Climbs

This is not the first time you’ve climbed this hill. You downshift into the next lowest gear and confidently stand up on your pedals in order to find that one last burst of effort that will get you to the top.

You think for a second about the first time you did this. You thought that it was death incarnate. Your host father passed you in a truck and gave you a thumbs up out the window. You wondered why he didn’t stop and offer to help given your distress was so obviously displayed across your face.

The first time you did it in 1-1. This time, you do it in 2-6.

This time, it’s just another hill on your bike ride to Savalou. You mount it and continue on. Turns out, the past 20 months have made you stronger. 

I want to ride my bicycle.

I came home yesterday from a food security meeting to one of the saddest things you can come home to when you are a cyclist: a flat tire. I’m talking rim-sitting-on-the-concrete-floor flat tire.

In an inspired state of I-can-do-it-myself Peace Corps attitude, I decided I was going to fix it myself. Forty minutes of sitting on the concrete floor and several minutes of cussing later, I thought I had been successful. Five minutes later, my post mate yelled to me from my front room.

“Did you already inflate your tire?”

I walked back into the room to see him poking an obviously already deflated tire.

Getting the tire fixed was not the problem. I had a guy in my village who already fixed my front tire and at whose workshop I regularly stop to get air. It was finding the time between now, at what was already 7 p.m., and my classes today at 8 a.m.

Looked like I would be walking to school.

Immediately when I started out on foot this morning the question I received after “did you wake up well?” was “how is the bicycle?”

Looks like I’ve developed a reputation.

Author’s note: One of the perks I’ve found, though, of being a foreigner in a small village is that I can’t get very far on foot. In the four trips I made to school today, I only made it a few steps before someone offered to take me on their motorcycle.