Carpe Diem lied to me…
PART I
It took years of therapy to work through the traumatic experience I had during my gap semester with Carpe Diem.
My semester started on September 14th, 2017 during a particularly difficult time for my family. As I flew across the country from Philadelphia to LA I realized I would have no way of checking in on my family because we were not allowed to have our phones. This would have been okay if I felt connected and included with the group of 12 other students, but that is far from what happened.
As I look back through my journal entries, I remember trying so hard each day to write with positivity and optimism despite my true feelings. Even the first day in the LA airport I could see the cliques start to form.
Of course there were good times where we learned new games and sang songs but my experience in Guatemala was nothing short of traumatic.
If you haven’t read my earlier post, Are Gap Year Programs really worth it?, I mention that the main reason I chose Carpe Diem was because of the community service and environmental impacts they promised. This was nearly a flat out lie. Here is a journal entry from September 20th, 2017:
(For context, we were staying at a small school in the mountains where we would take Spanish classes and spend meal time alone with local people/families. I stayed with an older woman named Pabla who lived with 3 of her children and 7 grandkids, had dirt floors, floor mats, and had loose corrugated plastic as a roof that she’d have to move with a broom to let to smoke out of her kitchen — if it was raining we’d sit in the smoke. Many children in this community and similar areas die of smoke inhalation.)
“I’m walking down the street looking at houses made from scrap metal, stray cats and dogs covered in fleas, and little kids playing with plastic bottle caps, while I am in a nice bed with blankets, a functional roof, running water, a bathroom, and the ability to go to school. What am I doing to help besides give them money to make me food? What real impact am I having? None.”
This was only 6 days into the program of three months, so I was optimistic that maybe it would get better and we’d actually start doing the service work and community aid we were promised. Nope…
On September 30th, 2017 (after a few near death experiences that I’ll share in another blog post), we headed to The Mystical Yoga Farm. Now, if you had told me that instead of learning to cultivate crops sustainably, building houses, or aiding communities in clean ups, that I would be taking a boat to a hippie farm where they don’t shower, purify us with sage, and make us drink cocoa tea to “expand our minds,” I would not have signed up for this. But here I was… **and honestly I would have been open to it had the people been Guatemalan but they were as white as you could be*
Here are some of my journal entries:
“We drove two hours to Lake Atitlan, then took a boat ‘the nacho’ over to the mystical yoga farm. We were greeted by this dude in lightening spandex and stupid looking dreads and he had a ridiculous name I don’t even remember. As we got more of a tour I noticed myself judging this place a lot. I't’s much more ‘hippie’ than I had expected.”
“We had a cocoa (ca-cow) ceremony. It’s a type of plant that is chocolate but still holds medicinal properties. It’s a stimulus and opens up the blood flow in your body. We all drank some after being purified with sage incense and prayers. The drink itself was bitter and grainy. I was not a fan. But after a while they told us to try interpretive dance. My mind felt cloudy and clear at the same time, which was weird. Everyone moved differently. Some people had structure and were nervous but others moved with the music and had flow.” (Having never been high before, that was the closest I’d felt to it. The next day I was uncomfortable because I had felt like I’d been unknowingly drugged).
“Today we left the mystical yoga farm and made our way to Antigua. As we left the hippies mooned us. An image I won’t soon forget.”
I did my best to learn while we were at the Mystical yoga farm about sustainability, composting, gardening, etc. but it was mainly focused on yoga, relaxing, and “vibing.”
To be continued…
**These examples do not display the traumatic experiences I had, only the strange and misleading ones. I will write about the life-threatening situations, irresponsibility of my leaders, and cruel intentions of my group mates in another blog post.**
