I got some questions about my Peace Corps experience, and since there was no reply email in the comment, I figured I would just write a new post.

What vaccines did you have to get before and while volunteering?

I don’t remember exactly. I had to have several in order to even apply, most significantly polio. Yellow fever is necessary. You also get Hepatitis B, MMR, Diphtheria-Typhus, etc… In country I was required to get a flu shot and an H1N1 (yes, they are big on giving you completely unnecessary shots). The general approach seems to be “fill them full of everything possible because if someone dies as a result of not having one we will be in deep ****.”

What diseases and/or general illnesses are common in your country?

Malaria is the worst, and we generally take mefloquine weekly. We are also trained on how to poke our fingers and do a blood smear to be examined for malaria parasites. TB is a problem in West Africa, especially as multi-drug resistant strains evolve. Cholera outbreaks are occasional. But the most common issues are simply bacteria, amoebas and giardia.

Have you been sick at all?

Niger is supposedly worse than average in terms of all those GI infections. Personally I have had all three once since I arrived in Niger (10 months ago). Some volunteers have it much more often and some less. Much has to do with how clean you are, but your site can also make a big difference.

The other big issues is staph infections. I had a rather bad one on my lip, and some volunteers have had several. Again, how clean you are makes a big difference.

What different creatures, animals, insects, etc. do you encounter (or not want to encounter) during your volunteering?

I see donkeys, cows, chickens, goats, and sheep everywhere, even in the capital city. There are also dogs, cats, pidgins, and the usual assortment of domestic animals. Camels are common. I’ve seen giraffes once on the road. A few wealthier traditional families have horses.

Perhaps you are referring to the scarier animals. I have found a (drowned) scorpion in my water jug, a live one next to a mat at a friend’s house, and a small snake curled up under my mat at my house. I’ve seen people dropping rocks on a half-dead snake as well. During my stay in Guinea and Niger, I’ve also seen bats, rats, mice, and many spiders. Most of these are not a common part of your life as a volunteer and I don’t really think of it as that different from a rural setting in America.

Also, if there is anything else you could share about the environment you live in, that would be great. For instance, is it stifling hot? Or too rainy?

At the moment it is ridiculously rainy. This is the height of the rainy season, but even so we are having more rain that usual, and you’ve probably read the news reports about all the flooding. This makes things (even the sand) moldy, and it can be hard to get clothes to dry. It still sort of mystifies me that I can’t get clothes dry in the middle of Niger. My thermometer regularly shows at least 100 degrees. During hot season (March – June), it was almost always above 115 in the daytime (and in the shade). At night it gets to high 70s or low 80s, except during hot season where it can be 90 outside in the middle of the night. Cold season is very cold, with highs in the 80s and 90s and lows at night perhaps in the 50s or 60s (one volunteer swears it can get to the 40s, but I think he’s wrong).

All of that seems very hot, and it is when you first arrive. You adjust some. But the heat itself isn’t as bad as not having access to something cold to drink or a fan to blow air around (my village didn’t have electricity). I have a game with my roommate in which we guess the temperature, and we have consistently guessed five or ten degrees under. I don’t think of it as terribly hot anymore, but I also have a house with electricity and even a fridge now. It is cooler now than it was as well.

I hope that helps. Good luck on your aspirations to Peace Corps.

I really like the movie Boondock Saints. I hear there might even be a sequel coming out. One of my favorite parts is when they are trapped in the mafia guy’s basement and getting their asses kicked and their italian friend gets shot. The dark haired brother says “Oh yeah I love this shit,” or something like that. His friend just got SHOT.

I’ve always taken it as a sort of exultation of life in the midst of tragedy. We love the high flying moments of success, achievement, love, etc… But we hate the moments of loss that are inevitably all mixed up with the good times. There is something sort of Buddhist in this, and usually people think that means one should try to be level and calm, seeing the highs and lows as attachments. I prefer the view exemplified by the brother, who seems to love the ride of life, the roller coaster ups and downs, the passion of our human struggle, of loss, of love.

I feel asleep thinking of that, and then when my alarm went off this morning I was grumpy with life. There is a question of control in all this. How much of life can we control? We don’t like it when we think we have control over something and life throws in our face the fact that control is an illusion. The struggle to manifest what we want in the face of a laughing mirthful world is what life is all about right?

Still, I don’t imagine that if I was laying in my friend’s blood as he was dying and I was tied to a chair that I would be saying “I love this shit.” Maybe that is insanity. Maybe I didn’t hear it right the fifth time I saw that movie. Maybe I’m just musing.

As far as my living situation. I still have no house, and it appears that I won’t be getting one, which means that I have a roommate for the next two months until he COSes and goes home. That’s not terrible, since at least I know where I am staying and I can start doing things like fixing the place up and putting in a garden. Still, I won’t really be moved in for another two months, and that kind of sucks. But if there is anything that I have had practice with in Peace Corps, it is the impermanence of things.

I wonder sometimes about other volunteers, and how they spend two years in one village. That must be a completely different experience from mine, where I will have lived in three different sites over my two and a half years of service, not including two months at training in Guinea, one month in Mali after evacuation, and one month in training in Niger. My service has been characterized by short stays in different places. Most volunteer’s services are characterized by staying in one place the whole time. How much have I missed out on really getting to know people and a community by moving around so much?

I found a book of Hemmingway’s short stories amongst the things left over from COSing volunteers. I had forgotten the profound ache that his writing imparts to me. I just read “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. His portrayal of cowardice and courage, and the plain meanness of people toward each other, shows the deep painful side of life, and there is no denying it. In Africa I laugh as I have never laughed before. I have found a confidence and finally given up the ghosts that were attached to my heels (at least for now). But the impermanence of life, the inevitable breakdown of love into some vague annoyance, the quiet suffering of great persons, these things do not beckon me to laugh or to shout my happy defiance into the rain. They ask instead that I sit quietly and alone and give that inner ache the bearth that it demands. Life, so opportuning of rapture, is joyously malicious.

There are many ways to struggle. I admire Hemmingway’s.