I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Maybe it’s the I’ve-been-here-a-year-already blues, but this “funk” has been pretty hard to shake. I’ve been A LOT more easily irritated. Things that I used to be able to roll off my shoulder, now, after a year of build up, make me have a minor stroke. Things that were soothing balms before are now losing their effectiveness. I’ve been keeping to the house a lot more lately. It’s just a lot easier on my nerves. Just aimlessly walking the paths of the village doesn’t hold the same appeal it once did. Walking to the river isn’t as interesting. I’m just tired of people yelling at me every time I go out. I don’t understand how people can’t see that after a year of being hollered at, and by the same (in my opinion) disrespectful word, it really gets old. People speaking in a language they know I don’t understand, just so they can laugh at my incomprehension gets old too. The sense of newness and adventure that just being in and wandering around the village just doesn’t outweigh the irritations anymore. I really only want to go out if I have some work to do, and even that feels like it occurs less than it should. These irritations are only the symptoms of a greater disease—the one of self-frustration. It’s been a year now, and when I think about where I thought I was going to be at this point in my service, and where I actually am, the funk follows. Graduate school really honed my brain muscle and it was at the peak of its best intellectual shape when I stepped off the plane in Accra. I could see a clear path of goals, because the path I was embarking on followed quite closely to the intense previous two years. I had dreams about accomplishing certain things that I knew were a bit of a pipe dream, but there were also things that I didn’t think, given the previous two years, I would fail at. Language for instance. I joined Peace Corps to learn another language. Even at the beginning of training I was determined not be one of those volunteers that didn’t learn the local language. But, a year in, I’ve given up any hope of even moderate fluency. As much as I want I just can’t seem to learn it beyond the simplest conversations. A year in, much of it still sounds like gibberish, I can’t even get the gist of a conversation by two competent speakers. People can totally talk about me without me knowing it. I even got a language tutor, and Gideon is great, but it doesn’t seem to be helping beyond the most miniscule of improvements.
I felt at the beginning of this, I had an advantage being shoved into a great practical professional opportunity in prime intellectually academic shape. This was my chance to avoid the career crisis trap that most anthropologists and academics face when they decide their degrees were useless. I was determined not to get to that place, and what better way to do that than to do exactly what anthropologists have always done? It was my chance to do what my professional forefathers had done, what my own “colleagues” were currently doing. I was going to develop professionally, do cultural research, find a subject, do all the methods, find something publishable, get some qualitative experience under my belt, so I could walk into a future interview and say, “Yeah, I’ve done that, and this is how it worked.” I don’t even have a reason why this hasn’t happened. No reason at all.
Some frustrations are more immediate. I’ve had a dozen ideas in the last year, that for one reason or another, just haven’t gotten to the Execute stage. Many of these are probably due to my lack of problem solving abilities. Motivation has been an issue as well—for me and for others.
I’ve been here a year and what do I have to show for it really? A few projects have been successful, but I can only ride those so long. I have a few good acquaintances, but not enough. I can’t speak the language, no great epiphanies, and haven’t contributed to Peace Corps in any great valuable way. I have half a dozen things I’ve wanted to start, but can’t seem to start them, and just seem to be doing too much “hanging out” and wasting time, a fat lot of waiting really.
There are some good things on the horizon, but I feel a bit lost. I guess, even after a year, I haven’t found my niche in this job. I was certain graduate school was going my allow me to hit the ground running, but it hasn’t turned out that way. I am supposed to be doing health work in Damanko, but I’ve always thought that job description in Peace Corps was a bunch of rot. I’m a community development worker—if the community needs health work, then I’ll do that, but they need other things. In fact, I’ve found that Damanko doesn’t really need my “health work.” All the technical training I had, the knowledge Peace Corps gave to me based on Ghana’s health goals and national projects, I’ve found is really not needed. All that knowledge is here. The people know it, the proper social workers know it, the apparatus is in place for appropriate interventions if only they’d follow through. None of my ideas are new, they know it all. Motivating them to do it is the key, and that’s honestly something I can’t do. They know malaria comes from mosquitoes, HIV from unprotected sex, shitting in the bush spreads disease, etc. It’s the behavior change that needs to happen. They know they need to sleep under nets, wear condoms, and build a latrine to shit in, but they don’t for various reasons, but one of those reasons is not ignorance. Peace Corps is all about creating behavior change, but through education. How are you supposed to create behavior change using education when they know these things already?
So I’ve decided to change tracks—focus on gender and environment issues (though not necessarily together but not opposed to it either). The conversations that aren’t being had here are about the environment—depletion of forests for firewood, over hunting and over fishing, degradation of farm land, etc. Problem is, since Peace Corps’ cross-sector training is scarce, I don’t have the training to handle these problems, but maybe I can at least get them started.
