Fears

I’m back!  Ok, I didn’t really go anywhere (minus a trip or two to Dar for meetings/trainings), I’ve just been on a writing hiatus.  I wrote one blog last month but I never posted it (I will post it with this one) and I don’t really know why.  I think it just got lost in my daily routine, a routine that has become somewhat devoid of responsibilities.  I went from having too many things at the beginning of the year to helping the secretary sort rice (yes, you read that right) after I’ve taught my math lesson for the day.  Well, if you know me relatively well at all, you know that my brain refuses to relax…ever.  So while I’m sitting and staring at the wall and waiting for time to pass, the gears in my head are starting to burn.  A lot has happened to feed the fire and I almost wonder if the time I have to think has been the greatest gift I’ve gotten from Peace Corps.  This last year has included a lot of self-reflection that I know I never would have gotten had I stayed in the states because I was too addicted to being busy to accommodate it.

In the last month, a few things have happened that have stirred up some serious emotions of all different kinds.  The most recent actually happened last night when I received a phone call from the US Embassy.  It is not uncommon to get phone calls from random Tanzanians calling just to greet you or harass you for one thing or another.  They don’t even have to have met you.  Example: my friend used my phone to call a bus driver about a month ago and the bus driver still calls me to say hi.  I don’t even know who this guy is!   Anyways, when an unknown phone number comes up on my phone, I take a couple of seconds to decide if I want to answer or not.  I answered thinking it might be Peace Corps and got a little huffy when I heard an unknown Tanzanian speaking on the other end (thinking it was the bus driver again).  Then when I heard him say “US Embassy” I got scared that I was going home and the first thing that popped into my head was “Oh my gosh! What did I do?”  My heart jumped into my throat.  Then I heard him say one of my students’ names, a student who applied last month to participate in a leadership program in America.  They chose ten students from the whole country of Tanzania and Laila is one of the lucky ones who will be boarding a flight to America next month for a 24 day trip to Denver/D.C.  When I told her, I saw so much fear in her eyes (the good kind that comes right before something amazing) and today as we started to prepare her for her journey, she told me that she feels like throwing up.  I laughed and explained that that’s exactly what I was feeling before I came to Tanzania.  I am bursting at the seams with excitement for her and I can’t wait to hear all about her adventure.  I know she’s going to have a wonderful time and learn some amazing things.   All she has to do is be brave and get on that plane.

While my heart is singing with pride and joy this week, it had its fair share of crying last week.  One of my biggest fears about going into the Peace Corps was that a family member would pass away while I was gone.  Even on my last day in America, to calm myself down, I was writing to myself that “I can’t stay here and wait for people to die, I have to live my life and hope that they will still be here when I get back.”  It put things in perspective for me at the time but, of course, didn’t eliminate the possibility of it happening.  On September 30, my Grandmother passed away.  The bone head that I am, I went to school to teach anyway thinking I could pull it off, but instead spent the first part of the day choking back tears and finally throwing in the towel and going back home to spend the next two days thinking about her (I'm serious when I say I'm burning out the gears in my head).   I’m really grateful that I had the opportunity to spend some time with her before I left but now that I can’t anymore, I think of all of the things I wish I had been brave enough to ask her or talk to her about.  I only really interacted with her consistently as a child and I wish that I could have heard some of her stories after I had become old enough to hear them.  In the end, like everyone else, she did the best she could with what she had and I am incredibly proud to be related to her; a woman who always followed her heart and just wanted to be loved in her own way.  I did love her, I do love her, and she will always be in my heart.  Not being there and not being able to attend the memorial is really hard but it only makes me more excited for Christmas... WITH MY FAMILY! (This is my transition from sad to happy.  Sorry about the abruptness.)

After FOUR years, I am finally going to be spending Christmas with my Mom, Dad, and brother.   The decision to visit the States during my service makes me extremely ecstatic while also filling me with insane amounts of anxiety.  Right now, though, emphasis on the ecstatic.  I can’t wait to spend some time with people back home, speak English, and take hot showers (even if it’s to escape from the insanely cold weather and not necessarily just to be clean). It’s going to be AMAZING. And get this, when I go to a restaurant, they’re going to give me a menu AND I will be able to choose anything I want AND the restaurant will actually have it.  I’m counting down the days!  Ahhhhhhhhh!

Anyways, here's a picture of Laila, my student who will be heading to the US next month!

Oh, Hey, September, There You Are!

I had every intention of writing one blog each month of my Peace Corps service but I ended up with a classic case of writer’s block.  It gets a lot harder to write about my ‘crazy adventure in Tanzania’ when things start to feel really normal.  So normal that thinking about coming back to America in real-life terms (instead of fantasy-terms) gives me enough anxiety to force me to block out the fact that it will actually happen.  I know there will be a time and that time seems to be coming with increasing speeds but for now life is just life here and it has gotten… comfortable.  Sans running water, paved roads, and everything that goes along with that.

Having said that, though, I must also say this: Peace Corps is hard.  When you’re in the midst of it all, it’s hard to remember that and what happens instead is you start to feel completely inadequate.

My service started a little differently than most other volunteers in Tanzania.  I lived with the volunteer I replaced for the first two months of my service.  There are a lot of pros to this situation and there are a lot of cons.  Those first few months of your service are when you, as a volunteer, get to establish yourself in the community, figure out how things work, and mess EVERYTHING up so that you can learn to do things better later.  It’s kind of like taking someone who can’t swim and throwing them into the deep end of the pool.  Because I lived with the volunteer I was replacing, I instead saw how SHE did everything… at the END of her service when she was good at everything.  Her Swahili was phenomenal, her house was extremely clean, her relationships in the village and with her students were ones to be envied, and she had routines and systems that worked both in and outside of the house.   Her accomplishments and routines at the end of her service became my baselines for the beginning of my service and I had to somehow live up to that.  A lot of volunteers go through this when they replace someone because villagers will say “oh, that’s not how so-and-so did that” or “so-and-so knew all of our languages and all of this too.”  The difference for me was, I actually knew what the volunteer before me did because I witnessed it and that meant that I was making all of those comparisons myself, every minute of every day.  I felt sub-par from the very beginning and over the last year, I have been waiting to wake up and feel like I was actually living up to my predecessor’s accomplishments. I didn’t even realize how much I compare myself to her until after a couple of visits from friends, when I found myself saying frequently, “Liz used to do it that way,” or “yeah, at our house, we have to…” because everything I do, I still subconsciously compare it to how Liz did it before me and even with the furniture changes, the house has never really felt completely like my own.

A couple of months ago, I got an email from Liz telling me that she would be back in Tanzania and she was wondering how I felt about her visiting.  I told her that she was absolutely welcome and that I thought it would be fantastic for her and the community here.  I then spent the next few months trying to tuck away my ego and anxiety, fearing face-to-face comparisons.   I had this irrational fear that as soon as she got here, everyone would turn on me and tell me how awful I am at everything and that they would all talk about me in Swahili so that I couldn’t understand what they were saying.  Or… maybe I WOULD be able to understand it which would at least ease the paranoia a little bit but still make me feel awful.

Do you want to know what happened instead?  I ended up spending a couple of days feeling, for the first time here, that I had a real ally with me.  Someone who understands the struggles and excitements I’ve been going through for the last year and can actually empathize with me, kind of tell me what comes later, and what I should let roll of my back.   There is not a single person in this world that can relate to my experience or validate how I feel about the experience as well as she can and I feel so blessed to have that.   There are a lot of things we have done differently but I have also realized that we have handled a lot of things similarly.  By comparing our services, instead of relating them, I only created an unnecessary monster for myself.  It turns out that my feelings of inadequacy seem to parallel hers even though all I can see are her contributions (many of which she doesn’t seem to remember).  This has given me back a little hope that my time here won’t be completely fruitless.

Today, after she left, I found myself feeling kind of lonely and really missing having her around.  I don’t know if this is because, for a couple of days, it didn’t feel like it was me against the world or if having her here was some form of validation, or if it was because she was here when I first arrived, or if it was just that she’s a cool person but whatever it was, I got a lot of peace out of the visit, a good day at the beach, and I have squashed one of my internal Peace Corps monsters.