How Teaching Abroad Destroyed My Faith
My Tuesday essay this week is the latest installment in my memoir in progress, but since that post is free to all I wanted to supplement it for my paying subscribers. Today’s essay first appeared as a chapter in my first book, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging. You might find this piece an interesting companion to Tuesday’s meditation on gardening and faith, since I recount an experience that pushed me, eventually, toward atheism for much of my adult life. It’s not theology that changes the motion of our hearts so much as the private and the personal. As always, our life events are open to multiple interpretations.
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How Teaching Abroad Destroyed My Faith
It was a slow descent into Montevideo, zooming in on neighborhoods sprawled beneath the paraíso and olmo trees. As I turned away from the window, my neighbor’s face beamed over my shoulder. “¿Muy tranquilo, no?”
I nodded and smiled, but I had already forgotten the scene below. After a mind-numbing series of flight connections from Seattle to Buenos Aires, I wanted nothing more than to drop my suitcase somewhere I could call home for the next year. Now the plane was touching down, rocking from one wheel to the other as the cabin shook. I raised a silent prayer.
The plan was to stay with Ana’s mother. We had been talking about this since Ana left college during her sophomore year and returned to Uruguay. Ana was a close friend whom I hoped might one day be a lover. She taught me Spanish in the heavy Tennessee night at a picnic table outside her dormitory, where a giant sycamore stretched against the moon and the red-dirt smell of the Appalachian hills rose from the ground. I started smoking there and measured two years of platonic friendship with hard pulls on Camel Wides. We talked about God and politics, and she complained about her redneck boyfriends while the cicadas roared.
After nightfall a lamp cast its light into the shadows, gleaming on our legs and arms and Ana’s round face. Her hair hugged her cheeks like tulip petals. She was always tossing her head back to laugh. Ana and I were sitting at the picnic table when I learned that she was pregnant and had to return home. Jack, the ex-Navy Seal and sire, wanted an abortion—a thought she could not bear. My role then was to sympathize. I had a string of girlfriends at that Bible college whom I never touched unless they were weeping in my arms.
When we said goodbye she made me promise to visit. “I’ll be lonely, Juan,” she said, using my adopted name. “And you need to learn more español. I’ll get you a teaching position.” I kissed her cheek and gave my promise.
Four years had passed. I was twenty-three years old, a newly minted M.A. brimming with wanderlust. Ana and I had kept in touch, and she was quick to invite me to Uruguay. “When will you get another chance?” she wrote. “You’ll see, it will be good for you. Everyone is so amable here. I know you’ll feel right at home.”
When I thought of Ana I felt a visceral tug like I had when I heard flamenco music for the first time and wanted to eat those beefy chords. Duty likely drove me, too. Why roam among strangers when I could visit a friend in need? Ana arranged a teaching assignment with the sixth grade that she said would give me enough cash for weekend travel. It sounded good. I asked few questions. The important thing was that I would get to hold her again—at least one big hug to say hello. I lost myself in reveries of Tennessee throughout the flight. I could almost smell the lilac perfume she wore.
My head was thick with fatigue when I stepped from the plane in Montevideo into the humid air. I remember the walk from customs to the baggage claim as if it were a dark Monet—heat waves on the tarmac, blurry queues stretching back from the booths, three wide windows smeared by handprints. Once inside I searched the crowd for Ana. A frantic hand caught my eye. I followed it to the unfamiliar face of a blond woman in mid-life, eyebrows raised, mouth wide in a false smile. She waved harder when our eyes met, so I hitched her way, suitcase banging against my leg.
“I am Teresa,” she gushed.
The quiet man at her side extended a broad palm. “Soy Juancho. Papá de Ana.”
I grinned and gripped his hand. “Mucho gusto. Nice to meet you.”
“Sorry about Ana,” Teresa said, as if I already knew.