One Year Ago Today

It was one year ago today that I boarded a plane to Philadelphia to begin my Peace Corps service. In honor of this momentous occasion, I will dedicate this post to discussing the Americanness I have left behind (and also took with me).

I remember the night before my departure from San Diego being sleepless and emotional. The tears started at Katie Rider’s house, where it finally hit me (hours before my flight), that I was leaving for two years and I had no idea what waited for me in Africa. She started crying and I started crying and then I kept crying. So, thanks for that Katie. The crying finally stopped when I ended my twenty-year streak alone in my Big Girl Bed. I woke my mom up in the middle of the night to sleep with me, works every time. But I was a wreck.

A year ago today and so much and so little has happened. Turns out my little break down wasn’t warranted, they never are. Actually, as it turns out, Malawi is quite underwhelming. Once I got past the culture shock, the nsima, and the chimbuzi, and the Africa, and the lake, and being the only white person in a 15+ km radius, life has settled into something much more boring than it is in America. Consider your typical day in America. You wake up, shower, eat, work, eat again, go do stuff, eat again, watch tv and sleep. But here, there’s no tv, no showers (they’re called buckets here), and no work. That leaves eating, sleeping, and doing stuff. You’d think that’d be “the good life,” and it is to an extent, but really, what it is is underwhelming. I’m not bored, oh no, the “doing stuff” part of my day certainly keeps me busy (ya know, gardening, sweeping my dirt yard, cooking over fires, reading, pretending I know what people are saying to me in Chitonga, seeing if Doug will eat anything I put in his mouth, including the neighbor’s baby), but one day melts seamlessly into the next. Before you know it, its dark outside again and Malawi is closed for business.

Here’s what this underwhelming yet culture-shocking year has taught me: I am undeniably, incontrovertibly, unquestionably American. I was definitely born in the right culture. Some people, you’ve met them, just don’t fit in America and would be much better matched to somewhere like England, or France, or Iceland. I, however, fit in America. I’m sarcastic and friendly-when-I-wanna-be. I’m Jewish but also a little Buddhist. I like my space. My friends are my friends and strangers are weird if they talk to me on public transport. I always have a water bottle handy. I have an inflated feeling of self-importance. I think it’s rude to walk into an acquaintance’s house unexpectedly. I’m a woman with a college degree and no husband and carry every self-righteous prejudice that comes with those qualifiers. I delight in variety in my diet. Dogs are pets, not target practice. I’m restless and can’t stay in one place very long, always gotta hit the road. Please. And thank you. Asking someone to borrow money is uncomfortable. I could go on…

These are all things that are common in America but exactly the opposite in Malawi. But here’s the hardest one, where my Americanness comes painfully into direct conflict with my Malawian Peace Corpsness: I love not doing anything of consequence, but I can’t enjoy it unless I feel like I’ve done something worthwhile recently. I feel useless, fat and restless when I have completed nothing in a 24 hour period. I’ve taken to make lists of things just so I can cross them off so I can fool myself into feeling I’ve accomplished something (like, 1. Wake up, 2. Make food…). Malawians can and do sit all day doing nothing but chatting, taking breaks from sitting only to eat nsima (still not food). I don’t get it! If you moved these sitting Malawians to Anywhere, America, they’d be called bums. I find myself judging them, just as an American would judge a bum. I can’t enjoy this “good life” because I have this I’m-not-contributing-to-society guilt! There’s gotta be a break in it for me. Some spurt of creativity or high productivity. Unfortunately, those are surprisingly hard to come by. Motivation is sucked away in this environment, if it ever was here in the first place. Their lack of motivation and activity (gossiping and planting maize excluded) is contagious. I’m stuck in the Doldrums.

I guess I should have warned you at the beginning of this post about the One Year of Service Blues. It’s common in the life cycle of the Peace Corps Volunteer. Between months 11 and 15 of service a volunteer will likely experience symptoms of worthlessness, apathy, moodiness, and my favorite, impatience/intolerance of host country nationals (I’m quoting here). I won’t go into detail, but if you’re curious, just ask my parents about the recent break downs and harsh words I’ve been spewing about my lovely host country nationals. Apparently it goes away… I’ll believe it when I see it. My attitude certainly has improved since I got off mefloquin, my profilaxis. Forcing myself to be busy at site also helps a lot. I recently replanted my depressingly overgrown garden. We’re going simple this time, one row of chickpeas next to one row of eggplant, and one row of green peppers. That way I’ll be able to tell the food from the flowers. (But my cucumbers are coming in nicely!)

So, as I was saying, one year ago today I was boarding a plane which would propel me into my Peace Corps service where my Americanness would come into sharp focus. It’s true, you don’t realize the extent of your culture until you’re in a different one for a long period of time. I can eat with my right hand like a pro, squat over a hole in the ground with precise aim, carry a bucket of water on my head, build a cooking fire in under a minute, and hold conversations in a dying language with village chiefs, but I don’t belong here. If I were meant to be comfortable and live normally in a tiny obscure African village, I would have been born into a tiny obscure African village. That’s something they don’t tell you about Peace Corps before you join. No matter how well you speak the language, how many friends you make, how well you integrate, you don’t ever belong there. And you can feel it, every day. A year of living in a village with the same people and I’m still a novelty to them. I’m still Azungu, I’m still something to stare at and laugh at when I speak in Chitonga. I still can’t just walk into the market to buy tomatoes. So far I’ve had the up’s and down’s that I was expecting and I am now well aware of what was waiting for me in Africa. These aren’t bad things, not at all. I’m still having the Peace Corps experience. Apparently, it’s a necessary, unavoidable part. But I’m ready for the next stage already… I hear the next stage is acceptance, like I’m going through the five stages of grief or something.