I haven't spent a lot of time in this blog talking about the difficult times. Maybe I've been misleading you, in which case I'm sorry. So here's the truth: At least once a day, the thought runs through my head--"I could go home right now. I could call it quits and be eating a goat cheese salad [or pizza, or thai food, or mint chocolate chip ice cream, or...] in 72 hours." That's the sort of thing we're not supposed to admit, but it's true. It doesn't mean I'm going anywhere anytime soon. At least once a day I also think, "I'm the luckiest human being in the world." The combination of these two thoughts, and the short time frame within which both of them float through my mind, is referred to by volunteers as the "roller coaster." The thing about roller coasters, even emotional ones, is that they are simultaneously thrilling, terrifying, fun, and nauseating.
Some days I would rather sit in my house and stare at the wall than attempt to have a coherent conversation in Swahili. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the cultural barriers separating me from my new friends--it has become apparent over the past few months that there really are some things that can't be understood cross-culturally. As close as I am to my Mamas, there is so much about me they will never understand. And I'm sure they feel the same way about me. And sometimes I just want to sit in my house and sob hysterically about the things I've witnessed here, and the fact that there is so, so little I can do to help. Other times I just feel totally numb. I find myself making really off-color jokes, which I guess is my way of trying to deal with things that are just beyond my comprehension. AIDS? Food insecurity? If I can't laugh, I'll cry. Sometimes I do cry. The realization that, statistically, at least a few of the children I play with on a daily basis are going to die of preventable disease. How are you supposed to deal with that? Everyday, I rotate between feelings of anger so intense I think it might eat me alive and numbness to the point of boredom and sadness so deep I might get lost inside it.
The roller coaster has been getting faster. The twists are more nauseating, the rails a little rickety-er, the drops are more dramatic. I find myself overwhelmed by the simplest decisions -- do I hold on or throw my hands up? Do I scream with joy or scream with fear? And really, is there even a difference?
Monday, November 29, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Eid Mubarak and reflections on integration and success...
I pull the hem of my dira over my bare feet and hide my hands beneath my shawl. My hijab is tight and itchy around my neck but I don't pull my hands out to adjust it. Even if I wanted to, I'm practically sitting on top of the women next to me so any unperscribed movement is a poor choice. As the service begins I mimic my Mama's actions--standing, kneeling, endlessly repeating "Allah Akbar." I try to pay attention, stay open and aware of the culture, spirituality, and beauty of this event I am honored to have been invited to. But all I can think about is keeping my white hands hidden and how, for the first time in 5 months, I might, maybe, blend into a crowd. The kids in front and to the side of me can still see my pale face, but to the rows and rows of women sitting and kneeling behind me, my colorful hijab and dira won't warrent a second glance. I feel relieved, free, and human in a way I suddenly realize I haven't felt in a very long time.
But for every other hour of my life here, I will never blend in. And if anyone was watching closely they noticed me fumble over prayers, motions, the itchy hijab situation.
I'm doing what I can to integrate here, but there are some barriers I will never cross. One minute I feel like one of the gang, laughing and drinking chai with my Mamas, and the next minute I notice that a kid has burst into tears at the sight of my strange pale eyes and freckly nose, or a teenage boy is staring at me like I'm a dirty picture in the bathroom who can't see his objectifying gaze.
One story which nicely illustrates the stage of integration I'm at took place last week as i was returning home from a long and poorly planned thougrh, thankfully, safely fexecuted hike up Mt. Hanang with, no joke, 50 secondary school students. I was exhausted and grumpy and ready to be home, alone, far away from the nearest teenager. As we reached the base of the mountain, we still had another few hours of walking back to the village. So, please don't judge me for this, I left the kids with their other chaparone and made my way to the main road to try to catch a ride. (Yes, I hitchhike here sometimes, but if you saw our busses, you'd understand why.) So a young man finally picked me up and immediately started doing what most men here do upon first meeting me--talking about marraige. Usually I just laugh it off and let him off gently by saying something like "That's very kind of you, but right now I'm focused on my studies." (Which has led to a running joke in my village where the young men ask me everyday if I've learned everything there is to know yet.)
But that day, I was in a particularly irritable mood. So the driver ends up asking if I have a husband, but instead of saying "mume" he says "mzee," which works in context but literally means "old man." So I decide to mess with him and tell him I'm married to a wonderful mzee named Saidi Jumanne*. Saidi Jumanne, in reality, is my favorite "mzee" grandpa in the village. So the driver and I have this long chat where I make up all sorts of ridiculous stuff about my fictional marraige.
Finally we reach the village and I hop out of the car to a crowd of the same young men I mentioned earlier, who like to joke about when I'm going to stop studying and settle down. So they're all boisterously welcoming me home and the driver turns to them and asks if it's true that I have an mzee named Saidi Jumanne. It turns out the real Saidi was standing about ten feet away, perfectly in sight and very much in his mid-70s. The men, laughing hysterically, point in his direction and vehemently affirm that he is, in fact, my husband. The driver drove off, utterly confused.
During Peace Corps staging (the three days of logistics before we boarded the plane to TZ), we were asked to write what would make us feel like we've "succeeded" in the Peace Corps. Knowing my tendencies to be a stressed out ambitious freak, I decided to write something simpler than "when climate change halts and all of Tanzania is reforested." I wrote, "When I laugh with my neighbors." Mission accomplished, now on to deforestation...
*Not his real name, but it's equally Tanzanian
But for every other hour of my life here, I will never blend in. And if anyone was watching closely they noticed me fumble over prayers, motions, the itchy hijab situation.
I'm doing what I can to integrate here, but there are some barriers I will never cross. One minute I feel like one of the gang, laughing and drinking chai with my Mamas, and the next minute I notice that a kid has burst into tears at the sight of my strange pale eyes and freckly nose, or a teenage boy is staring at me like I'm a dirty picture in the bathroom who can't see his objectifying gaze.
One story which nicely illustrates the stage of integration I'm at took place last week as i was returning home from a long and poorly planned thougrh, thankfully, safely fexecuted hike up Mt. Hanang with, no joke, 50 secondary school students. I was exhausted and grumpy and ready to be home, alone, far away from the nearest teenager. As we reached the base of the mountain, we still had another few hours of walking back to the village. So, please don't judge me for this, I left the kids with their other chaparone and made my way to the main road to try to catch a ride. (Yes, I hitchhike here sometimes, but if you saw our busses, you'd understand why.) So a young man finally picked me up and immediately started doing what most men here do upon first meeting me--talking about marraige. Usually I just laugh it off and let him off gently by saying something like "That's very kind of you, but right now I'm focused on my studies." (Which has led to a running joke in my village where the young men ask me everyday if I've learned everything there is to know yet.)
But that day, I was in a particularly irritable mood. So the driver ends up asking if I have a husband, but instead of saying "mume" he says "mzee," which works in context but literally means "old man." So I decide to mess with him and tell him I'm married to a wonderful mzee named Saidi Jumanne*. Saidi Jumanne, in reality, is my favorite "mzee" grandpa in the village. So the driver and I have this long chat where I make up all sorts of ridiculous stuff about my fictional marraige.
Finally we reach the village and I hop out of the car to a crowd of the same young men I mentioned earlier, who like to joke about when I'm going to stop studying and settle down. So they're all boisterously welcoming me home and the driver turns to them and asks if it's true that I have an mzee named Saidi Jumanne. It turns out the real Saidi was standing about ten feet away, perfectly in sight and very much in his mid-70s. The men, laughing hysterically, point in his direction and vehemently affirm that he is, in fact, my husband. The driver drove off, utterly confused.
During Peace Corps staging (the three days of logistics before we boarded the plane to TZ), we were asked to write what would make us feel like we've "succeeded" in the Peace Corps. Knowing my tendencies to be a stressed out ambitious freak, I decided to write something simpler than "when climate change halts and all of Tanzania is reforested." I wrote, "When I laugh with my neighbors." Mission accomplished, now on to deforestation...
*Not his real name, but it's equally Tanzanian
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Life is so easy in America--they drive CARS to fetch water from the river!!
Finally found some of that internet stuff again!! Welcome to Month #5. I’ve officially gone from counting days to counting weeks to counting months--the next logical increment is years. That’s kind of terrifying, kind of awesome, and makes me feel like I really haven’t done a whole lot to write home about yet considering I’ve almost been in this country for half a year now. Either way, there’s been a request for more information about what I actually do all day, so here we go.
I’m still in the “first three months at site” phase during which Peace Corps discourages starting projects. Basically my job is to just get settled in, make friends, and integrate. I’m also slowly but surely gaining confidence in Swahili and starting to be able to really get to know people in a way I couldn’t before. In the meantime, I’ve learned a lot about myself. For example: I don’t want to be a preschool teacher. It seemed like a good way to practice Swahili, but it turns out I have no patience and I’m really, really bad at controlling a room of screaming children. Another example: I am not a collectivist--my neighbors think it’s insane that I live alone and feel really bad for me because of it, but I rush home at the end of every day to enjoy my few hours of solitude. Political inclinations aside, living in America for 21 years instilled some serious individualist tendencies in me. I‘m slowly getting used to collectivism, though--if it’s 7pm and I haven’t got my charcoal stove started yet, I don’t hesitate to pop by my neighbors and guiltlessly enjoy her ugali. I’ve also been known to show up at Mama Hawa’s to ask for help with things like spiders, ant infestations, cleaning up the kerosene I spilled all over my floor, etc.
But if I’m honestly integrating, that concept has to go both ways, right? So last night a sixteen year old girl I’ve talked to a few times before showed up at my house with her one month old baby, saying she had been kicked out and had no where to sleep. She definitely wasn’t lying--I had heard from other kids that she had some serious problems at home, had dropped out of school to work after second grade, and had very little family left in the village to help her out. This was exactly the sort of “Lauren has a chance to be someone’s hero” situation that I was looking forward to. But when the time came, I am ashamed to admit I hesitated pretty seriously before taking the girl in for the night. In the end we had a peaceful evening, though she seemed very suspicious of the brown rice I cooked. I asked her what she would do if she had unlimited money and she said she’d build a three-room brick house with a tin roof and buy a plot of land near the river to plant cabbage, carrots, and green peppers (particularly lucrative crops here). Insert reality check here.
And now in no particular order, examples of the other exciting things I‘ve done in the past few months:
- Spent a day hanging out at the local water source talking to people as they washed clothes and fetched water. During this time a long group of kids came to stare at me and after about half an hour I finally turned to them and said, “I’m a human being, not a TV” and then they screamed and ran away. I also overheard my favorite quote so far: “That’s the new mzungu (white person). She lives in America. Life there is so easy--they drive their CARS to fetch water from the river!” This was followed by a very confusing attempt by me to explain indoor plumbing. I’m always surprised by the things I’m incapable of explaining… pathetically, it’s partly because I don’t actually understand how many of our modern conveniences work. Air conditioning, airplanes, the internet… as far as I know that stuff runs on magic.
- I hang out a lot with the local wazee (old people), talking about their lives and all the things they remember about the village. Lately I’ve been on a tree kick, so sometimes I ask them to take me around and show me their favorite trees and their medicinal and technical uses. The younger community members tend to know a lot less about these sorts of things, partly because the area has been pretty badly deforested so there just aren’t as many trees to use anymore. I think this might be the start of a good project that will involve collecting this information (maybe with the help of the school kids through the environment club I am slowly in the process of organizing) and putting it into a booklet type thing. The booklet will serve partly to educate people about their local resources and partly to demonstrate the importance of reforestation and of reforesting with native species.
- I’ve started a girl’s exercise club that mostly involves me attempting to teach yoga to a group of Mamas and girls who are falling all over each other and laughing hysterically at my instructions. Some things just sound bizarre when you translate them into a language you’ve only been learning for four months… I end up saying stuff like “Now you will start as a dog which has down and then slowly turn into a child.”
Besides that I pretty much just walk around and meet people, read a lot, practice guitar, and spend way more time doing household chores than you could imagine. Washing clothes by hand is a full-day job…especially since I live 2km from my nearest water source. I’ve also been doing a lot of running--there are a lot of beautiful trails through the hills behind my house that I’ve been exploring. I’m hoping to run the Kilimanjaro half (or maybe (big maybe) full) marathon in February. I’m mostly posting that here right now so I’ll feel social pressure to actually do it because I’ve just announced to the whole wide internet that I’m going to--so be sure to make fun of me if I give up.
I’m still in the “first three months at site” phase during which Peace Corps discourages starting projects. Basically my job is to just get settled in, make friends, and integrate. I’m also slowly but surely gaining confidence in Swahili and starting to be able to really get to know people in a way I couldn’t before. In the meantime, I’ve learned a lot about myself. For example: I don’t want to be a preschool teacher. It seemed like a good way to practice Swahili, but it turns out I have no patience and I’m really, really bad at controlling a room of screaming children. Another example: I am not a collectivist--my neighbors think it’s insane that I live alone and feel really bad for me because of it, but I rush home at the end of every day to enjoy my few hours of solitude. Political inclinations aside, living in America for 21 years instilled some serious individualist tendencies in me. I‘m slowly getting used to collectivism, though--if it’s 7pm and I haven’t got my charcoal stove started yet, I don’t hesitate to pop by my neighbors and guiltlessly enjoy her ugali. I’ve also been known to show up at Mama Hawa’s to ask for help with things like spiders, ant infestations, cleaning up the kerosene I spilled all over my floor, etc.
But if I’m honestly integrating, that concept has to go both ways, right? So last night a sixteen year old girl I’ve talked to a few times before showed up at my house with her one month old baby, saying she had been kicked out and had no where to sleep. She definitely wasn’t lying--I had heard from other kids that she had some serious problems at home, had dropped out of school to work after second grade, and had very little family left in the village to help her out. This was exactly the sort of “Lauren has a chance to be someone’s hero” situation that I was looking forward to. But when the time came, I am ashamed to admit I hesitated pretty seriously before taking the girl in for the night. In the end we had a peaceful evening, though she seemed very suspicious of the brown rice I cooked. I asked her what she would do if she had unlimited money and she said she’d build a three-room brick house with a tin roof and buy a plot of land near the river to plant cabbage, carrots, and green peppers (particularly lucrative crops here). Insert reality check here.
And now in no particular order, examples of the other exciting things I‘ve done in the past few months:
- Spent a day hanging out at the local water source talking to people as they washed clothes and fetched water. During this time a long group of kids came to stare at me and after about half an hour I finally turned to them and said, “I’m a human being, not a TV” and then they screamed and ran away. I also overheard my favorite quote so far: “That’s the new mzungu (white person). She lives in America. Life there is so easy--they drive their CARS to fetch water from the river!” This was followed by a very confusing attempt by me to explain indoor plumbing. I’m always surprised by the things I’m incapable of explaining… pathetically, it’s partly because I don’t actually understand how many of our modern conveniences work. Air conditioning, airplanes, the internet… as far as I know that stuff runs on magic.
- I hang out a lot with the local wazee (old people), talking about their lives and all the things they remember about the village. Lately I’ve been on a tree kick, so sometimes I ask them to take me around and show me their favorite trees and their medicinal and technical uses. The younger community members tend to know a lot less about these sorts of things, partly because the area has been pretty badly deforested so there just aren’t as many trees to use anymore. I think this might be the start of a good project that will involve collecting this information (maybe with the help of the school kids through the environment club I am slowly in the process of organizing) and putting it into a booklet type thing. The booklet will serve partly to educate people about their local resources and partly to demonstrate the importance of reforestation and of reforesting with native species.
- I’ve started a girl’s exercise club that mostly involves me attempting to teach yoga to a group of Mamas and girls who are falling all over each other and laughing hysterically at my instructions. Some things just sound bizarre when you translate them into a language you’ve only been learning for four months… I end up saying stuff like “Now you will start as a dog which has down and then slowly turn into a child.”
Besides that I pretty much just walk around and meet people, read a lot, practice guitar, and spend way more time doing household chores than you could imagine. Washing clothes by hand is a full-day job…especially since I live 2km from my nearest water source. I’ve also been doing a lot of running--there are a lot of beautiful trails through the hills behind my house that I’ve been exploring. I’m hoping to run the Kilimanjaro half (or maybe (big maybe) full) marathon in February. I’m mostly posting that here right now so I’ll feel social pressure to actually do it because I’ve just announced to the whole wide internet that I’m going to--so be sure to make fun of me if I give up.
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