One day, while wallowing in a bit of good old fashioned self pity ... reflecting on how sick I've been and all the battles I've dealt with .... I have a lightbulb moment; I'm not a tourist in a foreign land.

This is the real life of a local.

Nothing is easy for a local. Nothing is as simple as you think its going to be. Being a tourist in a beautiful country like Peru is an exciting adventure and everyone falls over themselves to make your experience fantastic and of course extract the mighty tourist dollar. But when you're a local, life is tough. When you're a foreign local, spending an extended time in said foreign land, it's even tougher. The language is a battle, nothing feels familiar, the queues are long, the processes are broken, the answers are unclear and the rate at which anything gets accomplished is mostly painfully slow; if at all.

My fellow kiwi and I were discussing the other day just how different our journeys have been, even though we did the same training, lived in the same house, worked in the same school and had the same friends. It's pretty cool really.

My journey has been dominated by experiencing first-hand the medical clinics and hospitals and 24hour pharmacies of Peru. I've spent too much time in these places, only once as a support person for someone else. The conditions were eye opening at times and the processes so broken.

You'll laugh at this .... my recent hospital visit where I was supporting a friend went something like this;

• First off, you must find reception (which you'd think would be in an obvious place at the entrance, but nope) to pay a flat fee for a doctor consultation.
• Then with receipt in hand, you wait in a super packed and over-heated waiting room.
• Eventually, you get into the room and the Doctor prescribes some medicine for you, which you must go and pay for and collect yourself.
• If you're in the public hospital you go outside, into the cold and round the back of the building to a hole-in-the-wall chemist. He types into a computer the details of the drugs and tells you how much it's going to cost. But … you can't pay him …
• You must walk around the other side of the building to a hole-in-the-wall cashier!
• You part with your money and he gives you a receipt, which you then take back to hole-in-the-wall-chemist guy.
• At this point you find out that 'hole-in-the-wall-chemist-guy' cannot supply ALL the medicine on the prescription … you must go to a 'real' pharmacy for the rest. Of course there is not one located in the hospital grounds.
• The nearest happens to be down the long hospital entrance driveway and across a 4-lane highway. Awesome.
• You trudge across to this pharmacy at 2am and bang on the closed doors. Someone eventually appears from their comfy bed out the back and you hand over the doctors' prescription. You pay and weirdly enough, feel excited to take this little bag of goodies back to the hospital.
• I must also point out that it's not just medicine in the bag, you also must buy your own equipment to administer the medicine … such as the needle and IV tube.
• After returning to the hospital, you sit back in the hot and overcrowded waiting room for the same doctor to be free.
• Finally, you get back into the Doctors room and you are hooked up to the IV with the medicine you have so laboriously obtained.

All stuff I took for granted in NZ.

With experiences like this, one day I insisted on attending a 'fancy clinic' which was certainly a much smoother process but all the doctor wanted to do was admit me for 3 nights, so he could make $2,000 USD off my insurance company. Thank god for a shift change part way through my visit and my faith was restored; meeting a genuine doctor not out to scam anyone. He was a delight and fixed me up well enough to travel to Lima early the next morning.

I've also had the pleasure of being ripped off by Chemists who charge me 5 times what my Spanish speaking friend pays when he buys it for me. I can't blame them really. Its hard to make a living in this country, but the principal and morality of their actions makes me sad.

Even though my journey here has been so different, it has undoubtedly been amazing. Why? Because it's in the most difficult of moments of your life that growth and change happens.

Think about it …. remember back to the times in your life when you have learned big lessons, had lightbulb moments or perhaps changed who you are or what you believe ….

I can almost 100% guarantee they were not happy, carefree situations. I'd bet my fabulous grasp on the Spanish language (um, yeah, right) that the times in your life when you grew as a person and developed who you are, was during difficult, stressful and upsetting times. That's when we confront painful truths that we may have been hiding from, or simply unaware of. That's when miracles happen.

This has been an adventure indeed. A growth and learning experience about the brutal truth of life. Full of happy moments and painful truths.

As I cross the border today, even though physically I feel weaker than I ever have, I realise that in so many ways I leave this country behind stronger than when I arrived.

Even though there have been moments of despair. Moments where I wanted to run back home. Moments when I doubted my ability and hated my situation. I am so, so grateful for each and every experience this country have given me. Being a foreigner in a strange land is not for the faint hearted - but it is THE most rewarding one could hope for.