Spent a lot of time with Nuno this week. Volunteered to go along with him and continue assisting with classes similarly to last week. Selfishly it’s worth it just for the car-ride conversations alone, or for the various observational insights you get from being in his presence. He’s very well-read about all the places he takes us, and it’s great for contextualizing and gaining a deeper understanding of the work that we do. We also spend a lot of time discussing Portuguese sensibilities. I especially liked how he explained one particular sentimentality to me through a fado song. Gaining such a rounded view of the culture from him just makes me wish I knew the language better, so that I could be able to interact with it and participate in it fully. It’s something I’m hoping to work on during the remainder of the time that I have here.
On the topic of time, I guess next week marks two months of me being a European Solidarity Corps volunteer. Somehow it feels like these two months have gone by in a flash, yet at the same time it feels like I’ve been here forever, and that time currently is moving extremely slowly. I’ve grown used to the routine and the circumstances, and I’ve found there are things here which I enjoy immensely. That being said, I find myself distracted with the idea that I only have limited time left, and the uncertainty that it brings with it now. Contrary to my volunteer peers who seemingly have things lined up afterwards, I never really looked at the ESC as a way to fill time for something. Rather I think I always looked to it as a way of breaking into something. Maybe it was because I was struggling with employment when I first started looking into it, or maybe there was another reason for it…
I don’t know if it was foolish of me to look at it this way, but I think it’s what’s behind this very Portuguese sense of resignation which I think I might be experiencing, and which Nuno and I incidentally happened to talk about.
A premature saudade.
