Another bout of diarrhea kept me inside all day, this time accompanied by stomach cramps. I read Hemmingway’s The Garden of Eden, and remembered why I loved Hemmingway so much in high school. A book may move you to abandon your path or encourage you to stay on it, but the great thing about the gret ones is that they encourage you to think and feel a little differently about things. Hemmingway’s unique combination of machoism and sensitivity leaves me wondering about him as a person. His characters are the kind of characters I always want to be.

It is interesting how making such a drastic shift to a new place and culture can end up being more self-reflective than anything else. What parts of myself are carried from my old life, what new parts develop here, and what parts have always been there? I can only look at myself through the lens of a life for so long before I stop seeing things. The fresh perspective is both refreshing and disturbing. Its like rediscovering an old treasure and remembering there were some things in it you don’t really like.

Sometimes I think I can too easily see different sides of a thing. Introspection from another angle is narcissism, and it seems nearly all good actions can be interpreted as selfish. This sort of double view makes it rather hard to believe in my own character, and though I know that we are all some mixture of altruism and selfishness, I want to walk in this world unheeded by the worry that I am acting selfishly or that what I have done and my reasons for doing it is less than honorable. There is some great conundrum here that I have been stuck on for years, but I am tired of it and the limitations of second guessing myself, and I’d like to move beyond it, wherever that may be. It seems to me that it should not be impossible to rid oneself of hypersensitivity to what other people might be thinking of you, just to give an example.

When I moved to Albuquerque I think I channeled the loneliness I felt into running. It took a lot of conviction to make it up every morning to run, and I can feel that kind of conviction returning. But that itself raises questions as to how capable I am of doing things that are uncomfortable after I have a measure of comfort. It seems like my desire to be physically fit should be rather independent of whether I am happy.

But maybe when I come back I’ll be a baller, cause I’m going to get my rear handed to me in basketball tomorrow. Its embarassing, but they don’t really care that I suck, they just like schooling me.

Its Sunday night, and another week starts tomorrow. As of Tuesday night I will have been here for three weeks, which is kind of amazing. It brings my monthly trip to Kankan rather close, and I’m torn between waiting another two weeks for the mail run or going in some time next week or so. People from Haute are getting together for a St Patrick’s day party, but I’m not really that excited about it, except that its the first time everyone from my region will be back together since being to site. On the other hand, I could probably take the mail run into Kankan and avoid having to travel by taxi, which is a big plus.

Today I burned myself to a crisp at the Niger, forgetting until it was too late that my mefloquine induced translucency does not prevent sunburn. The Guineans were tripped out by the fact that my skin could turn red, and that when you press it it turned white for a moment. I had fun though, and spent a while trying to explain to some petites that in America is pretty looked down on to marry before both people were eighteen, and in fact in some states (or all?) it was illegal. This was prompted by a nine year old girl that asked me if I was married and then proceed to tell me she would find me a wife, who turned out to be her twelve year old friend sitting next to her. After I explained the age issue (its a rather convenient excuse that doesn’t involve rejection) she told me she was actually eighteen. But now she thinks I am looking for a wife who is eighteen, so I can tell that future conversations are going to be in order. People do not understand how I can be 29 and not married.

So much here is subject to misinterpretation. For example, I get pretty annoyed at the way that I don’t really get asked if I want to go somewhere. Instead I get told I am going. Or similarly, someone will just say “Come here!” to me, or “Sit down!”, all in an imperative tone. They don’t mean it rudely, but they are used to people not interpreting it as a command, or at least having no problem rejecting their command if they want or need to do something else. I’m struggling to explain it to myself, so its even harder to write it down, but in general there is lots of arguing and contesting of wills that, in the states, would be cause for hurt feelings, but here is considered normal and no one is really offended afterward.

On a different note, I made tortillas and beans the other night, and whipped up some salsa, and even tried to make some cheese from some fresh cows milk. It was delightful. I think the cheese is probably not worth the effort, but I may try and some mornings substitute fresh milk for the powdered milk I generally put in my tea. Its tasty, but it requires boiling to be sure its safe to drink. And its a little chunky. The beans though were amazing, and the tortillas, though a little bit of work, were also really good. Course now ants are maurading my dried beans, so I will have to create yet another way of subverting the ants. I really might break down and just poison the heck out of them.

I’m trying to work more consciously on my French. I’ve reached a point where I can generally get my meaning across, but if I want to be able to sound good when I talk I will have to consciously practice the more difficult tenses and work to expand my vocabulary. I’m trying to learn five new words a day, one new verb, and a new idiomatic phrase, and then I will spend Saturday reviewing and take a break Sunday. We’ll see how it works out.

Lets see…more generally. Things continue to improve each day, with only a few missteps. I am thinking I am going to have a housewarming party at some point, though I haven’t really worked out the details. I don’t know how I would provide food, and I feel like I would need to invite a whole bunch of people. Each day I feel more comfortable, and that is the important thing that was really contributing to my unhappiness. As the sense of uncomfortableness fades my feeling grows that I will not only be able to last two years, but that I will actually enjoy parts of it.

On the 16th or thereabouts I’ll get my mailrun, and I’m pretty excited about it. I know I have seveal things on the way, so I’m hoping its actually getting through. I’ll be pretty disappointed if it turns out I don’t have much because it all got boffed.

I need to sleep. Its late and I want to get up and go running in the morning.

With all these negative posts and my talk about how hard these first couple of weeks have been, its probably time for people to hear some good news. Today I had a pretty good day, though I thought it was going to be terrible for a while. I was finally rid of the rat, so I got a good nights sleep. There was also current last night for several hours, so I got to charge everything, get all my new music organized, and put a bunch of it on my ipod. As a result I stayed up rather late listening to music. Even so, I was up in the morning, drinking tea and trying to pass the time until I left with Cece to the Niger River, where we were going to wash our clothes. Unfortunately I hadn’t asked him what time we were doing that, and so I waited till 14:00 before we finally left, all the while feeling pretty useless and hanging out in my house. I didn’t want to leave because if he came to get me and I was gone we wouldn’t go.

But when we finally did leave, we also went to the carptenter to have a bookshelf and a table made, and then headed to the Niger, which is like a California beach on Sundays. It was pretty amazing. Tons of people were there, washing their clothes or just playing in the river. We stayed there for a couple of hours, washed our clothes, swam a bit (parasites be damned), and I generally had a really nice and relaxing time. I was of course the only tubabu present, so I got lots of stares.

On the way back we talked to another carpenter who gave us a lower price, so I cancelled the other order on the way home and we promised him we’d bring the dimensions by later today. Well the carptenter that we cancelled with came by my house later (anyone who wants to find me can) and tried to say that we had to have him do it because he had already started. This I didn’t believe, so after much argument I went with him, where he tried to show me several boards he had already cut, all of which were a standard size that he had done nothing with. At this point I lost it for the first time, and proceeded to yell at him in French that I knew what I was talking about and that he hadn’t started and that the boards were the same size as all the other boards and that I wasn’t stupid. Cece was cracking up because usually when I’m with him he does most of the talking. Anyway, the guy I was yelling at agreed to the other carpenters price, and I left it at that.

Not that its good to lose your temper, but there is only so much that being nice will get you, especially when the color of your skin dictates you as a wealthy person. As a volunteer I certainly get a lot more money than many people who live here, but its not like its a ton, and I can’t go around paying double what everyone else pays.

It was a sort of changing moment, where I no longer felt beholden to being nice, and had perhaps bien integre, since arguing is how prices are settled here. After that I got some rice and sauce (it is much better here in Faranah, I really like the soup sauce, which tastes like beef stew), and then we headed over to the cremerie, where we got soft serve ice cream. It tasted vaguely of orange or something, but it was freakin delicious anyway, because it was cold.

We finished the journee by wandering around and salueing my homologue’s fiance’s family, and so it turned out that I was very social and got quite a lot done. I suppose its the same in the states, but even though it seems very hard to get things done, I am much happier when I have spent the day doing that then if I’ve sat around and gotten nothing done. Its all about balance I suppose.

Anyway, I want to leave everyone with the sense that there are some days that I enjoy, and that this was one of them, and that the desperation and despair that you may have sensed in my previous posts or over the phone seems to be slowly subsiding for now.

I was just installed at site. Tomorrow at 7 I’ll be meeting the officials and other folks in my town, so I’ll be getting up rather early. I’ve already met most of them, but this is the official meeting with both my counterpart and a Peace Corps official. Today we installed three people, and I was the last. It was a long day of driving, and it was sad to drive away from the two people we installed before me. I didn’t get to my site till about 19:00, and it turns out my counterpart is gone for the week, so I met with my other counterpart briefly, and moved all my chose into my house. I was really uplifted by how cute the other two volunteers who were with me (and are getting installed tomorrow) thought my house was. It made me feel like it was a good place with charm that I could live, instead of a place that was sort of dumpy that I had to do my best to make homey.

Anyway, I only had a minor onset of panic as everyone left, and am feeling suprisingly okay right now. Maybe that’s because tomorrow I will be seeing them again when I meet the town officials, but I think actually I’m just experiencing what I’ve been hoping all along: that the fear of how life will be at site is a lot worse than how life will actually be. Still, they say the first month at site is the hardest month of service, so I don’t expect I will always be this chipper.

I definitely have some fear that I won’t be able to hack it and I’ll have to ET, but I’m trying to keep it in the back of my mind, because it doesn’t seem like it serves any useful purpose. My completing my service will depend in a large part on my refusal to give in to fears and the desire to isolate myself in my house. If I can get out and walk around and chat with people and feel like I have friends here, it will be a relative breeze.

Anyway, I just wanted to quickly note that the first night at sight is so far going well for me, despite how difficult I thought it would be.

Tomorrow I also have to buy tons of stuff. Right now I have burners and gas, and a trunk, but nothing else that I need. I need to buy buckets for bathing and a myriad of other stuff to outfit things And I also have to figure out how I want to set up my house, whether I want to go through the trouble and expense of replacing my huge bed with a smaller bed that takes up less space, and whether I can and want to get rid of some of the other furniture in here. There being only one room, I want to do my best to open up space. Right now I’m thinking I’ll get the small bed and then commission a countertop for my cooking space, and then I will have a table and a couple chairs, and the rest of my room will be open space. I also want to buy some rugs, some decorations, and other cool stuff, but that will come later. Petite a petite.

I have to remember not to try to get everything done at once. I have three months to go about setting up and learning about my community before I start working, and the better job I do of that, the better I’ll know people and the better my work will be when it starts.