Flexibility for Sanity
October 24, 2011
Claudia Binet

I know this subject has already been written about, but I feel like lately, challenging situations have happened to me, and the only thing that saved me from keeping my sanity was… my flexibility.

Of course, there are the situations which are regularly testing your patience: the long waiting hours, the crazy bumpy rides to get to the communities, being caught in the cold rain and all the rest. But lately, it’s been a little different.

About a week ago, I took a 15 hour bus from La Ceiba, Honduras, to Antigua, Guatemala. The journey was fine, the bus was pretty comfortable so I had nothing to complain about. I arrived late in Antigua and I decided to rest for one day since I was pretty exhausted and had another day of traveling before reaching Todos Santos, this time on very uncomfortable chicken buses. Next thing I know, the tropical storm E-12 is destroying the Pan-American Highway, causing deadly mudslides and destroying bridges. Normally, I must say that I’m a risk taking person. I always feel that nothing is going to happen to me (magical thinking!) but this time, the seriousness of the situation made me think that it was smarter not to leave until the weather and the road conditions improved. So I waited, waited, waited, and every day there were more mudslides, more roads blocked, more flooding. The problem was that I had packed for a trip to Honduras (very light clothing), not for a week in cold and rainy Antigua! Every night I would pack my bags, and a while after, Jorge( my supervisor) would call me telling me that I couldn’t leave the next morning. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Antigua, but the constant rain confined me to the hotel for the majority of the day so I wasn’t exactly having fun. Also, the uncertainty of the situation and the thought of all the work that was waiting for me in Todos Santos was really starting to make me nervous. I thought THAT was bad! Until one day, as we were still in Antigua, my fellow intern had to abruptly go back to Canada because of an emergency. It was a horrible and incredibly stressful day. This also meant that I was now all by myself in Todos Santos until the end of the internship, with a ton of work to do.

Flexibility is definitely a necessity when you sign up for a 9 month internship in a developing country, and I don’t believe that a rigid person would last for more than a couple of weeks. And as much as we sometimes struggle with certain situations, I feel like we are all doing a very decent job at adapting ourselves to the unexpected.