Today I decided I'm going to be a theologian or religious studies teacher. I'm going to be this because I think academia, which I've known for a long time is a good fit for my abilities and interests, could actually be a ticket for me to live between the US and Peru. Universities talk to each other. They share resources and swap professors. My hope is that I will be able to find a degree program, or a Fulbright grant, or something, that will let me spend significant amounts of time in Lima while still "advancing" my academic career in US terms.
It works on several levels. Peru is the birthplace of liberation theology as well as of its founder, Gustavo Gutierrez (whom, if I move quick and am really lucky, I may actually still be able to catch in some course or other in Lima before he gets real old and stops teaching.) So as a theology student I'd have excellent reasons to be there. And as a person, I have excellent reasons to want to be BOTH there and at home. It's not just that it hurts terribly to think about saying goodbye forever to all the people who became my world and my community there. It's also that Peru woke me up to life in ways I'd never been woken up before. In Peru I lived in a big city for the first time, traveled to great places, saw poverty firsthand, visited old sick people in their non-house shacks and was a better person for it, learned to dance, lived in a foreign language, learned not to care when people looked at me funny. I even used bathrooms that were not really bathrooms at all. (I'm sorry to be gross, but in a sense, there's something that's really LIVING about being able to say that.)
I have a feeling that studying/researching/teaching in Peru would keep me in touch with the "real life factor" that I found myself more attuned to there than at home. But at the same time, I don't want to give up my own background and culture and just move there. My hope--no--my GOAL is to be able to be a theologian in both worlds.
God, I'm exhausted. Making decisions is so draining.
Now I just have to go find out how to do this... after I take a nap.
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