When two worlds collide
Cindy Speer helps children build with blocks during play time.
Kaitlyn Speer with her parents, Bill and Cindy Speer
Kaitlyn Speer is a former Observer-Reporter intern who recently graduated from Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., and is volunteering for several months in the Dominican Republic. This is another in an occasional series of dispatches from overseas.
Living in the Dominican Republic feels like a dream sometimes. When I wake up in the morning, I’m greeted with palm trees and a view that makes me never want to leave. The children I work with at the school make working enjoyable, and the missionary family I’m staying with treats me like family.
They are my family, and this is my life. Sometimes that feels unreal. But, sometimes, like a few days ago, I find that my life back home isn’t that far away.
Enter my parents. A few weeks ago, my parents told me they booked a flight to the Dominican Republic and hoped to stay for a week. I was ecstatic, but I wondered how it would be when my two worlds collided.
My parents arrived on a Thursday, sticking out like a sore thumb in Santiago’s airport. I found them right away, hustled them into a car and, soon, we were on our way into the hills near Baitoa, where this travel-hungry 20-something has lived for the past month and a half.
It’s fun to watch your parents experience something new. You see, my mother’s never been out of the country, but because she loves me and she felt like she was supposed to go, she left her comfort zone and visited the Dominican Republic. She entered a whole new world, literally.
This is a world where we don’t always have running water, so we use rain water for a bucket bath. My new world is a world where we don’t always have enough water to flush the toilet, so we dump water in it to make it flush. It’s a world where mashed plantains, fried rice and fish meatballs are normal. And, it’s a world that my mother willingly chose to enter, despite her fear.
Someday, I want to be more like my mother. I want to choose to leave behind my fear, uncertainty and anxiety and enter a world in which I’m uncomfortable. Because then, and only then, will I learn to grow as a human being.
Though I worried how my parents would handle this “new world,” they took to it like champions.
My mom and dad easily took to the new routine, even faster than I did when I first arrived. They took their bucket baths, they ate their fried plantains and fresh fruit juice and they enjoyed the view on the same porch I frequent after a hard day’s work. My parents were here to visit, but they left with more than they came with. They left with hearts full of new people and new experiences. They didn’t just visit, they soaked in their surroundings. They watched, and they listened.
There’s a lot to learn when you visit a new country – when you make a new life for yourself with new people and in a new place. But it’s OK, because it’s worth it in the end. When worlds collide, something great is created and a connection is built. And for me, I know it’s going to be a forever connection – a connection of which my parents are now a part.
So, look for those potential connections, because you never know when the opportunity will show itself. Don’t miss out on all the world has for you. It lies just past the horizon of Washington.