LTN intentionally focuses on community in their program, both with the other interns and in the neighborhood. I knew that coming into the program, but I wasn’t actually sure what that meant until I got here.
Living in a small apartment with three other girls and sharing a balcony with two other apartments that also have interns means that there is little to no privacy. I’m an only child. I have never not had privacy. Even when I had a roommate in the dorms at Roanoke, I knew how to find privacy easily. For the first few days, it didn’t really bother me. I was still getting to know everyone and getting used to everything. Then at some point, it sunk in that I was going to be here the entire summer.
There would be no privacy and lots of socializing for three months.
I’m not going to lie, it made me a little nauseous. I’ve never been one to admit needing other people. I mean I’ve always had friends, but for a long time, I kept (mostly) everyone at least an arms-length away, too afraid to let anyone get close. I prefer to be alone (or that’s what I tell myself anyway). I hide myself away in the pages of a book, choosing fictional characters over real people. I have never wanted to admit to being social or a people person.
Going to college began to change that, though I am still fighting it.
I came here saying that I am an introvert. Within the first week and a half, I had multiple people question my introversion, because I was being so social. One person even went so far as to ask if I was just a shy extrovert.
That was a super weird moment for me.
It’s not that I’m a shy extrovert (I still very much need to be alone to recharge), but I don’t actually need to be alone as much as I say I do. I am more in the middle than I’ve ever been willing to admit. But here, it’s different. Very quickly, I was forced to acknowledge the importance of community. I don’t have the chance to fight it here.
I brought the journal I had with me in Peru to Louisville. I was flipping through what I wrote a year ago in Cusco and I came across the entry from the day we had the lecture “Cosmovision Andean.” I learned so much in that lecture, but there was one specific thing that stuck out to me, so much so that I wrote an entire page about it and an earlier blog post (Family).
“Ayllu”
In Quechua, it basically means family, but in the lecture, it was described as being much deeper than that. It is their community of people, the people that are with them through the highs and lows, the people that know their darkest secrets and still love them, the people that push them to grow and mature.
I loved the explanation of “ayllu,” because I thought that’s what family should be. At the time, I thought I understood that kind of community.
I didn’t.
Now I do.