Another Sunday in Africa. I wake up to the sounds of roosters and children in the streets. I stare out through the mesh net that covers my bed, and try to close my eyes again. I’ve been sleeping for 10 hours, my nights are so long here when life stops when the sun goes down, but I still feel tired. I’m exhausted from a sickness that is no different than what I have felt at home, but made worse by the lack of familiar comforts that make life so easy. I have to force myself out of my room to walk to the metal box with the plastic toilet to dump out the bucket of pee from the previous night and relieve myself from a long slumber after working on re-hydrating myself due to this damn sickness.
It’s a church day. I’ve agreed to attend church with Magogo every Sunday, and I sit in the tightly packed pews and listen to a language I have not even begun to understand. It’s a catholic church, a very small denomination amongst my rural community. No more than 20 people show up every Sunday, and the father is an Italian who makes his rounds to several in the area, only coming to this one about once a month. I bring my own bible, a King James Edition, printed a long time ago, written in old English that makes me feel even more like I don’t even have a full grasp of my own mother tongue. I hear the words that they say, I pick up the familiar verbs and nouns but the meanings get lost in contextual grammar variations. The songs that are sung are different from last week, no one gave me a song booklet this week, and I don’t mind much. My butchering of their language can’t be nice to hear amongst their melodic tunes and pure baritones, so I clap when I hear the beat and do the hand motions that go along with it to fake enthusiasm.
Church has been something that has always been engraved in my own personal culture, but I have never felt comfortable with the structure. The familiar format is easy to recognize, so I go through in my head what would be happening as I try not to focus on what I need to get from town today and how I really want to be doing laundry right now. I cannot help but get distracted from the stares from the children around me. I was told to sit in front, and my feeble attempt to sneak to the back was highly unsuccessful, so I stand alone in the front pew towering over all that are around me, trying to make myself as small as possible so those behind me can see around me.
I have grown quite accustomed to the stares; children as mostly confused by my presence and are just trying to understand anything about me. I doubt many of them have seen a white person before. The whites that come through my town are speeding through in there Toyota pick-up trucks on their way to the million dollar game lodges. No one stops in this village, I’m not really sure if there is anything to stop for here. The people from the bigger towns simply describe it as boring, but it’s the lack of movement, the lack of development, and the lack of just about everything that makes this rural wasteland so undesirable for most. The children though, they don’t know anything else, I doubt they know about the riches that exist in the world. They are so different from the children who don’t have to worry about when their next meal will come, or if they will see their father again. You can see the pain and burden in the eyes of the old men and teenage boys who are aching for something different, but the children, so naïve and so carefree, they know nothing else.
“Are you sharp?!” Is a text that I usually send or receive from other PCVs about once a week. It basically means, “is everything going okay?” I picked it up when I was at a wedding over training and had 4 host brothers to look after me who would take turns asking me if indeed, I was sharp. The usual response is “Yes, sharp sharp” but sometimes it’s really hard to say that everything is “nice nice”. Most of us, minus the couples, are kilos away from other volunteers and are lucky if we see them every other week, so these text messages really serve to keep us sane. We share stories that only make sense to us. About how being treated like a child by our host families is exhausting, and how the money from the EU is still being discussed when the final report was supposed to be turned in a month ago. Similar stories make us feel okay with our surroundings, a shared experience that can only be understood from those that are walking in our similar shoes. We can joke about how backwards things sometimes are in this country, and lament in the lack of alcohol that can be consumed to relieve any of the stress that builds up after a long day of work. It’s been a month now since we were all together in our training utopia, and as much as I was ready for it to be over, I would trade a big sack of rand to be able to spend a week with all my friends from a month ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still excited about being where I am, I’m just ready to stop “culturally integrating” and ready to start making a difference in my community. My organization seems to think I am a glorified intern that can make magic tricks with a computer, so as much fun as data input is, I would much rather be up and running with all the ideas that have been stewing in my brain for over a year. I had a friend tell me that a countdown to freedom from Peace Corps three month policy of sitting back and observing was keeping her sane, and I guess that I need to start adapting this idea for myself. It’s either start a countdown and begin planning, or just keep on counting the geckos on my wall, 13...
