BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Mennonite Mission Network) — I found myself being soaked by pelting rain in the middle of a thunderstorm with furious amounts of lightning. It was a little after midnight, and I was pushing a car that wouldn’t start down a street filled with rushing water that came up to my knees.
I felt truly alive, with adrenaline running through my body, and I laughed before I shouted over the rain and thunder to the driver that we had to keep pushing until the road was higher, for fear that the car might be swept away.
I liked to think I didn’t have many expectations for my experience in Argentina before I came here.
But really, I had a lot of expectations. Most of them weren’t even for missions.
I was looking for a break from school after two years of college, and hoped that this trip could give me insight as to what direction I should take my life. Maybe the internship would even bring to light some passions hiding somewhere inside of me.
Most of my expectations were dashed. Instead, I encountered many unexpected things.
I expected to connect here. I expected to jump into relationships with my host and church families. I expected it to be a little bit hard, maybe even moderately difficult, but nothing as daunting and impossible as what I actually encountered.
I had been told to be prepared for culture shock. I had had orientation sessions to discuss and even simulate culture shock. But looking back, I still think I was totally unprepared for it. I’m not sure anything but culture shock could have prepared me for culture shock.
I was without my language. I had forgotten most of my high-school Spanish, and was terribly afraid of saying things incorrectly. I couldn’t understand anyone, even when I asked them to slow down.
I was thrown into very deep levels of dependency with people I did not know or understand, and with whom it took great time and energy to communicate the simplest things. Even those efforts sometimes failed. In essence, I became a mute. When it takes a lot of effort to say anything, you start evaluating everything you might say to see if it’s actually worth the effort. For me, I ended up weighing almost everything as not worth saying.
Without voluntary communication, and with different social norms and expectations, I had a very difficult time building relationships.
As an introvert, I find that a lot of my motivation to build relationships comes from the relationships already established and the context they give to new ones. Almost for the first time in my life, I found myself without any relationships to build new ones from, and it was challenging to move forward from there.
Unfortunately, my reaction to this shock was to shell up, to throw up walls that hindered connection and relationship and social growth. Rather quickly, I noticed that some part of me was doing this, but I had no clue how to stop it or get around these boundaries. While my host father says he thought about asking my director if I should go back, I was determined to stay here for the duration of my assignment.
I was just afraid I would be miserable for most of the term, especially when the main focus of my assignment was not to do specific tasks, but to generally build relationships and gain a level of connection and fellowship with the people I was sharing life with.
My assignment is part of a partnership between Mennonite Mission Network, North Central Conference of Mennonite Church USA, and Programa Misionero al Norte Argentino (Missionary Program of Northern Argentina, PROMINOA). Mennonite Mission Network helps facilitate and give structure to an ongoing relationship between North Central Conference and PROMINOA. I am from North Central Conference and am a volunteer mission intern with PROMINOA to help further the relationship between these two groups, while Mission Network provides the infrastructure and historical expertise.
While language and culture shock have been ongoing challenges and frustrations, I did not stay miserable for the whole term.
Several months after I started here, things inside of me and in my interactions and outlooks started to change. My Spanish began to catch on. I found myself needing to ask people to repeat what they said less, and more often found ways to say what I wanted to say.
I have not built as many strong relationships as I might have hoped, and I still often have a difficult time connecting with the people around me and socially involving myself. Yet it would be very hard to forget my time here because of the relationships that I have built.
I recently had my director from North Central Conference come and visit me, and it was very encouraging to hear the affirmation from him and the conference, that I have succeeded down here. While many things could have been done differently, this internship is the first of its kind, and the conference, as well as PROMINOA, feels that I have accomplished what they wanted. We have figured out how to do things better the next time an exchange like this happens between these two groups. Now I can speak sufficient Spanish to help facilitate that partnership in the future.
I bet you’re wondering what this has to do with me pushing a car through the thunderstorm. In reality, it doesn’t have much, except the relationship I now have with the guy who was driving and the guy who was pushing next to me.
My experience is a good example of how much outlook can influence an experience, and how this trip has helped to change my ability to adapt to uncomfortable and unplanned experiences. I’m very thankful that I have come. I have a renewed desire and confirmation to continue school when I go back.
I hope to never forget the Spanish I have learned here. I have learned a lot about myself: who I am, who I’m not, what motivates me, my weaknesses, and my hopes.
I have been drawn closer to God in my faith and relationship with him. I have experienced a different culture, been a part of it sometimes, and gained a new worldview that is much less bigoted than what I had before.
I won’t say my time here has been wonderful; it hasn’t. But I will say it has been good. Not the good like pizza is good, and not the kind of good like God saw in sinless creation either. Somewhere inbetween. It has been good because it has been tough, rewarding, and I feel less afraid of life because of it. I only shared a couple tiny aspects of my term in Argentina. However, I will live the rest of my life differently, for the better, because of what I have experienced here.
I can’t thank God enough for the opportunity to come, or for the life and love he has given me. And from the bottom of my heart, I thank my communities, here in Argentina, in the United States, and in other places of the world, for the encouragement and support I have received as I have walked this path.
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Corin Wenger is a mission intern in Argentina who works with PROMINOA. He is from North Central Conference, which is in partnership with PROMINOA and Mennonite Mission Network. At home, he attends International Falls (Minn.) Evangelical Covenant Church. This summer, he’ll return from Argentina and plans to attend Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Mich., where he will major in marine technology.
A meaningful experience for him in his service with PROMINOA happened during the first couple of months he was in Argentina, when, for about two weeks, he and German Cariaga, a co-pastor at the Jesús Rey de Paz Mennonite Church, chiseled the old tile floor of the church building and poured a new concrete floor.
This experience was important to Wenger because Cariaga was one of the first people Wenger felt connected to in Argentina and still is one of the people Wenger knows best. This floor project also happened in the first months when Wenger felt like he wasn’t achieving anything.
“I’ve now become more comfortable with not having many physical results of my endeavors here, but at the time of the floor project, it was very encouraging to feel like I was actually helping and making a difference here,” said Wenger.###
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Mennonite Mission Network, the mission agency of Mennonite Church USA, leads, mobilizes and equips the church to participate in holistic witness to Jesus Christ in a broken world. Media may contact news@mennonitemission.net.
