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.