zot in Niger bush camels

I will probably cave soon and start taking my ipod to the charging guy. I know I was talking about trying to ration my various batteries, but I have started exercising a little every day, and I like to listen to music when I exercise, so that is adding to the drain. Plus I forgot that I can charge my ipod by plugging in directly to a socket because I have one of those adapters, so I don’t have to use my computer. And I am not really worried about anything being stolen, so it seems like a good idea. Then also I can conserve my computer battery for when I am ready to write a post, and I won’t be siphoning off energy to recharge peripherals at the same time, so I might get several posts written without losing all my charge. All that is likely to become moot in a couple of weeks when IST starts and I will have electricity more or less constantly.

Birthday plans include going to another volunteer’s site on the day of my birthday to see their market and make cake. Several other volunteers are coming also. Then the day after some of us will head to my site, where we will kill some chickens and eat food with some of my friends from the village. It should be lots of fun. The week after that I head to IST, so there isn’t much time left in my village before it will be IST and then my one year of service mark will be up, and that seems like a big milestone for me.

There are a lot of things bubbling under the surface, but nothing really new to report since my last writing. This morning I was listening to the BBC describe an art exhibit in which the artist has done a little pencil drawing of each service person who has died in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was very sad, there are over 5,000 now. I don’t think I used to be a very patriotic person, and I would still hesitate to say I am patriotic in the sense of believing that the U.S. has the right to be the biggest and baddest country, but I am increasingly feeling more invested in the United States as a community; My community and a community that I want to contribute to making better. It is interesting to me that it took me living in a foreign country to discover that. And it isn’t about missing things that we have in the states, its about being apart from family and friends and being aware of how important they are. Friends here are also important, and people are wonderfully open, but no matter how long I am here, I will always be an anasara (stranger and white person, which is what I get called walking down the street). Of course my reaction to the BBC piece could be part of the more intense emotions that have accompanied Peace Corps in general. It is funny how emotions can be affected so much by a geographical setting or a cultural position.

I wrote this bit originally in my notebook, and am tranferring it here. Often when writing blogs I am on battery and am trying to get as much out as quickly as I can, which leaves wanting for some of the deeper thoughts and feelings, hence this piece. But before that, we found a scorpion the other day. It was the first one I have seen in Niger. It was perhaps an inch and a half long not counting the tail, and seeing as how it was pitch black I don’t know how my friends saw it, but it was right next to the mat we were laying on. Yikes! Anyway, here is what I wrote:

Peace Corps was, in part, a reaction to the feeling that my thoughts and actions were stuck. I wasn’t learning and wasn’t challenged. I was becoming complacent. It was also an attack on the perhaps existential sense of loneliness which has always been with me and the seeming control that it has exerted on so much of my life, so many of my decisions. I wanted to destroy that ache, and thought that by subjecting myself to the full intensity of alientation and loneliness I might become dulled to their effects. I thought that by confronting loneliness at its strongest, I would be forced to make friends with it. But also, I hoped that the change would get me learning again.

But what I learned has been different than what I expected. I have found that those parts of myself that I like less than others have followed me here, as of course they must. I have found that loneliness can be much more powerful than I thought. It seems that existential hole cannot be conquered by casting oneself into it, though Thoreau seemed to argue so.

That I resisted so strenuously my new life in Guinea and in Niger (though perhaps by the time I had arrived in Niger I had stopped resisting), reflects poorly on my stories to myself about my flexibility and enjoyment of adventure. Indeed my whole concept of myself needs be changed. As I reflect, my actions seem more those of an uncomfortable putty, unable to handle changes in routine, annoyed by interruptions, and generally resentful of intrusion. How paradoxical that my response to isolation should be to resent visitors.

But I am being overly harsh. I enjoyed the time among friends, the weddings and dancing and the time spent working together. I made real friends and had good, interesting conversations, and these became the most important, most valuable, aspect of my service. I accomplished projects, though I remain unconvinced of their effectiveness. In some ways then I did exactly what I wanted, I just didn’t expect it to be so difficult. Perhaps, having generally found things easy, I was surprised when I encountered the difficulty of living in another culture as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Language was always the worst barrier to overcome isolation. Even being marginally sociable is difficult when your conversation is limited to where you are going, where you are coming from, and whether it is hot or cold. In Niger this was less of a problem because my French allowed communication with students and other educated people, but the majority of the population was still out of reach to me.

Agains these self-realisations that were so hard to admit and yet undeniable, I could take comfort only in the stubbornness of not giving in, in the choice of having come at all, and in the small moments of meaningful exchange with friends. I would like to add to that that I engaged with my experiences on a thoughtful and personal level, except that in some ways I think that engagement not only failed to produce anything of value, but actually prolonged the period of resistance that characterized my first six months as a volunteer.

Unfortunately, only a month or two after emerging from that long dark tea time of the soul, Peace Corps evacuated Guinea and I left the community that I had worked so hard to become a part of. That, after two months of bureaucracy, left me in a village in Niger. This new adaptation, and new service, proceeded much more smoothly. Everything really is easier the second time around. Of course language was again a huge problem, but nearly everything about my post in Niger was easier to adjust to.

Yet in a way ease was itself a problem. The struggle of my service in Guinea had in large part also ensured my refusal to quit. I would not be beaten. But a few months after arriving in Niger, and coinciding with my one-year slump, I was coasting through my service feeling like I was accomplishing little. I never believed strongly that Peace Corps service had valuable impacts on a social or economic level. There were personal changes of value, and there was cultural exchange of value, but in some sense I felt that I was on the other side of that hurdle, and the prospect of waiting out the remaining 16 months (my service had been extended by three months when I was transferred) seemed like a waste of my time and my life. I suppose it didn’t help that I was turning 30 in the midst of this internal debate.

My reasons for staying became small: not wanting to disappoint my village, my fellow volunteers, my staff. But reasons for going were also small: being bored, feeling like I was wasting my time. Part of me believed that if I felt like I was wasting time, I should just start doing things that made me feel like I wasn’t. But that is only possible to a certain extent, and rather limited when in a small village with little access to information and an ineffectual arsenol of potential work. And other reasons were growing that had me thinking returning was what I should be doing.

It is somehow already the sixth, which means I must have entered into that phase of my Peace Corps service where time seems to be flying by. The fourth was apparently the half-way point for my stage from Guinea, though my half-way point is not until February 21st on account of my service being extended a few months. They say that you hit a low after about a year, but that if you make it through that you are in good shape to finish your service. I figure I probably haven’t hit that point yet since I have been in a rather disrupted state for several months. Instead I feel like I have reached a point similar to where I was right before we evacuated Guinea, in which adjustments have been made and projects seem to be taking off. Of course, my projects aren’t quite at the taking off stage yet, since I have only been at site about six weeks, but they are numerous and looking to take off shortly after I return from IST. When I have electricity I may try to enumerate them.

I had an excellent meeting with my program director and my mayor yesterday, in which we discussed all the projects I was interested in doing as well as those that they would like to make happen. It left me feeling like I actually have a lot to do and I had better get in gear if I was going to make it happen. That of course is a much better feeling than sitting around doing nothing. So much of Peace Corps is about self starting, but you have to be careful because many people will do a project just because you want them to, but won’t actually be interested. You can spend a lot of energy on failed projects that way.

But I think I will have active, interested participants for everything that I want to do, and though I still have many reservations about the practical effects of projects I do (are there any?), it is good to be doing something even if the pool of impacted people is nearly zero.

I have also basically completed my house, having received my wooden bed frame yesterday, which can sit outside permanently and is much better than my woven cot. I have also gotten a kitten, whose name is not yet well determined. It is ranging in the solution space between funny Zarma names and jesting people names, chiefly either wiza (meaning something like ‘surprise!’) and Fa’iza (the Niger name of the volunteer at my village before me). She is very cute but also a little hellraiser, though her habit of sitting on my lap and purring herself to sleep redeems her against most ills.

I am looking into getting a bike, which they don’t issue automatically to volunteers here like they do in Guinea. Mainly I want one because each day I wade back and forth through a pool of water that has flooded the road to my village. Now I am not too squeamish, but you can imagine that I might want a bike so that I can bike the several miles around it instead, especially if you consider the floating cow and donkey waste and the relative stagnancy of the water (it just floods into place and then sits there). And then there is always schistomyasis, but if I am going to get that I already have it because I have been wading back and forth the entire time I have been at site. I am going to look into finding an ONG to do some road improvement so that my village doesn’t have to wade through the water to get to their gardens and fields and school and road (basically everything out of the village).

I read a great Isaac Asimov novel in which he discusses some ideas of parallel universes that are pretty interesting, and I am working my way through the the complete works of Arthur C. Doyle, so if my writing has the flavor of Sherlock Holmes to it, now you know why.

I dream a lot of video games, a motorcycle tour of the states, and interesting new tech gadgets, but I am I think finally happy again after the whole mess of being abruptly moved to a new country. There are some serious ups and downs, as always, but I think I have been through the harder part and am looking forward now to just having my life here. The hardest adjustment is getting to a point where it feels like it is your life, instead of just a temporary thing. The temporary feeling of life here, which for me stems from thinking of what I could be doing back in the states, leads to just wanting it to be over so that you can get on with your ‘real’ life, but this is also a real life, and once that is accepted it becomes much easier (I am for some reason writing this in the second person even though it is about me).

I do a funny battery dance here, trying to juggle my ipod and my laptop so that I can recharge my ipod often enough to listen when I want to (mostly at night in bed) but not so often that I use up precious battery life that could be spent writing posts. It seems to work out to writing a post about once a week, during which I charge my ipod, and then going without music for a couple of days if I have been overzealous in my listening. Since my listening to music is directly correlated with my happiness, I end up without music when I am feeling down about my service, but then I have only myself to blame and it isn’t actually that much of an issue to not have music after all.

My diet. Mornings I eat something called coco, which is basically powdered millet with a bunch of water. Its a little like oatmeal with no chunks of anything. I take this stuff called koolikooli, which is ground peanuts squeezed so that there is not much oil and it becomes solid, grind it up, and add a tablespoon or so of sugar. It isn’t bad and the peanut stuff adds a little protein. I have limited my tea with milk and honey intake to once a day in the afternoons, and for lunch I usually have popcorn with peanut butter or copto, which is just steamed leaves with peanut butter, salt, couscous, and seasame seads. Dinner is hawru and sauce, which is powdered rice or millet mixed with water and formed into a paste and covered with a sauce made from okra and other things (including a holy ton of MSG). You can see the heavy carb nature of my diet… Once a week I make dinner, which is almost always spaghetti with tomato sauce and is my good source of veggies. Occassionally I find guava and when I go to market I get limes, from which I make limeade. I was going through three or four tablespoons of sugar a day for a while drinking tea with milk and sugar, so I had to cut that out. In all it isn’t bad, though it leaves me sort of feeling always hungry.

Well, that is all from my exciting life. Things seemed to have calmed down here, at least for the moment, so some amount of normalcy is returning. I turn thirty in a bit more than a week. Wow. I read an interesting article about the mechanization of production and what is going to happen as fewer people are needed to produce things, and therefore fewer people work and less money is spent on consumption. Where is this funny world going? I spent yesterday afternoon thinking about how I wish computers were instead of how they are and wondering if I couldn’t whip something together to approximate it. And why don’t we have digital assistants, not PDAs, but actual software that does things like research and organize topics, indexing and adding references and links, so that you can come back and quickly review available resources on a topic? The same software could manage information about people and other things to make life rather easier.

Along those lines, are there bars yet where you can step inside, log into the bar group, and see profiles of people who are there? It would be a kind of weird interface between facebook and reality, and seems like it could be kind of fun. I bet it happens if it isn’t already. And in response, there will also be places where you can go and all signals are blocked, like a forced unplugging. I bet those either do exist or will soon (this is what comes of listening to the BBC’s predictions about the coming year).