We’re doing a mustache contest for the end of stage. I’ll do my best to put up some awesome photos. It seems to be a tradition for Peace Corps Guinea. Mine is still a beard right now, but at some point in the next week I’ll be driven to shave by the combination of heat and itching, and will be left with a nice mustache befitting the modern American male of the 1920’s.

The constant wail of babies threatens to drive me mad. Two one year olds live in the same house I do, and their cries are unending. It seems that people here do not care much for trying to stop them from crying, and often they are left to cry for long periods of time before someone can be troubled to pick them up. In general I find my shell for these kinds of distractions comparably weak. Perhaps growing up with the racket of humanity surrounding you gives you a certain armor, but my own armor is much too thin.

If I have been in higher spirits in the past week, the boredom of today has left me again filled with a restlessness. Five more weeks of training before we are released into the greater world of Guinea. My anticipation grows with each passing hour, though I fully expect a raft of issues to crop up once I am there. My primary frustration with stage is never having time to myself, and I suspect the irony of site is that my frustration will be finding something to do with all the time I am given.

There was a rash of letter writing last night and this morning as I found out that the country director’s daughter would be headed back to the states on December 31st. But when I arrived at the Peace Corps compound this morning the car had already left. Hopefully I can send them with a car tomorrow. In the future I will have to stagger the letters so that I am not writing so many at once. But I keep thinking this will be the last opportunity to get a letter out for a while and want to get them out to both family and friends.

But in the midst of writing letters I managed to distill some of the thoughts that have been floating around in my head. I never wrote a piece on why I was doing the Peace Corps. I wanted to, but it seemed too complicated and, in truth, I don’t think I knew myself sometimes. But one thing I was seeking by joining was a space to consider my adulthood and its ramifications. I am swiftly approaching 29 years old, and it seems to me high time that I stopped thinking of myself as a young person recently out in the world and started to see myself as the grown man that I am.

I don’t mean that in the sense of acting more maturely, and in fact I have not really been able to define what I mean when I say that I need to start seeing myself as the grown man that I am. I think it has at least two major components. The first is the giving up of depending so heavily on what people think of me. In some way I think that my overawareness of other’s thoughts of me reflect a deep-seated self doubt. This self-doubt is something that I associate with being a teenager and it seems distinctly out of place as I approach 30. To some extent I am making strides in that line, becoming more comfortable with my own self assessment, and more confident that when I look back at my life, my actions can generally stand up to the light of judgement. With that recognition, problems that other people might have with me shift from being a personal failure to a truth of human interaction, in which there is no real need for blame. This is something that I have struggled with for the past several years, but I’m beginning to be able to put it into words, and that feels good.

The second component is being less afraid of confrontation and conflict. I tend to shy away from conflict, and so conversations that should happen don’t, or they happen too late. This always leaves me a little ashamed, again a feeling I associate with being a kid. But the funny thing about confrontation is that if you approach it in a direct way, it often turns into something that isn’t confrontation, but instead is a mutual learning and building, or at least a direct resolution or understanding.

Some of this is arising from having thirty people together every day as training progresses, and some from having to live with a family that would, if I let them, quickly step over any personal boundaries without even realizing it. With my fellow volunteers I have reached a point where it doesn’t matter whether some of them like me or not, but that we can still work together and be cordial. And in fact no one really dislikes anyone else, its just a question of how we handle the tiny conflicts of personality that, if blown out of proportion or swept under the rug, erupt into full fledged dislikes. But the group is too good and the size is too small to spend two years seriously disliking anyone. All of which is to say that I am content with being friends with some, and being only acquaintances with others. And this does not mean anything about them or me. I think a few years ago I would have been personally afronted if I wasn’t getting along with someone and it would have to have been someone’s fault, but that idea seems silly to me now.