Nowhere to Sit

I had decision fatigue almost immediately after we arrived on the field. Our coworkers took care of practically everything logistical, but language acquisition brings another level of constant decision making. When I'm speaking, I'm constantly choosing which words to say, and I must choose from a woefully limited vocabulary. When I'm listening, I make constant decisions about which words to apply meaning. I ask myself, do I need to translate that word in my head or do I know it? Which ones do I have to think about, and which ones must I ignore? Can I understand the essence without understanding each word?

In spite of my best efforts to focus on the present, it is really challenging to think realistically about the future. When you've just moved, it seems everything is in the future. "When we get this, when we have that, once we've done those..." it never ends, and it's easy too get caught in a spiral of worry about the unknown.

Because of all that, plus the actual decisions we were making daily, I could not choose a couch. We went to furniture stores and we picked out a table, chairs, dinnerware, places to put books and clothes and even decorations. We picked a mattress, which felt like a big step, but when it finally came I had some regrets because it's quite firm. So even though we needed a couch, we were using the empty salón space to build Ikea furniture practically every day and we thought we could put it off.

When we finally made our decision, we were told it would be two months - our couch would arrive in September.

Now it's the last day of the week that our invoice says the couch will arrive, and still we have nowhere to sit, and we're sorely disappointed.

More to come.