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.)
3 comments:
i'm glad you wrote about this. it's all i keep talking about when people ask me how you are. the answer is always: it would blow your mind how much she has adapted there. and how settled she is.
it's funny, i was just talking about this at dinner with mike. we ate at a nice restaurant and i suddenly thought to myself: where are we? how was i so uncomfortable here just a few weeks ago, upon my return from africa? i haven't been back long enough to forget what a comfort it is to take a hot shower in a clean tub with soap, shampoo, conditioner, and face scrub. it's one of those things i hope not to forget, so i can continue to appreciate how people live in other parts of the world.
i'm excited for your experience and pleased to see how adapted and mature you are about it. i don't know how else to describe my connection to what you wrote except to say -- i think i get it.
hugs!
it really is remarkable, i think, how adaptable you are. and, to echo kat, how mature. i hate having to admit, about myself, how much even the thought of camping spooks me. what's beautiful about being this open to diverse experiences is how it just opens up so many corners of the world for you and brings you a rich understanding of who people are, outside of american sitcom, overstocked-grocery store, whirlpool appliance-filled life. what's ugly about fears, such as mine, about lacking running water, or becoming ill from germs I'm unaccsutomed to, is precisely the converse - i can almost feel the experiences slipping away, the visits to india, dream of hiking in peru, and of seeing just exactly where you live. thanks for being your inpsiring self, and giving me something to shoot for.
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