3/28/09

I expected that at this point in my Peace Corps service I would feel more of a sense of accomplishment and pride. I have been here for one full year now, and you’d think that should amount to something. A year, you say. Twelve months spent in a foreign country, learning to adapt and adjust and integrate and respect and speak and work and LIVE.

Instead of rejoicing though, and giving myself some credit for this, lately I’ve been beating myself up and feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt; feeling like I’m not doing all the work I want to be doing, and having a hard time feeling like I’m getting any work done at all. On top of that I feel like I am spending less time being social with my Senegalese friends, and seem to be falling behind in my correspondence to friends and family back in the States. I apologize to those of you whom I haven’t emailed back in many weeks, or perhaps months - but remind myself, and you, that this is one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place ☺. So I hope you’ll forgive me, as communication Stateside sometimes falls last on my priorities list.

As for work, I would have thought by now that I would be full-on gung ho about what I’m doing here, and it’s hard to admit that I’m not exactly. There are some things that I’ve done that have really been exciting, but others I am involved in that I feel like are just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping plodding along. I suppose that’s development work for you, though, it IS hit-or-miss, and sometimes it IS just about simply showing up and keeping encouraging people to do the same. It’s just hard to realize that, though, being so ingrained in my American ways, with our focus on results-driven work. I’ve had to realize that the word “work” is not always defined the same way here, and that “success” has different barometers and criteria.

I was warned before I came about the intangibility of much the work I would be taking on here, how physical, measurable results are not necessarily the usual end product of two years of Peace Corps service. But knowing about something and living it are two very different things. Working in education as my main focus here, I know I am aiming for long-term results, ones that may very well not be seen in the next year I’m here. Despite the warning, it’s a difficult reality to come to terms with.

Last week I was invited to go back to Thies to help with training of the newest group of Peace Corps (soon-to-be) volunteers. It was a peculiar feeling, to be the “experienced” volunteer, and to be asked questions like I was the expert, when I know now how much I still don’t know, and there’s so much I feel I haven’t done. But these trainees had been in country for just three weeks so far, so my scope of knowledge about Senegal and Peace Corps far surpassed theirs, which was again, surreal. This is the second group of new volunteers that have come into country since I did, but the last one six months ago didn’t have as big of an impact on me emotionally. They were exciting and fresh, but after six months me and my stage-mates were still just getting our feet wet.

This year mark is a strange coming-of-age, a time to look back, and ahead, to assess how far I’ve come, where I am now, and where I still want to go. The group of volunteers who were a year ahead of us and helped with our training a year ago are in the process of leaving the country now (COS’ing - Close of Service), and saying goodbye to them makes me think about how fast time has been flying. I just hope that a year from now, when it’s my time to go, I can walk away and say, “Yes, I did something too.”

365 days

This past Friday marked my 1 year anniversary of being in Senegal.
One year ago I started this adventure, along with the rest of my training group. We came together for staging in Philadelphia, met each other for the first time, with all of our physical and mental baggage, with all of our optimism and dread, anxieties and excitement and eager naiveté.

I can still see the carpeted hallways of that Holiday Inn in the historic district, the pink hue of the conference room, and the flip chart paper we taped to the walls, with our hearts out there in the open, having been asked to draw our hopes and fears. We rode the bus to New York, checked in all our luggage, and boarded the plane. And after over 36 hours of being in transit, we landed in the still warm night of Dakar.

There were so many times in the last year when I thought I was surely not going to make it this far, when I doubted all the reasons I had for coming, and wanted nothing more than to go home. And I don't think that those moments of doubt are completely behind me - but I know now what to expect. I don't expect to encounter too many new challenges and changes over the next year. Just the same challenges, over and over, ad infinitum. That will be the biggest challenge perhaps: knowing what I'm facing, and keeping optimistic in spite of it. In spite of everything.

I still think this is the right decision for me, to be here, now. Yes, I do miss America and my friends and family there sometimes so much that it seems like my heart is just going to burst. But if I think about leaving here right now I am filled with an equally deep sadness, because there is still so much I want to try to do here before I would feel at peace with stepping away and moving on. I feel that here is where my life is now.

So I stay on, and look ahead. To this next year. May it be everything I hope it can be.

dreamstate

I didn’t sleep well Wednesday night, through a combination of drinking too much water right before bed and it being unseasonably warm all of a sudden. Probably because of these factors, I dreamed, vividly. My dreams here in Africa seem to me to be more often than not transparently symbolic of my anxieties and neuroses of waking life, and this one was no different. The following is the actual, honest-to-goodness, true dream, as well as I can remember it.
…….

The set-up: I was getting ready to go on a trip, with many other people. I was excited of course, and a little nervous, because we were going back to America. The trip was just going to be a visit, a week or so, not permanently leaving Senegal, so I wasn’t sweating it too much, but as we were advancing towards the security gate, I realized I didn’t know where my boarding pass was, or my driver’s license, or passport.

I started ransacking all of my bags looking for these critical papers, not coming up with anything even as the crowd thinned out and fewer and fewer people stayed nearby to help me search. My bags didn’t seem to be proper suitcases, just large plastic bags full of random stuff, but finally I turned up a scrap of paper on which I had scribbled in pen the flight information and my ticket numbers, and hoped that would suffice as a boarding pass. I continued to go through all of my things, which seemed like a ridiculous amount for only a weeklong trip, and as the minutes ticked by I became more and more certain that I was going to miss my flight. Somehow my mother was there too, my real American mother, and she offered to look through her baggage too in hopes of turning up something that could prove my identity. So we delved into her bags, together pulling out what must have been several kilos of large onions, until she had her hands around the biggest onion of all, which she pulled apart to reveal a few small books that she had tucked inside the cleverly-cut vegetable. I saw my monthly planner among her other closely guarded treasures, and reached for it, my hope rising. “I already looked in it,” she said to me. But I smiled, taking it from her and flipping the book open to its back flap, where the inside pocket divulged my coveted driver’s license, as well as the IDs of a few other PCVs, which I had apparently been holding onto for safe-keeping.

I sighed in relief, having feared my precious ID lost. But after a minute of calm, I looked around me, realizing everyone else was gone already. The hour continued to advance, and I still didn’t have my passport. My mother drifted out of the scene, and I drifted closer to waking, seeming once more to be alone, with no one left to help me search for the one last document I knew I needed to board the plane. I started to lose hope that I would be able to make this flight, and soon I woke, before I could find my passport, before I could go anywhere, my feet still on the ground here in Senegal.
…….

I’m not going to list the numerous links I can find here between my imaginative subconscious and its origins in reality (because they seem obvious to me, as I know myself so well) but I would be interested to know what you, dear readers, see, if you feel like commenting. Maybe the next time I will write about something actually related to the “work” I do here, Inch’Allah. Until then…