no cappuchinos and instead of drapes there were these weird metal things on the window that I could not figure out how they worked. The supermarkets were even foreign with weird wormy things that appeared to be some kind of seafood.  The first night in the supermarket I was crying on the aisles because no one accepted my cards without ID , and I knew nothing about food or anything. It hit me how sort of alone I was.

Not to say I didn’t have friends because I did.  But there were some very long- and very painful periods- where I was alone . I have to say , if it wasn’t for Niaz and Cristina and some other people I would have gotten completely insane.

But over these very very harsh trials in Madrid, I am finding now a year later that I have changed. I have become purified over the fire and a lot of things that used to worry me are no longer an issue.

But for the most part, it was the junior youth who kept me going.

So I leave with not a lot of regrets, a bit of a heavy heart and positive outlook for the future.