Today felt like it had something to teach me and perhaps, just maybe, I will learn something. But not right now. I am just not in the mood. Right now I am so Fabulously Frustrated, I can't for the life of me try to sort out the lesson of the day. Am I supposed to be keeping my chin up when nothing is going my way, or was I learning to be gracious when someone is trying to help me do something I would rather be doing myself? Or maybe it is just that today, for the first time, I am feeling so fantasticaly foreign in this country I now call home. I knew it would happen, was waiting for it actually, but it still doesn't prepare you for when the time actually comes.
It started weeks ago...Weeks ago, you say? But you haven't been in Chile that many weeks...How could it have started weeks ago? But it did. Our heating system was checked and our water was regulated and we should have been good to go. But it didn't work that way. Our heat is sporadic and it depends on me going out into our laundry room about 5 times a day to open a valve so that the pressure is high enough to push the heat into the house. I sometimes forget, or I am away and the pressure drops enough that the house is like an igloo by the time I get outside to turn the valve. Then I get the heat to kick in about 4 pm and the house is a furnace when we are trying to sleep and the pressure needs to be reduced. It has been an interesting game of trying to balance the scales since we got here. To make it worse, the hot water is also regulated by this system and I can't for the life of me figure it all out. And I have been trying to get it fixed for the past couple of weeks. But this is Chile...and they will get to it, well, when they get to it.
It came to a head on Sunday. Cold showers and I do not get along. Lukewarm showers and I aren't even friendly acquaintances. I like my showers steaming hot. I mean steaming. When I don't have scalding hot water, I tend to get a bit grumpy. I was determined to finally get it under control and here is where it all falls apart for me. In California, I would have woken up Monday morning and started calling plumbers. I would have kept calling until one of them gave me that famous 4 hour time slot where he would show up in the last 15 minutes of the last hour, but he would have shown up - that day. I would have been in a hot shower sometime before bed on Monday night. But here I am, in Chile, speaking enough Spanish to get by - but not enough to conduct phone conversations. I am at the mercy of others. Others need to make my appointments. Others need to explain my problems. Others need to do things for me and that is something I am just not used to. And it frustrates me. It frustrates me because I am not used to having others do things for me that I am very capable of doing myself...at least when I speak the language. I can try and pretend that I can do all the things that I used to be able to do, but I really can't. I am a foreigner in a foreign land and try as I might, I just don't speak the language well enough to get my meaning across to a plumber and I must rely on someone else to do it for me. And it's not going down like a spoonful of sugar.
Don't get me wrong, I am still very capable. I have surprised myself in the past couple of weeks with the things I can do. But sometimes life just let's you feel all smug and you start thinking that you have this expat thing licked, and then it kicks you back down a notch or two and you realize that one of these things is not like the others - and it's you. But I won't let it define me. I won't allow this frustration to stall my drive to learn the language. I want to become independent again. I don't want to just get by, I want to flourish.
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