This post that you are about to read diverges a little from
my previous posts in that I’d like to move momentarily away from the subjects
of language, culture and religion to illustrate what life is like as a Peace
Corps volunteer.
Someone close to me asked me on the phone the other day,
“You seem to be really loving it there - do you just feel like you are always
on vacation?”
I had to subdue my initial guttural reaction which was to
burst out with a high and mighty, “HA!”, the product of my feeling something
between amusement and insulted at such an insinuation.
I do not feel like I am on vacation every day.
I feel like I am at work every day.
All day.
Every day.
Some of this, I know, is self-birthed, self-nurtured,
self-inflicted pressure. I do not have an office, set hours or a direct
supervisor who hands me a finite list of tasks to complete and as such, the
line between work time-place and living time-space is blurred, left to be
interpreted by Peace Corps volunteers like myself in our own unique situations. For me personally, when I am without a person
or structure that tells me when I should work and when I should play, when I am
given the choice, I go to work. I hold
myself to high standards. There are so many things I want to accomplish and so
I need to do lots and lots of to-do lists.
Side Note: Not all Peace Corps volunteers share this
particular disposition. Many, in fact, do not know how to push themselves when
they are not pushed and thus they go coasting along, never faster than allowed
by the subtle slope of time. But contrary to an apocryphal understanding of
what Peace Corps volunteers do stemming from stories of 1960s-70s Peace Corps
volunteers who more or less got dropped off in the bush somewhere to hang out and sing Kumbaya for two years, Peace Corps has evolved
significantly as an organization along with the role and work of the
volunteers. Today (and probably to some
extent through the 1960s-1970s as well – I don’t mean to entirely discredit the
service of these generations of pioneering volunteers) there are a lot of
go-getters who are doing a lot of really difficult, important and fascinating
work.
What is true for all Peace Corps volunteers though,
regardless of their natural disposition towards a work-play balance, is the
nature of the job itself.
Every day you wake up and go to bed on-duty. You must dress appropriately, greet appropriately, act
appropriately and eat appropriately. If
you go to your place of work that day, you likely spend the day dreaming and
scheming and planning and (inshahallah) doing whatever your community needs and
wants you to do – like you would at home except with a cap for cultural
awareness and flexibility for navigating unreliable logistics. But as soon as you get off, you are not off-duty. You may still have dreaming and scheming and
planning and doing of your own to do for future projects or current projects
with different work partners. When you
tire of that you have cultural integration to work on. You may get nights and
weekends and really hot or rainy afternoons off formal work but informal work
is never complete. There are people you
must go sit and visit with from time to time – important people like the
village chief, neighborhood chiefs, religious leaders, various old men, and
institutional administrators as well as family, extended family, extra-extended
family, friends and neighbors. There are
festivities at which you must make an appearance - funerals, weddings,
baptisms, holidays, etc. And don’t
forget language (or languages in my
case). Maybe you make a point of turning
language study into work by sitting down with a book or making flash
cards. However, even when you don’t
study so ceremoniously you will find that everything you try to do in village
that involves other people constitutes a (sometimes exhausting) lesson in
language comprehension and utilization; communicating with people and
practicing language are one in the same.
Top all this off with 100-plus degree heat, 80-100%
humidity, spotty cell phone reception, unreliable electricity, mosquitoes
galore, spiders bigger than my fist, chronic GI issues, reoccurring skin infections,
sweat on sweat on sweat, (often) tasteless and nutrient-lacking food, having to
do laundry in a bucket and wiping your butt with your hand in lieu of toilet
paper and the workload get seemingly a little heavier still.
It is only at our Peace Corps regional house, a 1-acre oasis
of bare knees, Mexican food, luke-warm beer, a real-ish shower (cold water only
and it is outdoors) and English language, that we find ourselves truly off-duty.
But it is very far away.
Travel between my hut and the Peace Corps house in my regional capital
takes a minimum of 1-hour of travel time (if you are blessed to be free of
mechanical issues) plus 1 to 3 hours spent waiting for a car to arrive and fill
up with enough passengers to leave. And
many volunteers’ sites are even further from their respective regional houses
than I am.
Plus, volunteers like myself cannot afford to go there
often, both because of our meager monthly Peace Corps stipend and because we
have so many other things to do in village.
And so, I work A LOT.
Fortunately, and perhaps necessarily for purposes of
sustainability, I love my job.
…preposterously
paramount, fantastically fool-hearted, wontedly formidable but (inshahallah)
never indomitable, grueling, gratifying, marvelous fortuity...
And while my primary aim in writing such an
alliteration-happy list of oxymoronical hyperboles was to capture the reader’s
attention, I do truly believe the statement to be true.
Every day is an undertaking for the “fantastically
foolhearted”, every day an adventure.
I love that the most reliable way to get to a meeting on
time is to hitch-hike with Malian truck drivers who (for my benefit?) play Phil
Collins’ In The Air Tonight and go
bananas when I break out the air-drums for the big steel drum solo.
I love that because my work is not defined for me I get the
opportunity to define my own work. I get to choose the projects that interest
me – malaria, HIV, typhoid...
I love that in the process of hammering out details of a visit
by cervical cancer researchers to my district hospital I get to hear (in
French) about the midwife’s life-altering trip to the US, her all-consuming
adoration of Little Rock, Arkansas (huh?), and how she serendipitously found
herself sitting in Bill Clinton’s chair on her birthday.
I love that working in a resource-poor environment demands a
certain resourcefulness, a certain scrappiness, and a certain creativity in
devising solutions to problems. We can’t
just buy our way out of things; we have to find back-doors and forge new paths.
I love that on my walk to work I run into 10-foot-long
poisonous snakes with fangs like daggers (is love maybe not the right word
here?).
I love that there is an utter lack of limpidity. While at times the labyrinth-like obscurity
in effecting every-day tasks may be harrowing, boredom is never a worry.
So when I get in bed each night, succumbing to the languor
settling in after a long day hard at work, I know I am in the right place. I
know that this is truly a “marvelous fortuity” and that later in life I will
realize how “preposterously paramount” this experience has been, even if I end
up spending two whole years in a row at work.
And maybe someday I’ll write a blog post where I actually
tell you about what I actually do for work (lol)…
