Misnomer

A Tangential Rant.

Warning: I talk about periods and make gross judgmental stereotypes about my Host Country Culture.

I wrote this my last night in the village before I started the journey of getting into Vila. I am still doing fabulous. Maybe this will be the last bitter rant you'll hear from me for a (little) while...


This blog was originally titled,

Six Days In My Life, or, A Glimpse At My Job.

but then I didn’t end up getting through the first day, or talking very much about my job. Oh, well.

March 27, 2009

It’s been two years. And you all still keep asking me what I do all day and what my job is. When are you going to accept the fact that I do nothing all day, and that I have no job?

Okay, seriously, I know it’s my fault because I rarely talk about work. This is due to a combination of the following factors 1) I rarely work and 2) when I am working, I am busy working and am not pontificating.

Which is why you are all left wondering why the U.S. taxpayers are paying for me to drink coconuts and play with babies for two years.

Well, you wouldn’t be the only ones.

But to put it in perspective, I read somewhere once that the entire budget of Peace Corps (like for every volunteer and program operating in every country combined) is less than the cost of one of the fighter-war plane thingies flying around Iraq. This statement would be a lot more dramatic if I remembered the precise details of it. Oh well.

Sunday

Sunday is a sacred day of rest here, which means as a Peace Corps volunteer, it is the only day I will ever have a captive audience for meetings, workshops, etc. For a long time I was very respectful of the sabbath and would absolutely never initiate any kind of work-related activity on a Sunday. In fact, I used to even get indignant when someone else would schedule a meeting on Sunday and expect me to show up - on the Lord’s day of all days! What an abomination!

Gradually, as I began to feel (and show) less and less respect for local custom and religion, I started working more on Sundays, and I feel like mostly everyone probably thinks I should have done that a long time ago. Does it really matter if the heathens work on Sundays? Who knows?

Anyway, my usual routine on Sundays is to get up and do my morning Yoga routine, cook breakfast, and then head to church in my village, Bongabonga, around ten or eleven, whenever the bell rings. Church is usually 1-2 hours long, and then I go down and have lunch with my “mom” in Meriu, the nearby village I lived in for my first several months on the island. I hang out there for the afternoon, and then I walk back up to my village as it is getting dark laden with fresh but rare goodies from the garden, ‘Western’ vegetables that she gives to me for the week ahead: green beans, cabbage, tomatoes, or green peppers depending on the season.

This particular Sunday varied slightly. As per my previous statement about no longer showing respect for local customs, I opted out of going to church. It was great! I think I might do that every Sunday from now on. Then I headed down to Meriu a little early, because I actually had some ‘business’ to attend to, interviewing two sample households for a Community Health Survey we Peace Corps Health Volunteers are piloting. Just to cover all my bases, I had asked a chief’s representative a few days ago to select the households I should interview, because you just never know when a group of people is randomly going to erupt into a jealous rage.

I did make a mistake in planning this excursion: I did not consider my lunar calendar...as in, I accidentally planned to do something on the dreaded Day 3 of my period.

I have a real thing about The Third Day, the one day of the month when, in the past, I would consistently conclude that life was a terrible mess of loneliness and this body was a substandard vehicle that oppressed me. Over the past couple years, in an effort to support this day of utter exhaustion and systemic shutdown, I have integrated so many rituals that I actually look forward to it most of the time.

As a rule, I do not do any work f it can be helped, and it usually can with just a little advance planning. I make no social calls, and purposely make my home unwelcome to visitors (this means keeping windows and doors closed as much as the heat will permit). I organize my life so that as much housecleaning and laundry as possible is done in the days prior. If I’m really on the ball, I sort out most of my food procurement and prep in advance, so that I am free to spend virtually the entire day supine. Yoga practice is, for once, entirely optional. I was once read in a tabloid that a certain actress (Sharon Stone?) had written into her contracts that she would always have at least eight hours between shoots to ensure her beauty sleep. As soon as I have enough clout and am not begging for any acting job I can get, I sincerely intend to have a clause in all my contracts that I don’t work on My Third Day.

Anyway, every once in awhile, I forget and plan something unnecessary, which is why I concluded that I was most certainly about to die as I trudged down to Meriu in approximately 100 degree heat and about 85% humidity (I’m guessing). Needless to say, when I arrived at the first house, they had no idea I was coming or why. After we spent awhile trashing the people that should have told them (they) and ascertaining that they were, in fact, willing and able to participate in the survey (me), I took out my papers to begin and realized with horror that several important pages had been left in my house...up the hill in Bongabonga.

I might have cried at the shock, surrounded by several rounds of the always so helpful, “Wow! That is so awful that you have to walk back home to get them in this heat, I wouldn’t do it!” as well as my favourite, “If only you had checked through all your papers carefully before you left...”

I might have cried, but after sweating so profusely on the walk over I really did not have any extra fluid left.

I would like to go off on a tangent for a moment and talk about this phrase that translates to “If only...” People love it here, and it was one of my pet peeves until I decided to adopt it myself and realized how enjoyable it is. “Oh! You wanted to get on that truck? If only you were here ten minutes ago, as there won’t be another one until October.” I guess in our culture people say that stuff, too, but...here, it is actually considered an acceptable way to end a topic of conversation. “What? The province is closing down our Aid Post because our Village Health Worker has other obligations and our building is considered substandard? If only our Village Health Worker didn’t have other obligations and our building was better...” and everyone nods emphatically and that is the end of the discussion. And you’re sitting there as the Peace Corps volunteer and for like the hundredth time you say, “Well, maybe instead of reviewing all the things that went wrong we could spend this meeting brainstorming possible solutions...” and you are met with a chorus of blank stares. The whole point of meetings is to Blame Someone, isn’t it? How would anyone know how much they’ve failed if we went ahead and found solutions?

I remember once lamenting to a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, “I don’t understand how people here think that blame is the most effective use of time and group energy. Is trying to find a solution really such a foreign concept?”

“Yeah, actually, it probably is...and that’s probably, you know, why the U.S. is, like, a developed country and stuff...

Sheer genius! I have thought about that conversation at least a hundred times since.

Put all your thoughts on imperialism and the concept of development aside for a moment and consider it. Maybe if your culture lends itself to focusing on solutions, y’all come up with things like, I don’t know, running water or...the wheel. And maybe if your culture lends itself to finding a scapegoat, y’all come up with...nothing new. And nothing ever changes. Until Western influence trickles in and you decide you want your very own Jean Claude van Damme DVD box set, but now you need the DVD player to play it, and a source of electricity, and the money to pay for all that, and a job to give you that money, and maybe an education system to make you eligible for work, and then you decide you need a Peace Corps volunteer in your community because, after all, they probably all know Jean Claude van Damme personally, but if they don’t they probably know other white people that will give you money so you don’t have to work, after all...

Am I being racist? Or, like, culturist or whatever? I honestly can’t tell the difference anymore. When you live in a society where segregation is a rule, where racism isn’t racist, it’s just...life, where, for God’s sake, people actually ask you if white women menstruate, it’s so hard to remember what’s appropriate.

I’ve tried to explain race relations in America several times here, unsuccessfully. It usually comes up when guys ask me how they can get themselves a Missus.

“Well, actually, in the countries that most of these women come from, it is not generally accepted to choose a mate based on skin colour alone, so you don’t want her to know that you want her because she’s white.”

“Why not? Tell her I like white girls. And I want a half-caste baby...”

“Right, but...like, these women don’t want to be wanted for their pigmentation. It’s like, how would you feel if someone wanted you just because you were black?”

“Great! That is totally what I’m looking for, a Missus that likes black men. Do you know any?”

“But-doesn’t it bother you that a woman would only want you because you were black?”

“No, because that means she wants a half-caste baby, too!”

And so on, and so on...the conversation is always the same.

I was supposed to give you an overview of six days in my working life, but...that didn’t work. And now I’m tired. And nothing seems more boring than writing about my job right now.

Although I will tell you that I did hike back up the hill on Sunday to get my forgotten papers, and then I did go back down to do the surveys...and then of course had to hike back home again in the afternoon. Which actually set the pace for the week ahead because the next day I started a First Aid training program for teachers at the primary school in Meriu, which means I have been going back and forth to the school every day since, anyway, so...

So I am going to climb into bed with Mrs. Dalloway and not think of tomorrow’s adventure: getting myself to the other side of the island without dying of 1) fatigue 2) heat exhaustion 3) frustration. The only trucks that can make it to my side are out of commission, so I intend to use some combination of walking, paying teenagers to carry my stuff, and possibly a canoe to get myself to the airport by Sunday afternoon.

That is, if the rain doesn’t cancel my flight, anyway...