zot in Niger bush camels

The Niger I envisioned before I came here has suddenly arrived. The heat only wanes, but never truly leaves. Mornings are slightly cooler, but by the afternoon everyone who is out is wandering somewhat haphazardly through a heat that seems to bake into you, while gusts of hot air blow against your skin, and the sand works its way slowly into your lips, your nose, and the cracks around your eyes. There is a rawness to the heat that brings with it a certain unrelenting peace.

But the heat also brings back old questions: Do I define the meaning in my life by my suffering? What is it about hard conditions, about the struggle to overcome, about merely enduring, that is so enticing to me? And does that bode well for my life if I am always seeking that struggle?

I am driven by a notion that we sleepwalk through much of life and so I grasp at the things that make me feel like I am living life as fully as possible. There is a desperation there that is probably not healthy, and a zest that almost assuredly is. Maybe surrounded by comfort and happiness it is harder to feel alive in that sort of raw sense, but does that mean that I want a live intentionally less comfortable but more raw? Is it simply the old interaction between comfort and boredom, rawness and feeling alive? That idea was with me as a child, and seems to be with me still.

And I am happy, walking through the heat on a sand-blown day, pondering unsolvable questions. I am happy in a way that I am not in an air-conditioned room eating delivered pizza and watching a movie (though my brain is screaming for exactly that now that I thought of it). I am at peace in those moments of rawness in a way that I am not otherwise. The trick is probably, as always, in the balance of the two.

Tomorrow I am away to site, so posts may not come for a while. Peace be with you.

I realized the other day that I don’t know what milk tastes like anymore. I mean, I have a general sense. I eat enough powdered milk deliciousness to know what that tastes like. But in fact that has become what milk tastes like, but probably good old 2% in the states doesn’t actually taste like that at all.

Other things have become normal also: crossing the street in crazy traffic, plastic bags littering everywhere, being enthusiastically greeted, and yogurt in a plastic bag (it may be normal, but its still heaven). But other things never do. The other day on my way to the infirmary kids were crossing the busy four-lane street, five and six year-old kids with no parents and no guidance. They cross somewhat like goats, unsure of when to go and then sprinting when they see an opening. The slightly older kids take the younger ones by the hands and they make their way together.

In general I appreciate that in Niger parents aren’t so overprotective of their kids. Children wander around, get dirty, fall down and hurt themselves, play with knives, and generally get into a mess of trouble that parents in the states would never allow unsupervised. There is something important in that, some recognition that life is dangerous, that things can hurt, and that one needs to experience that oneself without the overbearing guidance of a parent.

And yet there are times when the treatment of children seems lax even to me, such as when these young kids are crossing the streets. I find myself wondering if they are ever hit, as goats and chickens are, and whether parents ever consider teaming up to herd them across the road. Crossing the roads can be scary even for volunteers, let alone a child.

All of which points to the theme I have been writing about sometimes: the merging of cultural identities. At the beginning we start out very uncomfortable, unused to so many things, all of which seem at once very different and essentially the same. Over time that fades as we become used to life in a drastically different place. Now I find myself unable to remember the taste of milk. I get anxiety when I think about going to the mall, about trying to find a parking spot, about having a schedule so full I don’t have time to eat a meal, let alone sit and ponder life. So I am, as I wrote earlier, caught in a sort of crossroads, where the idea of going back stresses me out, but I’m not really wanting to stay here either. Where will I be in another year? Will I be excited to return to the fast-paced tech life, a place where everyone understands what I say, and the future of my life and I envision it? Will I be sad to leave behind a more relaxed and contemplative life, though still trying in so many difficult and exhausting ways? I am sure it will be somewhere in between, and the combined goodbye homecoming will be both bitter and sweet, as with so much of life.

In the time that remains though, I am increasingly excited about my service. Recent coup notwithstanding, it seems likely that all the transferring countries and instability of my sites is past, and I can expect to stay in my village for the rest of my service. I always do better under pressure, and now I am finding myself confronted with a rapidly shrinking timeline. I have two serious projects I want to finish by the end of the summer, a entreneurial club for girls (and boys?) and a series of one day conferences on gender roles and future planning. If I can make both of those things happen, then I will be set up in the fall to start in sync with the new school year working with a math group and any funded projects I want to do, and the gardening season will be coming up. Then it will be spring again and I will have time for another business club and some other smaller projects before I have to start wrapping things up. Time is really starting to fly here.

I remember pizza delivery, though I think I have built the fantastic cheezy goodness up to gigantic proportions. I hope I never forget the goodness of pizza. Did I mention there is a restaurant here that has amazing pizza? Its for patrons, but the pizza is so amazingly good I could just eat it for the rest of my service, except that after a few days I would be broke.

I remember when I first joined Peace Corps hoping that it would give me a respite from the feelings of uneasiness, that at the end of my service I would have faced some of the most uncomfortable and challenging situations of my life, and I would return somehow immune or hardened to feeling uneasy. But that seems silly now. The truth is that life’s pleasures, the tiny moments of beauty and laughter, reside precisely in those moments of uneasiness and insecurity. I go through my daily life so attuned to not experiencing the discomfort of the strange or the unexpected, the heartbeat of conflict, that in fact not much is felt except a kind of enforced direction. It is in the moments of uncertainty that I can feel something new, that I can learn something new, that I can react in some unusual way. Compassion, real compassion for the human condition, resides more accutely in those moments more than anywhere else. And beauty, beauty lies in the moment of risk in which we make ourselves vulnerable. The rest is all swords and complacency, gluttony and combat.

Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy dancing, conversation, moments of quiet reflection, and even the occassional battle. One cannot only have uncomfortable moments. But I know for certain only that I have this one life, that it could end rather suddenly, and I plan on wringing every drop from it that I possibly can. But I mean this in a somewhat unusual sense, in the sense of trying to stay close to the heart of tenderness, of holding fear with softness.

I think I have been working toward this much of my life, struggling to come to grips with fear, seeking to ensure some kind of control over the chaos of life. But all of that work wasn’t designed, as I thought, to make me hard enough to face the world, but to make me strong enough to face myself and accept my own vulnerability. And in fact, the strength to face the world stems from having accepted my own existence. That is sort of campy and overly simple, and the truth is more like an oscillation of probabilities than a binary switch, but it fits roughly.

And so my service has in some sense accomplished one of the things I started out to accomplish, not that I am dulled to feeling uneasy or uncomfortable, but that I have come into my own in a way that lessens my tendency to feel that way. The past several months, with some false starts and certainly complicated by the evacuation from Guinea and the subsequent problems with security in Niger, can be characterized with a sense of coming into my own, and I am now waiting out the last few days of my medical hold (insha Allah!) to get back to site and make things happen (make might be a strong word, but I am excited anyway).