If You Believe

When I first started thinking seriously about Peace Corps and planning my life after college around it, I remember I watched a recruiting video on the Peace Corps website showing the different ways that volunteers live. There were several examples of humble homes from around the world. The female volunteer in Africa had a house that was very basic, and looked like it fit right into what I always pictured Africa would look like. The male volunteer in Panama had a small house that overlooked a giant valley, which I remember really struck me as one of the many types of natural beauty I hoped to encounter on my Peace Corps adventure. Another female volunteer talked about her house, where she had very little furniture, and a hammock that she said she just about lived in.

After watching the video, I remember being really struck by how drastic a life change this was going to be for me to make. I even spoke to friends about my shock. Should I have been surprised? Of course not. But I was.

It wasn’t a dramatic enough shock to keep me from moving forward with my application, but it did help me to realize one of the many ways my life would change in the Peace Corps. (Of course there were hundreds of other ways that my life would change that I never could have anticipated.)

I bring up this memory now because I’ve recently had another visitor from the US. Having her here brought into even more clarity the different lifestyle that I am now experiencing. When my family came here, just 2 months or so after I’d moved to my town, I could sense how they were feeling because I’d felt the same way just a few months before. I knew to tell them to wear bug spray and to warn them not to flush the toilet paper. I knew which reactions to look for, which ones would make me laugh, and of course to also be on the lookout for things that aggravated me about life here that I knew would get to them too.

But with this most recent visit, I failed to do that, at all. It’s been so long now that I don’t even think about throwing the toilet paper away, and I can kill a mosquito with the swoop of one hand. My house is no longer a rustic, rural dwelling, where my hammock is my only shelter. My visitor took a picture of the shower in my bathroom and said she was going to label the photo as my “shower, kitchen sink, my only water source…” I didn’t even laugh because to me, it’s gotten past funny. It’s life (and I consider myself to be very lucky to be among the volunteers who even have running water.) The shower is my kitchen sink because the hand sink that was installed in the house in August fell out of the wall the other day (it’d been drooping for months and I’d known it was just a matter of time). To you, the American reader, it sounds strange, but believe me, it’s even stranger that to me that this is not strange-it’s just one more of the many adventures that I get to life through here. (When the sink fell to the ground, I was just glad it hadn’t shattered. I pushed the hardware into the corner and set the sink in a bucket. A few days later I realized the puddles that kept developing were coming from the leaky hose connected to the sink, so I set about finding a way to keep it from dripping. Again, not funny, not strange, just one of those things.) Sometimes your sink falls out of the wall.

So yes, my house is rustic, but it’s mine now, just as my apartment in DC was mine, my tiny bedroom in Chile was mine, my 2 dorm rooms at AU were mine, and all the homes I’ve ever lived in with my family have been mine. They have each had their various perks (basements for romping, good neighbors for playing capture the flag, parks for climbing in, laundry service, pools, to name a few) and they have all had their own annoyances (flooding, neighbors with mean dogs and/or offensive bumper stickers,) just as my house here. (Recent perks: I’ve started to let Lina take naps in my bed with me (she’s sleeping at my feet right now) and tons of great junk food and other American gifts brought to the house by my recent visitor. Recent annoyances: new neighbors living about a foot from my back door with loud children who are terrified of me (but nowhere near as badly as their pop-singer-imitator mother is), and getting to add bees to the list of domestic creatures of the home.)

Church and State

On Sunday, I attended a community meeting in the town over from me. The mayor of that town had invited me, as he claimed, to get a chance to discuss the request we’ve submitted to him for the library land purchase. What the meeting turned out to be was a discussion about whether or not the mayor should be ousted from his mayor ship.

The meeting was started by the Catholic priest of the nearest city. He was concerned for the community, as he put it, and knew that everyone agreed that what was best for the town ought be done. Apparently a meeting had been held the week prior which had gotten completely out of hand. So, he was the moderator of this meeting which he promised would be more productive. First he granted someone with complaints against the mayor to speak. The man spoke (with limited interruption) about the many ways the mayor has avoided being accountable with his money to the community members, and the curious ways that he noticed money was being spent.

Then the mayor spoke. He was interrupted repeatedly (and every time seemed less concerned, as if he almost wanted an excuse to not address what the charges that had been brought against him.) The priest had to move on to deliver a mass (it was a Sunday after all) and left another much less competent man in charge as moderator. People began to speak out of turn more rapidly and their tones reached higher and higher pitches. As things got heated, I looked around at all of the other faces in the room and wondered, again, what the hell I was doing there!

The meeting ended when people got too frustrated by their own interruptions and stormed out. Then the mayor left. He was very visibly angry.

It struck me that a priest would rarely be called in to moderate political talks in the US, or at least that is the hope. How many other communities in the world depend on their religious leaders to be more than just spiritual advisors? At what point is it no longer appropriate to ask religious leaders to be more than spiritual advisors?

Medical Mission: Part Deux

I got to put a guy’s eye in.

Let me explain.

A recent medical mission came into the town: New York Eye Doctors! I was on hand for the full week to interpret. There were many jobs for interpreters, interviewing for patient intake, working on the various stations of the eye exam room, interpreting for doctors working on preliminary consults, and finally interpreting for staff for pre and post op. I spent the bulk of my time working intake and in the eye exam room, but I did get a chance to do all of the jobs. (And on the last day we all got to play eye doctor with one another and a real patient.)

On one particular morning in consults, I was called in to help a nurse who was working with prosthetic eyes. She had a patient whose eye was shrunken and dead, but had not been removed. She was fitting him for a prosthetic and needed my assistance to help teach him how to place and remove the eye for himself. He was having trouble with the prosthetic. So, the two of them worked on it for a while until he asked her if he’d be able to go to work that day. That’s when her cultural sensitivity kicked into overdrive. Not only was she then worried about fitting his new eye properly, but she was also concerned for his comfort and for his employment. At the same time, she was called, twice, by nurses coming out of surgeries to look for her, and both times the nurses had a lot of urgency in their requests for her.

I knew what was coming, but was still a little shocked when she looked to me. She told me he was not to leave until he’d removed and replaced the eye a few more times. She asked if I could oversee that. It was so clear to me that she was needed somewhere else that I nodded my head of course and waved her off to her other, more urgent job. But in reality, I was nervous.

He began to struggle some more with the eye. He had been, very obviously, in a great amount of discomfort fitting the eye into a crevice where before there had been nothing but fluffy tissue. His eye welled up as a result. He needed to get to his job, or who knows what might have happened, but it was imperative that he learn how to work with the eye before leaving. So, we got to it.

He struggled, acknowledging my encouragement, but all the while being unable to force the eye in. After watching with frustration for a while, as he tried to wiggle it in, I decided to be proactive. With his permission, I lifted his upper eye lid so that he could lower the lower lid and slip the eye in under the upper lid. Again he struggled, as I encouraged, until finally it was in! But that was only one part of the battle. He had been given a tiny suction cup to use on the eye to remove it. It was either that or pushing his own finger up and under the eye to take it out. He’d been unsuccessful with the suction cup in the presence of the nurse and had given up on it. So, he pushed his finger in, as I still held his upper eye lid, tear ducts flowing all the while, he got the eye out! Once more he put it in and then left, to come back the following day to speak with the nurse again about other cleaning the eye and the future.

As I left the room I held the wall, fearing that if I kept my arms to my sides I’d fall over. Not once watching hernia surgeries or eye surgeries had I gotten faint. But this time it was an eye, and it was staring at me, and I was right there in it, and so yeah, I felt a little faint.

The next day I asked to sit in with her and him again, and he allowed me to take a photo of the two of them working together with the eye.