We all have good days and we all have bad days. Because I am generally not great at hiding facial feaures, my bad days in the past were often observable. Someone would say something and I would explain the situation. Maybe I got to bed really late last night or I had a rough day at work or the kids were bouncing off the walls. No matter the situation, you could generaly explain the situation and the reasoning was understood. There is no explaining anything here.
In many ways, you feel forced to never had bad days, to always smile, and to never look despondent. For most of our neighbors and those in our community, our body language, our facial features, constant "Buenas Dias, Tardes, or Noches" is all we have to communicate at this point what type of people we are. In many ways our testimony is based simply off of being very outwardly happy and positive daily.
Here this feels like a very big deal as every person who walks by looks at us, they want to size us up and see how you respond. We are the oddity and they will make decisions about us well before we learn to speak fluently. In many ways, we are forced to constantly be on guard. We are living watched lives. Of course, no truth is new truth, so as I was thinking about this I realized that I have always lived a watched life.
You then start to scratch your head and wonder why this is such a foreign concept. This public testimony I am trying so hard to convey here without words is not so different then what I should have been accomplishing in the States. While yes I could explain my behavior, facial gestures, or actions away to friends, 90 percent of those I encountered in the States knew me no more then my neighbors here do. I spoke as loudly to them as I speak to these I do not share a language with.
It has struck me, that this constant sense of being watched is not so bad. No matter the situation, I need to learn to live a watched life.
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