This probably made me feel more validated than it should

Over the past two days, I’ve noticed a greater than normal number of ant carcasses littering the floor of my outdoor kitchen. I gave it no mind and merely swept them up along with the normal onion skins and used matches.

This afternoon, I found the cause of death.

I was rummaging in my kitchen when a movement in the corner made me look over at the shelf. It appeared that in the Ziploc bag of condiments I had confiscated from the continental breakfast at the hotel at which my family and I stayed in St. Louis, two plastic containers of maple syrup had ruptured. Somehow a hole had been poked in the bag, and the inside, a colony of ants had taken root in some death-by-insulin-shock pact.

The first method of attack was submerging the bag in water. I saved as many pre-packaged containers of honey and syrup and grape jelly and cream cheese as was possible while the less strong ants struggled to swim their way to the sides of the plastic tub or tried to use the floating containers as life rafts. (Darwinism, man. It’s cutthroat.)

The second round of attack included insecticide. There was no way these fools that had managed to escape once were going to waltz right into my house and into my Skittles and candy corn and Jolly Ranchers.

They didn’t see it coming. Up the wall of my back patio, back into the water, trying to hid under the plastic bag, there was no place the noxious gas did not reach. And as their inch-long bodies lay curling in agony on the ground the only remorse I had was that I was going to have to sweep my back patio after I returned from class.

No one messes with my maple syrup.

Step 2: Reintegration

I returned to my village after my five-week absence (16 days in the US, 19 days Cotonou) with the same assumption that I believe most people have a tendency to hold when they leave a place: nothing will have changed since you left.

It’s a false hope that I continued to hold on to even after having spent two weeks getting this myth busted. The city where I lived for 18 years had changed. The people with whom I had lived for 4 years had changed. I had changed.

But, in all these circumstances, the easiest changes to notice were the physical: my exit off I-70 is now one of those where you drive on the left side of the road, my roommate who was always pro-Droid now has an iPhone, I’m much darker and my hair is more blonder than when I left.

And so, when I came back to my village, those were things that I noticed first: The boutique where I buy eggs and phone credit now has a concrete front porch with latticework that I admire they were able to finish in the time I was gone. (There is less direction and scheduling in construction here than in the US.) The road in front of the market has been repaired. To accommodate an increase in students, I now teach my 6eme class under a roof of palm fronds and on a chalkboard painted on the side of one of the buildings.

It was my work partner who noticed the non-physical changes first. “You look good,” he told me when he saw me for the first time. “You look healthier.”

Whether he intended to talk about my mental health or not, he isn’t the only one who has commented on how I’m more talkative and happier and more of myself than I was the last few months I was in Benin.

So, maybe while it’s the physical things that change the easiest, it’s the other changes that mean more. Eventually, that porch will fall down. And eventually, I’ll be teaching all my classes in a classroom again (Inshallah). But hopefully, my students will remember the kind of teacher and the kind of person I was for longer.

Step 1: Get over homesickness

There’s something about being surrounded by people who have known you since you were born, about spending a weekend with someone who knows you better almost anyone else, about seeing the ways in which your best friend has changed in the past 16 months that you weren’t there to witness, that makes it hard to come back.

And, as I broke down to one of my best friends here the second night I was back in the country, I wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by those people once more.

When we had made it past the initial outburst, she told me something that her friend had told her: In relationships (all kinds) what makes them work is what you are able to bring to them. Many people look for people to make them feel complete, but what really matters is that you felt whole beforehand. You are nothing if you aren’t able to define yourself outside of your relation to others.  

She told me, that above anything in my life thus far, this experience is going to be what I am able to bring to the table.

These 16 months have been hard and complicated and sometimes made me a person that I never wanted to be, but it has shaped me and made me stronger and taught me more about myself than any other experience I have ever faced.

I have walked away from classes cursing in English under my breath. I have mastered a transportation system that seems to lack all sense of logic. I have convinced a 14-year-old girl that she was capable of asking for more than what life had initially given her.

I left a significant portion of myself at Gate 58 in Kansas City, but I have things here left to do, people left here to teach and parts of me that I have yet to discover before I can truly have an experience to bring to my relationships afterward.

I only ask that those I left behind wait another 11 months. 

First world problems

I don’t really remember what spurred the question exactly, but while I was home, one of really good friends asked me this question:

“Do you think that we (Americans) create our own problems?”

I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had since. And like most conversations I have that aren’t between myself and my keyboard (ie don’t involve a “delete” button), I’ve been thinking about how much more eloquent I could have been in that conversation.

We (people who live a world with reliable internet and climate control and 5G smartphones and coffee that costs almost as much as I make in a day) don’t create our own problems. As someone who is in her own way familiar with psychological issues, I certainly don’t think that those exist all in someone’s head. (Psychology pun intended) But I do think that because we (most of the people that I’ve known in my life as someone who comes from a relatively privileged background) have the ability to focus on less physical and need-oriented problems because our basic needs are met everyday. We are able to identify and seek treatment for diseases such as depression because we are not worried about the fact that our 6-month-old appears to be malnourished.

I’ve rarely talked about mental health issues in the host country population here and never talked to a Beninese doctor about them. But, most Beninese physicians are mainly focused on keeping their patients from dying from malaria.

And certainly my observations and theories have some holes. But what I’m really trying to say is it’s the urgency of the problems plaguing a population that is one of the factors that determines the kind of medical issues that are able to be diagnosed. Not that any issue is more important or more severe than another. Only that when I am nursing a high-grade fever and worrying that I’ve contracted malaria, I don’t have time to think about a lot of other things.

In which I come to a realization after an interaction with a human who can not yet talk

I am terrible at keeping in touch with people.

It’s not that I haven’t met people who have changed me and shaped me and made me the person that I am today. It’s not that I haven’t met people that I wish I was still in contact with today. It’s not that I never had best friends who knew all my secrets. 

Because I have and I did.

But I’ve always wanted to be the person who leaves. I’ve always thought of the lifestyle that I lead as a transient one. The people that I surrounded myself with meant something to me while they were surrounding me, but never enough that I made the effort to keep in contact with them when they no longer were surrounding me.

And I was ok with that. I had accepted that the people I met would only be in my life for so long before they would leave again so I should learn the most from them while I still had the chance.

And then I met my nephew. 

We were in the kitchen of my brother and sister-in-law’s house. I had walked in and then suddenly, in front of me was this very small person who I had never met before, but was someone who was very important to me. And, as I watched him bang his hands on the marble countertop, I realized (and I’m borrowing from John Green here) that, as long as I am alive or as long as my nephew is alive, I will be his aunt and he will be my nephew.

There isn’t a part of the African bush remote enough where I can escape that fact. 

And that nine-month-old baby made me realize that maybe I should start thinking about the other people and other relationships that I want to foster so they will still exist long after it would have taken me to figure out how important a particular relationship meant to me in the first place. 

I realized that you have to choose to let someone be part of your life. And you have to work to keep that person part of your life. Because, maybe, leaving isn’t always the answer.

On entering the US for the first time in 15 months

First person I told I hadn’t been home in 15 months: The man who had just sat next to me for 8 hours and 52 minutes on the flight from Paris to Minneapolis

First person I texted: My roommate from college while still on the plane at the gate in Minneapolis

First realization about life here versus Benin: I can understand what everyone says and people can understand everything I say (i.e. when I’m mumbling to myself about what people around me are doing)

First time I wanted to text a Peace Corps volunteer and couldn’t: When I had the realization that I didn’t have to be so aggressive while standing in line at US customs because cutting in line is not socially acceptable here

First thing I bought: Pumpkin white chocolate mocha with skim milk, no whip from the Caribou coffee next to my gate in the Minneapolis airport

First time I was concerned I would cry when I landed in my hometown: Drink service on the flight from Minneapolis to KC

First face I recognized at the KC airport:  My mom

When the director is away...

The day before I left my village, my director invited me to his house. He wanted to give me sesame flour and have his wife teach me how to make sesame dumplings with sauce, so I could make it for my parents while I was home. (In case I got sick of eating crab rangoon, Waldo pizza and steak)

In the middle of the cooking lesson, he left for an overnight trip to a neighboring city. Suddenly, the girls were home alone.

It may be just me, but when I’m somewhere in my village and the men leave a room, they seem to take the tension with them. I no longer have to worry about offending (or being hit on by) anyone. The other women no longer have to worry about one more person’s demands. 

When I lived at home, when my dad would be away on business trips, my mom and I always ate KFC for dinner one night. It was our guilty pleasure. We knew my dad would never accept fast food as a suitable dinner option. (He was always a plate of home-cooked meat, starch, vegetable man) It was as crazy as my mom and I got, but it was our secret.

That night, I ended up staying at my director’s house for dinner. Usually, when I eat at someone else’s house, I eat with the men of the family (ie before everyone else in the house). That night, myself, his wife and another female student ate together. That night, sitting on a straw mat, all eating from the same bowl and at the same time, we could have been eating KFC.

38 days without electricity

2: Phone calls to my director to try to sort out the problem

3: Trips to my host father’s house to use his electricity

9: Walls painted

5: Days spent living at a fellow volunteer’s house in Savalou

2: Days he lost electricity, leading me to believe I was cursed

6: Radio Lab episodes completed

11: Books read

120: Hours spent charging solar lamp

1: Blog posts spent thinking about in retrospect, that for the fuss that I made, how little of a problem it was

Tell the world that...

I had a blog topic ready to go; I really did. I’ve been back in village for a day; I mean really back in village. None of this spending a day readjusting by watching episodes of The Wire. 

But then my plans changed and suddenly, I’m leaving my village in less than 24 hours to start my 3-day journey back to the US for a two-week vacation.  And the only words that were left make me think of a Diddy chorus:

…I’m coming home.

Thoughts from places: living in the second unhappiest place in the world

At the beginning of September, Benin was named the number two most unhappy country in the world, according to the UN-sponsored World Happiness Report. 

So, while I’ve been here in a removed environment where I am continuously forgetting that I live in Benin (the Peace Corps office in Cotonou), I tried to think about whether the people that I’ve surrounded myself with for the past year seem particularly more unhappy than the society that I left behind.  

My neighbor doesn’t seem so unhappy when he’s riding my bike around our compound. My host father doesn’t seem so unhappy when we’re eating pounded yams together. My students don’t seem so unhappy when we’re singing and dancing through the village.

More than being unhappy, the Beninese people want more. They want more than they have now, but don’t know what to do to have more. They perceive that other countries have found the answer to how a person can have more than he or she does now, while their own country has been left in a state where the best solution is to leave. They see others advancing (Nigeria, Ghana, the US) while the rest of the world continues to label their country as “developing” and “third world.”

Because they come from a society based on strong patriarchal ideals, the Beninese take statements from people of power (the western media, the UN) to heart. More than just reading this report with interest, the people that I know will believe this to be true. They will continue to believe that their country is failing in comparison to the rest of the world. And they will continue to believe that the answers to the problems in their life lie outside their own country. 

You can talk about what was the real purpose of this report was. You can talk about our western indicators designed to quantify an unquantifiable idea. You can talk about internalized oppression. 

Just don’t forget that you’re talking about real people who have real issues who are really trying to make the lives of their children better than their own.

I am no longer a Peace Corps volunteer.

Due to a non-serious issue (stitches) I have become a permanent fixture of the medical unit here at our office in Cotonou for the past eight days and will be for the next five. 

I have been living in air conditioning. I have had access to high-speed internet. I have eaten Honey Nut Cheerios with cold milk for breakfast everyday. I have passed the afternoons watching The Hills on DVD. I have spent my evenings speaking English with people who work at the embassy. Today, I reclaimed the ability to sleep past noon.

We say that coming to Cotonou is almost like being back in America. As the largest city in the country, it is also the wealthiest and cleanest and the place where you are most likely to find Ben & Jerry’s. There are people who live in Cotonou and have never left. Never taken that trek up the highway where the country becomes poorer and poorer in front of your eyes. 

I’m not going to say that I’m not enjoying this mini-vacation. But this, along with my two weeks of vacation in the United States in one week, makes me afraid that I’ll forget how to do things like sleep in 90 degree heat, pull water from a well and feel bad about not leaving my house until 5 p.m. And that I will have forgotten the real reasons why I’m here.

I'm waiting to be surprised how easy it is to forget.

The film was Hotel Rwanda. My friends and I went to a screening of it tonight at the American Cultural Center in Cotonou. Not particularly because we wanted to see the movie again, but because it was something to do at an unfamiliar place in a city with which we were trying to become more familiar.

My first interaction with Hotel Rwanda was, like most people who lived in the western world in 1994, one of guilt. And this was in my living room in the United States. In a room full of Beninese, it was more familiar. 

There is a scene when all of the western citizens are being evacuated from the hotel, and the staff has just realized that no one is coming to help them and the thousand refugees staying at the hotel. A British cameraman is ashamed at his ability to leave and the Rwandans’ inability to do so. It is raining, and as he turns to walk out on the people he has just lived with for the last week with the knowledge that they may not survive after he goes, a hotel porter opens an umbrella and walks him to the bus.  The cameraman scoffs at the porter and sends him back under the awning, out of the rain.

It is with this feeling that I’ve become more familiar in the past year.

The respect with which I am treated in this country I have done little to earn. And is so much more than the respect given to a woman who was born into this society. I can work as hard as I can to empower those women for the next 12 months and teach those women about how they deserve what they want and how these unspoken rules about what they accept as an acceptable form of treatment are false. But one day (and it’s a day that is approaching faster and faster) I am going to disappear into the rain and back to a country that recognizes equality between the sexes and has seen waves of feminism and the unspoken rules that run the society allow for women to be unsatisfied with what they have been given. Where I can go back to pretending that the rest of the world must also be like this.

On the occasion of Stage 26 swearing in as Peace Corps volunteers

It was this time last year that I first went to the ambassador’s house. It was this time last year that I was with the 56 other trainees in my group anxiously waiting to swear-in as volunteers. It was this time last year that I didn’t yet understand what my life would be here.

This year was about the same thing. The ambassador gave pretty much the same speech. The embassy served pretty much the same mini cheese pizzas. The group of new volunteers seemed pretty much as excited and naive as I was last year.

I could write another post about time passing. Another post about the cyclical nature of the Peace Corps and how, when there have been volunteers in the country in which you are currently serving for the past 55 years, it doesn’t always seem that you’ll be able to make much of a difference. 

Because time does, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Because it won’t slow down it I acknowledge how fast the past 15 months have passed. Because no matter what I write, I have less than 12 months left.

Around this time next year, I will no longer be here.

On the road again

I have always had a special place in my heart for highways.

I was raised off exit 18 of I-70 in western Missouri. The commute to my high school was formed by I-70 and I-435. I always looked for the skyline of Kansas City formed by the two highways right before merging southbound. Where I first defined my life happened off exit 121, where the exit ramp is lined with tiger paws, a cheesy reference to my university’s mascot.

I wouldn’t say that my life has been sheltered. I listened to NPR. I protested child soldiers. But for all intents and purposes, my life has always existed along I-70. I can tell you the Gap outlet store used to be at exit 20. I can tell you Concordia is the best place to get gas. I can tell you the Missouri River intersects the highway at about mile marker 100 and that during the winter,  you can see the Katy Trail running parallel to its banks and that during the spring, the bank will reach well into the flood plain on either side of the bridge. 

But more than that, by the time I graduated college, I felt I could recognize every individual tree and bush along that stretch of highway. 

I now live on a stretch of 23 km of highway between Savalou and my village. I have ridden on those 23 km in cars, both air conditioned and not, on motorcycles  where you can reenact Rose at the front of the Titanic if your driver doesn’t mind, but mostly on a bike.

I know now the children in Kpataba are the most aggressive when shouting “foreigner." 

And that there are only two major hills left to climb once you hit Mamatchoke.

And that tree. That tree right there, is the first shady spot outside of Savalou, a good place to retie the backpack that’s falling off your back wheel mount and that place where you ate ice cream with your friend Lynsey one time.

Local Library Project | Donate to Volunteer Projects | Peace Corps →

aloveaffairwiththeworld:

I’m building a library and I need your help. Make a difference. $5 equates to 2,500CFA in Benin. That’s enough to feed a person for a week. That’s also a massive contribution to a project that bridges the gap between a future confined to the harsh terms of village life, and an opportunity to gain skills and knowledge that’ll help young people succeed in an otherwise bleak future. We need your help. Donate. 

Backstage

My postmate, Dave, and I walked up to the man guarding the curtain. We had heard a voodoo spirit would be coming out tonight in his village, so we had followed the drums and dancing to where the village was awaiting his appearance.

Currently, the voodoo spirit (fetish) was in preparation behind this curtain. And Dave, who is much less concerned about following traditional rules, talked his way back behind it.  A group of village elders were sitting in a group doing what village elders spend a lot of time doing: talking and drinking liquor. After a series of rapid conversations in Ife about whether or not we were allowed to be there, we were given spots on the blanket and shots of sodabi.

Next to us was the fetish. He looked like a regular villager; in fact, we had run into him earlier that day at the market. He was eating pate while someone tied a rope of palm fronds and seeds onto his calves so it sounded like a maraca when he walked.

This was the first time I was seeing a voodoo spirit before he became a voodoo spirit. (Although, I always had a suspicion that there was a person underneath that paint, beads and hay.) This is their Santa Claus, Easter bunny and Tooth Fairy; except that we got to see it was actually the parents slipping 50 cents under their child’s pillow this whole time.

Was something going to happen that would suddenly make this man who works in the fields with Dave an ambassador from the world of voodoo? Was this just an elaborate game of dress up? An excuse to drink and dance until 4 in the morning? Do the people generally believe that this person is a voodoo spirit?

That’s the question, belief. But does knowing the truth mean that you can no longer believe? Do we still believe in the kindness of others during the holiday season just because we know that a fat man in a red suit does not come down our chimneys? Do we still believe in a day to celebrate with our families just because we know that a giant rabbit did not bring those chocolate eggs that appeared in our basket this morning? Do we still believe in the innocence of childhood when we know that a fairy did not sneak into the house last night and put two quarters under a child’s pillow?

I want to tell you the truths of my life. Not because I want sympathy. Not because I want to complain. But because I’m still trying to figure out if all of the truths are real.

I live in a country that until the fall semester of my senior year of college, I didn’t know existed. It is a place where the answer to the question of whether I want to be there is answered daily, based on what happened on that individual day. It is a place where if I stop taking my doxycycline, I will get malaria. Here, I have met people who offer me part of their dinner every night and people who ask me for a present every time I see them. I have wanted to punch a wall more times in this place than I remember every having wanted to do anywhere else. I have at least 345 more days in this place. What I’ll be doing in 345 days, I couldn’t tell you.

I am a Peace Corps volunteer, which I guess makes me technically an employee of the US government. If I lived in America, I would live below the poverty line, but in my host country, I have never managed to not live within my means. These facts do not make me look forward to being back in the United States.

I teach English at a middle school. It is a job that I never would have listed on my top 20 desired jobs, but it gives structure to my life in this generally unstructured place. My students are stronger than I was at their age, and there are more times than I would want to admit that I am not the teacher I wanted to be. I never thought I’d be living The Dead Poet’s Society everyday, but this is a job that is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

The first three months of Peace Corps training was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done, but now, I sometimes miss it. Everything was new, everything was different and really, the biggest issue dealt with on a daily basis was what my host family was going to feed me that night.

I have two parents and two siblings. And I have missed them more in the past 430 days than I ever thought I would. I have always imagined myself as a person who would travel the world and try out every country before choosing one, but I’ve started thinking more and more about home.

My closest family here is the 23 other volunteers who live within biking distance of my house. It is not hyperbole when I say I wouldn’t have made it this far without them.

I like silence. I like being along with my thoughts. This desire is hard for people here to understand. I think my best thoughts when I’m running, bicycling or driving I-70 between Kansas City and Columbia, Missouri. I have not driven a car in over a year. I ride my bicycle everyday.

I have a cat. He kills mice for me. I give him fish. He sometimes sleeps in the valley formed by the sheet between my feet. He meows whenever he walks into a room. He is the first four-legged pet that I have ever had.

I live a media-saturated life. I have seven registered Tumblrs and two registered sites on Wordpress. One of the most disappointing things that happened to me when I first got here was the realization that Twitter mobile is not available on Beninese cellphones. I read every issue of Esquire from cover to cover. I watch Good Will Hunting once a month because for some reason, this movie helps me make sense of what I’m doing.

I will be home in 26 days. This keeps me up at nights. But this vacation will be a lot less prodigal-son-esque than how it plays out in my head.

When I come back here it will feel like too soon. I will try to build some latrines. I will finish the school year. I will say goodbye to people I have come to love. And then all the truths will change again.