Rollercoasters

One thing about Peace Corps you know going in is that it is going to a rollercoaster ride of emotions.  Being here is amazing, and most days I can log at least one Holy-Shit-I’m-in-Africa moment, but some days are just the pits.  How do I describe the bad days?  Well, it usually consists of me not having anything constructive to do, which leads me to hanging out in the house and thinking too much.  It’s left over from graduate school where time is of the essence, and so, if I had nothing to do there must be something wrong with my time management or I was forgetting something, or whatever.  Just this basic feeling that if I had done everything right, I wouldn’t have time to waste.  So some days, I am in the house with nothing to do.  Okay, I was prepared for this.  Life in a developing country—or any country not America for that matter—means lots of waiting time, down time, things not happening fast-fast, as my counterpart likes to say.  But still, down time = thinking time and sometimes that’s not always good.  I start to question my situation.  Am I integrating well enough?  Shouldn’t I be using this time to study language?  Why don’t I have any one to hang out with?  There must some cultural thing I should be observing.  And speaking of which, how am I meeting my anthropologist goals?  Why am I not out there perfecting my methods skills?  Shouldn’t I have more notes about observations?  Shouldn’t I be doing more needs assessments?  Aren’t there more people to meet?  Why am I not better at this?  Shouldn’t anthropology and graduate work have made me more able and adept at this?  Why am I not on the fast track?  Why am I not fulfilling the vision I had for myself and my experience in this space?  Ugh!  It’s so frustrating to have these thoughts cycle through my head over and over like a broken record.  I’ve always been one to be moderately patient and wait for the right opportunity to present itself in its own good time, and making sure I was available to pluck it.  Forcing things to work has never worked for me.  That’s being tested here.  Then there’s the whole comparison game:  this volunteer’s doing this, and this volunteer’s doing that, and I’m not doing either.  Should I be?  Am I behind?  Such thoughts are ludicrous, because everyone’s sites, environment, abilities, situations, colleagues are all drastically different.  But still, what have I done that’s equal to it--different but equal?  It’s aggravating.  The funny thing is that such moods are easily evaporated by simple things: a conversation with a needed person, a chance to get out of town, one child calling me Madam Kristi instead of “fada,” a visit to the guys at the police station, or even just a walk to the river.

Anyway, I was in this funk a few days ago, and then I got an interesting, out-of-the-blue call.  This guy introduced himself as Kyle, said he was a friend of one of my PC buddies, and working in Accra in a company working in sanitation, and he wanted a rural perspective, so could he come visit me?  Uh, sure, why not?  So after a quick phone call to said buddy, Kyle arrived a couple days later on an early bus to spend the day seeing a different part of Ghana.  This is important because the South (especially Accra) and the North are very different in terms of development.  Not to mention traveling this road is a travel adventure in itself.  So a couple hours of visiting and a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, we started out to see the sights.  Kyle was lucky because that day happened to be Market Day so there was LOTS of activity.  We headed to the river first so we could discuss the water situation in Damanko and watch the fishing boats for a while.  Then we got one of the fishermen to paddle us out into the river a ways, much to the amusement of the spectators on shore.  Kwesi (this is my counterpart, who, up until now I’ve been calling Kofi in this blog, but have gotten tired of the pseudonyms) and my other buddy, Addai, were at the bridge in uniform pulling over unregistered motorcycles, so we greeted them and went on our way.  We walked back down to the other side of town to the clinic then back to the house.  Kwesi was off his shift by then, so he came back to the house with a watermelon (reason #87 he’s the best counterpart EVER!) then I made him play tour guide and we went “roaming” around town.  Kyle wanted to know about the sanitation situation in Damanko so we told him about the things we were planning to do and so on.  We walked to a couple of the smaller villages just outside of Damanko whose situations can be quite different.  We sat with a group in Baduli for a while talking about our upcoming latrine project.  We walked past the other side of Baduli and stopped to sample some pito, the local brew, and then had some fun with a group of girls carrying things back from market by trying to balance things on our heads.  After our afternoon walk, we headed back to the house.  I made some market soup while Kwesi and Kyle chatted and were eventually joined by Joseph, my inherited “small boy”.  Joseph, being my cultural events alarm bell, told us there was a funeral service that night, and would we like to go?  Duh.  So later that night we went to the first of many funeral events.  Ghanaian funerals are very long, elaborate, celebratory affairs which I will write about at a different time.  This was the religious service, so there was a hefty mixture of African gospel evangelism with traditional beats and dancing.  It was amazing to watch (though not as amazing as the Kinachung event I witnessed a week later).  Kyle left the next morning.

His visit actually did a lot for my morale.  He’s the first visitor I’ve had to host since I’ve been here, and it was very helpful to have him.  Having somebody to show things to helped me to take ownership of this space and my experience.  This is MY site, MY house, MY counterpart, MY work, MY experience, MY village.  It’s always nice to pass that imaginary border where, at least for a time, one stops being the perpetual newcomer and begins to be the local.  And we just did a lot that day.  It was nice to have plenty of things going on, to see a bunch of things, even if I’d seen some of them before.  And it’s nice just to have another white person around just to diffuse some of the looks, to encourage me to react to things differently.  I was reminded, watching this new person jump right in to everything, how scared I am to just jump into things with both feet.  I feel at the center of attention all the time, so I try to hide as much as I can.  I hate taking attention away from whatever they’re doing at the time, being the perpetual distraction.  I feel like an intruder always.  So I refrain from just jumping into things, going up to people uninvited, etc unless I have another person, a doorway, something.  Kyle needed no such things, and I wish I were more like that.  I remember my Uncle Mark, ruminating on the old "sink or swim" metaphor a long time ago: “Your aunt can’t just dive into anything.  She has to check the water, find a life jacket, take swimming lessons to make sure she can swim first.  Me, I jump in, find out I can’t swim, then ask for the life jacket and swimming lessons.”  Guess I’m just like my Aunt Lori (insert snide comment from my mother HERE).  I’ve gotta have all my ducks in a row first; or at least grouped together in a queue-like fashion.

So, here I am now, taking it day by day, knowing that this experience would be a hundred times harder if it weren’t for some key people, but they can’t make all the bad days go away.  Some days I want to hug and play with all the children, and some days I want to punt all the ones that shout “Fada!”  Some days I look at goats and think “Cute!”  Other days I look at them and think “at least those annoying pests taste good.”  Some days people smile and greet me and are genuinely happy to see me; other days all I get is harassment from the men.  Some days I feel happy to see the same people all the time; other days I feel like I’m not doing my job right because I don't know enough people.  Some days it’s just too hot to do anything; other days walking to the river at sunset is an amazing spiritual uplift.  Being here is wonderful, but I guess my fundamental fear is I won’t actually be able to do the work I need to do with the skill I envisioned myself doing it with.  There are so many people who are happy to have me here and so many people that don’t deserve to be let down.