Last Letter Home

May 14, 2009 - Wednesday

Dear Parents,

I decided to write a letter because I never write letters anymore, and pretty soon I’ll be online and have cheap long-distance, so there will be even less of a reason/opportunity.

I think the reason I stopped writing letters was mostly because I have been travelling through Vila so much the last several months - and even if I know it’ll be two months till I go in again, e-mailing someone later will get to them faster than mailing it from the island. There’s that and the fact that I’ve had my DVD player since October. And the fact that no one writes me anymore. Anyway.

By the time you get this, I will most definitely already be in Vila, if not New Zealand.

The reason I am writing at this particular moment is because I finally started cleaning the Dirty Corner of my house and I found this half-empty notebook…and I thought I was out of lined paper! I despise writing on blank paper. What do you think that reveals about me? Ironically, this was the notebook I used when I first got here. I’ve just flipped through my notes on basic greetings in Namakura and some family trees I sketched while I was trying to get to know everyone, before I just gave up on trying to keep track of it all.

I also found an ‘Ideas’ page from my youthful and hopeful days of 2007. I thought it would be incredibly depressing to review it, but actually it wasn’t! I discovered that surprisingly I’ve ended up accomplishing the spirit if not the letter of most of the ideas on that list - and some other stuff that is actually a lot more interesting and potentially important than what I’d originally brainstormed.

I see why so many volunteers end up extending at the last minute. It’s hard to walk away, particularly from unfinished projects you don’t want to crumble in your absence. And yet I know I”d never stay, not least because nothing ever really will be finished, and you could keep dragging it out forever - and also because no one but me and other Peace Corps/Development People care whether my projects fall down or not.

When I first got here, I had a lot of ideas for what I wanted to do, and then was (appropriately) brainwashed by Peace Corps to believe your own ideas were inherently evil and everything was supposed to be about the communities’ needs and desires - so I waited a year for someone to articulate them to me (I just got asked for money a lot). When I got too upset and guilty about spending all day in my house (not bored, mind you, guilty but never bored - I love sitting in my house all day), I started doing whatever I thought could be important, mostly anywhere but here in this village, and the funny thing is, the projects and programs I started later in my service, all the things I feel like ‘salvaged’ my time here, made it worthwhile in the end - are actually not that different from my original ideas list. Go figure.

I experienced a moment of ‘integration’ last week - when I got to see a few of the things I’ve been working on converge. Bridget and I took five of our best campers from our Tongoa Camp GLOW in March over to nearby Tongariki to help another volunteer (Sarah) run a GLOW for her girls. Our girls had no idea we were going to make them teach anything, and I’m sure would not have agreed to come if they had, but we did make them and it was pretty cool to see the girls poring over the lessons plans from the Camp GLOW Manual for Camp Leaders in Bislama, otherwise known as Why I Don’t Remember October. You may remember me complaining about it last year. A resource like that had been my dream since I first joined the GAD (Gender and Development) committee, it took forever to hammer out that draft and I was eager to pass it off to the next set of willing hands. Bridget, Sarah, and I also used it during our camp in Tongoa in March, and even then how I was joking how we had written it for Ni-Vanuatu facilitators but in the end it was saving our own asses.

But this was way cooler - seeing it used for its original purpose, by women I had personally trained and ‘mentored’ if you will. I don’t know how often you get to see the fruits of your labour in Peace Corps. I guess it depends on your project - but I think we do all live with the general understanding that you will never really know if anything you do works, lasts, means anything to anyone, etc.

After the first camp with the teens from Tongariki, when our next program fell through (long story island-style), we improvised a 2-day How-to-Run-A-Camp workshop for our campers-cum-counsellors from Tongoa, with a few locals that wanted to join, including a really amazing teacher. It took me 5 minutes to write my two sessons, “Why Drama?” and “Dealing with Behaviour Problems”.

It occurred to me that after two years of making a lot of mistakes, I have actually picked up a thing or two and have gotten pretty good at some things. It’s a shame I don’t actually care about development work or Vanuatu, because I almost feel a Ph.D thesis coming on - what with the utter specificity of my various methodologies (too bad I don’t care about academia, either). Anyway, I am just trying to write up as much as I can for the people that do care.

So…onto a life I actually do care about! I hope I don’t get distracted again…at least not for awhile. I can’t wait to be one of those crazy women obsessed with their careers. People whisper how she has no social life because she is married to her career. I’ll give myself a hobby for balance (and fitness), cycling or…something new, like rock-climbing. I am quite fond of extremes…

Okay, I am bored with writing now. Bye!
Amanda