Where does this take us?

It's been a week nearly to the hour since Adam, Meredith and I returned from El Sauce.

The students are back in class, a few months shy of graduation. I am back in the office, showing off samples of El Sauceno coffee and the pine-needle baskets made by the able hands of the Cerro Colorado women.

Bracing myself in the back of a 1960s pick-up and staring up at the sky and into the crags of the mountain road seem very far off but close in my mind.

A few hours after going to bed the night I returned, I woke up, bleary eyed. Before I adjusted to the light and got coherent, I saw the wooden planks of the poorest homes before me instead of my closet, rays of light penetrating the holes and gaps.

"Oh, I'm in one those houses," I thought, just before my feet hit the carpet and I knew I was home.

The next night, I woke up disoriented in the bed; I had to think and reason out that yes, we had been at the Atlanta airport and oh yeah, I'm in Rochester.

Traveling plays funny games with your mind. You don't realize that a place has so entirely crept into you and become a part of your daily life until you're suddenly jarred out of it. Suddenly you become very aware of the things you grew accustomed to.

Bucket showers in the day, chickens serenading in the morning hours. The 6-block commute from Xiomara's to the Geneseo office past the church.

Walking off the plane and into the Atlanta international destinations wing, we had some culture shock. Before us was a huge food court — options of 20 restaurants — with a bar and a piano player and a duty free store and newsstands, jewelers, anything I could look for. Before we left Managua, Yacarely suggested we take a spin through the super market and get whatever snacks or necessities we might want for the week; you can't find much in El Sauce. You never know what can be bought.

The kung pao chicken, chicken wraps, fudgy brownies ... it was all overload and it was so .... so plenty. I felt a little gluttonous; the choices and immense differences were staring me in the face behind a deli case.

I am often reminded of what Kellan said about running the El Sauce program: it's the step between college and graduation. Like the world after you toss your cap in the air, and in real-life Nicaragua, you need to figure out things yourself. He guides the students and gets their projects ready, then lets them figure it out. He walked us all to the projects the first day or so to make sure we knew where we going, but then on, it was Meredith who met Yuritza each morning, took the bus and spent the days alone with her in the communities. No professor or director standing over her, showing her how it's done. She became a member of the society and she liked it that way. "What I like about this," she said to me one morning as we rode the bus to the stop, "is that it forces you to be independent. I would never be doing the things I'm doing here otherwise."

How else would we sit in a family's small house with its dirt floor, talking about families and helping grind corn, in a community that's an hour off the road and down a path, over streams? Meredith could have asked for help and Kellan would have been there. Adam too. But they didn't.

I'm not sure how the El SAuce experience will settle into my psyche over the next few days, months, years. I am still learning lessons 20 years after I, as a college student, jumped off a bus in the middle of rural Brazil and asked a remote community of protesting farmers if I could live with them for a project. Will I be 60 and remember these moments from the last 17 days, each time with new insight?

Surely so.

It's the beauty of travel. Of immersing yourself in a new culture. Not just as a tourist, walking past the landmarks, but becoming a member of the community. You soak it up like a sponge. You get to be full of the memories and slowly see what shakes out.

Surely we won't remember all the details but what is most important will stick, and shape us in ways we can't yet imagine.