Respark - How My Time in Peru has Rekindled My Passion of Service

Jorge Rios is a business student at Fordham University and is no stranger to cultural experiences and nonprofit style work. In his blog, Jorge questions our eagerness to search for deeper meaning and reflects upon a feeling of numbness  - 

        Numb. Lost. Repetitive. Intention.

These are just a few of the words that kept coming up in my head before my flight to Miami (which would eventually connect me to a flight in Lima) took off. I had been in this non-stop back and forth in my head before my immersion to Peru. While I was in high school I had my fair share of immersion and service trips, including places like Guatemala, Peru, and Skid Row in Los Angeles. Each trip gave me lessons to bring back to the United States and it was up to me to decide to implement them or not. Though, something felt different before this trip and I was unsure of what I expected.

On paper, this trip was exactly what I wanted. An opportunity to travel back to one of my favorite places I had visited in high school along with the chance to reconnect with people I had met my first time around. Plus an internship that would carry on into the school year, which is a great opportunity to grow and learn as a business student and it looks nice on a resume. 

Though, having gone on many of these trips already and participating in many reflection circles, I couldn’t help but feel…numb. Experiences seemed to repeat themselves and the same talking points during reflection would come up about how amazing the people are or how blessed we are, etc. Now given, these are very important conversations to have and are great things for people to experience and learn from, but to me it felt like I had gone through this same exact cycle too many times. I was scared I had been desensitized and decided to do this trip for all the wrong reasons.

 Was I just trying to look good on Instagram and have people tell me I was so amazing for doing work in another country? Was I doing it just for a picture that could get me a few more likes than normal? Did I just want a resume booster? 

These questions haunted me and made me feel guilty in a way about posting on social media about my trip. I felt that people would just think of me as someone who was just chasing likes and followers everytime I posted to my story. I knew that if I didn’t bring up how I was feeling during one of my reflections it would just eat at me. So I opened up to our team during reflection and fortunately one of the team members who was a part of the first ever Communidad related to me. He explained to me that he asked himself the same questions and felt the same way when he was in my position. He told me to not be scared to share the things I like on social media, and I took that to heart. If I enjoy traveling and doing this type of work, then I should be proud and not ashamed of sharing it with others.

In terms of the feeling of numbness, I decided to see how the first few weeks would play out to see what this trip was trying to teach me. 

I can confidently say that during this trip I have been focusing on “living in the moment” along with using this time to build better habits to bring back with me to start my sophomore year of college. I felt that I tried to find the deeper meaning in a lot of things that really didn’t need to be examined in such a way. I thought, “what does teaching English at a high school here really mean” when in reality, I should’ve just been enjoying my time building relationships with the students and having fun learning a new language. While I’m here to help them with English, I’m also here to build relationships with the students and in that they help me. I spend time relaxing and having fun which brings me peace, a lot better than just stressing over what the deeper meaning of teaching English is.