“We fought injustice wherever we found it, no matter how large or how small, and we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity”
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, on one of the things that helped him survive prison. Almost three weeks after returning from South Africa, I am still struck by the country’s history, a place that took fifty years to create and then revoke laws that took other places centuries to discover their immorality.
I regret my lack of posting in the last week, and my excuses could be listed as follows: my electricity extra unreliable, leaving little battery power for blogging; I’ve been spending a lot of time with volunteers lately, and in Cotonou, which leaves me mainly with “I love my friends” stories, which would be be true, but not really what I want this blog to be about; and I’ve been so well-integrated that I haven’t had the time to blog.
The truth, though, would be that I’ve been too tired to get all the things I need to finished before vacation, let alone find the brainpower to write words that aren’t meaningless on here every night.
If you had told me that there would be a time that I would be this stressed during my service, I wouldn’t have believed you. But not just me, every one that’s about to hit the one-year mark is suddenly realizing how much the next four months of their lives are booked. And how much this schedule is going to put us suddenly at October with less than a year left, not quite remembering how we got there.
Most of the time here, I feel like I’m living in a time warp. Time just seems to pass differently here. It once felt like it would never end. Now it feels like it’s disappearing without my permission.
The new group of volunteers arrive in about a week. Those first three months felt like they were the longest of my life. Now, it’s weird to think about how they will be experiencing days that feel like they last 30 hours while the rest of us run around the country trying to to snag as much time as possible.
I was coasting down the other side of the hill I just climbed when I looked down at my front bicycle tire. That I could push it in to the point where I could touch the rim was not a good sign.
I could no longer see Kristin, the volunteer with whom I was biking the 50k to Dassa, so I started walking.
The first village I came across was 3k down the highway. I stopped two men who had just left the fields.
“Do you know a mechanic?” I asked.
“Yes. He is over there,” the man said, pointing in the general direction of the village, a classic example of Beninese directions.
Nothing in the direction he motioned looked like a place where I could get my tire fixed, so I kept walking, chalking up the interaction to a failure to understand my accent.
Thirty feet later, another man comes running up from the village to me. He was the mechanic. So, I followed him back to his shop. And I made faces at the group of kids that steadily grew as word spread there was a Yovo in town while he patched my tire. And I thought about how much I love that I live in a place where I’m never more than walking distance from someone who can help me along my route.