The One Kicking it Off

Hi everyone! How are you doing? Hope that life is treating you well in America.

Sorry I haven’t given you any substantive updates in a while; the past few months have been a whirlwind. It all passed in such a blur that I could hardly recount it out for you! Instead I have a couple stories that give a glimpse into the heart of my work these days: agricultural observation, youth empowerment, and existential angst. Ha. But in all seriousness, I’m most enlivened by the work I’ve been doing with kids and teenagers, a passion which reignited over the summer when I served as a counselor for two national camps (one for kids affected by HIV/AIDS and one for kids with physical disabilities – more about those later). This fall I’ve been fortunate enough to deepen my relationships with some amazing young’ns in my own hood, via a Girls’ Empowerment Club and English Learning Club at my village middle school and a monthly club for kids affected by HIV/AIDS at the children’s hospital in Dapaong.

Enjoy this little smattering of stories, and have a very happy holiday season! Wherever you are in life, may the new year wrap you in its arms, giving you the love and joy you so thoroughly deserve. I’ll be sending good vibes your way. Love you!

Oh, and ROCK CHALK!

The One with the Girl Power

Girlhood in Togo is, in a word, difficult. Girls have so many odds stacked against them that it’s hard to know which trial is most pressing: they are obliged to spend hours doing thankless housework; they are discriminated against in and left behind, especially at school; they are harassed, demeaned, and, all too often, abused by boys and men; they get knocked up before they have a chance to define their own lives. This is the norm. To look around the average village and see droves of workhorse women who have never completed their educations or strayed more than a few kilometers from home is to know the well-defined trajectory of girlhood.

But this is not some hopeless sob story. The girls I know are not objects of pity and sorrow but of pride and respect. They are smart, resilient, playful, hardworking, innocent, and sublimely strong. In the face of grinding adversity, they bloom. Take Awa with her big doe eyes and soft demeanor, or Beatrice with her gentle confidence and easy laugh. Habibata with her brooding inquisitiveness and shy smile, Afia with her rare imagination and eagerness to explore. Each of them a precious vessel of possibility, harboring the same hopes and aches. After all, they’re just girls.

While in the Dapaong town market with Awa (one of the most active “peer educators” at our middle school and essentially my hero) and Habibata (one of the most promising new students despite living in deep poverty), I watched a scene familiar from my own girlhood unfold: giddy, deliberate, and completely absorbed, the two of them sorted through heaps of used clothes donated from abroad like American girls scour clearance racks at the mall. Across from the stall selling khaki cloth for school uniforms, Awa caught sight of a gauzy concoction of lace, plaid, and sequins. Very old school Madonna. The skirt – not used but new, probably straight from China – had her under a spell; she kept glancing over at it as we finalized the purchase of Habibata’s khaki.

“Are you going to go look at that skirt?” I asked.

Awa darted away her eyes, looking down. “No, it’s too expensive.” She didn’t even know the price, and already it was too expensive.

“How much for that skirt?” I call over to the vendor.

“6 mille,” he says, giving the white person price. We bargain down to 2 mille, about $4. My conditioned way is not to give away stuff in Togo, not to be a foreign benefactor. But as if it’s someone else reaching into my wallet, I pass Awa the money. Why not let a girl be a little spoiled this once? Kids aren’t supposed to earn everything; they deserve little treats, just because.

Receiving the skirt bagged up in a black sachet, Awa beams with humble pride. She has a great deal to be proud of – and the new skirt hardly makes the list.

The One on the Farm (yee haw?)

One morning in late July, I went with my friend Mamanaa to help weed her rice field. Rainy season was in full swing, the dampened soil wooing farmers au champ each morning. The lazy days of hot season had given way to long hours slaving away in the fields, trying to lure a year’s worth of food out of ruthlessly arid dirt.

I don’t have the strongest track record of “helping” with farm labor; my uncalloused American hands blister upon contact with a hoe. I must admit that I arrived in Togo with a romantic draw to subsistence agriculture – growing all your own food is so cool – but the honeymoon was swiftly over when the sweaty, achy, exhausting reality of savanna farming kicked in. High hopes (both my village neighbors’ and mine) faded to tepid persistence and the vaguely depressing realization that I was wholly incapable of improving anyone’s harvests. Despite all this, I figured weeding couldn’t possibly give me any trouble. Mamanaa started pulling up the tangle of green that had sprouted up around the rice, and I jumped right in to help. Grab, pull, toss, grab, pull, toss: this wasn’t hard at all!

All of a sudden an urgent cry broke my groove: “No, no, Pakyendu! Those are my beans!” Uh oh. Mamanaa darted over and held up one of the “weeds” I’d tossed. In my single-minded devotion to yanking up everything that wasn’t rice, I hadn’t noticed that she had intercropped a smattering of green beans, used in a local millet dish called flii. Oops.

“Kafala, kafala…” I apologized insistently. Mamanaa just laughed with exasperation. And so we kept on weeding, sweating out our unmet expectations in the midmorning sun.

The One to Dave Eggers

DISCLAIMER: One of my solitary hobbies is writing letters to authors who have moved me, engaging in a one-sided dialogue about what they mean to my Peace Corps life. This is the first of those letters that I’ve felt compelled to write down – a bit of a creative experiment in all its messy, potentially embarrassing nakedness. Continue reading at your own risk… and don’t say I didn’t warn you

 

Dear Mr. Eggers,

Would you believe how boring the Peace Corps can be? So boring that here I am on a Tuesday afternoon daydreaming about… you. Us, actually. Or rather an idealized abstraction of you and a maybe-on-my-best-day aspiration of me, living a charming romantic tragicomedy of a life together. I know you’re married and all, but this is my daydream and I call the shots. So we would be like Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski in Away We Go, and I know you could swing that because you wrote the damn screenplay. That scene where the hip colors-of-the-wind family cuts short The Sound of Music at the close of “So Long, Farewell…”? Brilliant. But we would let our kids know about the Nazis because they’d be strong enough for that. They’d have just the right mix of grit and grace, like your books and my musings.

Like Togo, in fact. Which is where I live. You strike me as the kind of person who would know where that is (hint: not a Pacific island), but you know what? I’d find it irresistibly endearing if you didn’t. A few months back I lost a bet over whether or not Sudan has a coastline (it does); so I paid up for my friend Mark to guzzle down a big Guinness while I lamented how I’d just finished What is the What.

I guess I feel like you’d understand me, maybe even love me (daydreaming here), because you understand and love Valentino. These days I have more in common with him than you’d think possible. South Sudanese in Atlanta, Kansan in Togo; the similarities abound. Because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. I have loyal, generous friends (to the extent that Valentino has American friends), I have work (some days), I have the gratitude and wonder that comes along with making it this far. But I’ve been living in this village for a year now and the day-to-day can still be… rough. Unrelenting. Dull.

My days are strung together by two faint undercurrents, which I believe will make sense to you:

The first is of groundedness and belonging, of unshakable interconnectedness and tender humanity. Of babies who break into the purest smiles upon sight of me, of reveling in drunken laughter with my neighbors like we’re all in on the same joke.

The second is of brokenness and isolation, of sinking apathy and creeping doubt. Of babies who catch one glimpse of me and burst into tears, of tasting the cold bite of seclusion when the crowd has left me just one step behind.

The two coexist rather amicably, blending into something plain and unyielding enough to be called hope.

But then things happen that shake it all up, draw the second wave to the surface. You know those times, don’t you? When you just about had yourself fooled, believing you were the kind of person who could coast through adversity as the rock of serenity and strength. After all, you’ve been that person before. But this time all it takes is the smallest crisis to blow you over like a house of cards.

Whooooosh, life blows on you. Whoosh. A swift act of upheaval that is at once destructive and healing. Because, for whatever reason, you can’t give up that truer current, the one that whispers in your ear, It’s gonna be okay. In fact, it already is. Your suffering, your shame, your self-pity, your frustration – it’s all as beautiful and worthy as your dear humanness. You’re not finished here: you have more to give, more to receive, more to see, more to love.

So Dave. Have I bore enough of my soul to call you that? I sense not, but it would take a lot more than a single letter to match the weight of your memoir. So forgive me. Dave. I know the pull of it-could-be-worse, but tell me, honestly: Do you still get sad for yourself even as you bear witness to the kind of strife and injustice that renders your life a cakewalk? Not too sad, you can’t be that self-absorbed when you see all that’s going on around you, but… Do you still miss them?

I know why you’re drawn to New Orleans, to Sudan. It’s why Anderson Cooper skips parties to go “sniffing out blood in the water” in Iraq and Niger and the like. Why I am wandering around in barren fields and teasing smiles out of AIDS orphans. We’re all the same.

So Anderson’s reporting.

You’re writing.

And I’m living here, working on working, remembering over and over that it’s all worth it.

Thank you for daydreaming with me.

The One Year

Dragonflies sleep in trees.

I learned this early on in my experiment in village living. Walking to my latrine one evening, I spot a cluster of them perched on the tendrils of moringa that hang over my shower wall. They were so still I wouldn’t have noticed them had the edges of their transparent wings not framed their silhouette against the blue dusk – an impossible marvel, a blink-twice enchantment, like an Escher painting brought to life. Something about the delicate veins on their wings rendered them objects of stained glass, or dewy spider webs made solid. There they clung to the branch like a ladder, one above the next, synchronized in their splendor.

So struck by this, I gaped at them for a few minutes with a concentration normally reserved for election returns and season finales of Grey’s Anatomy – expecting them to do what exactly, I’m not sure, they were asleep! – then washed up for bed. I could hardly lie down without first sneaking back to find them, yes, still there, still asleep, still suspended in a gravity-defying chain of stillness undisturbed by my awe. They, after all, had been sleeping in trees for the entirety of their little dragonfly lives; it was no more a miracle to them than breathing or waking up each day – which is to say, a miracle beyond measure.

They kept me up at night, those dragonflies. They became something to Figure Out, to plunder for meaning: How could something so exquisite, so strange, not mean something – about Beauty? Mystery? Grace? God? Well, maybe not god in name, I’m not into all that, but… Creation? Life? Death? The Point of It All?

Night after night, I fell asleep to thoughts trailed by question marks and branches lined by dragonflies.

***

There is a chill hovering above my skin as I step out into the airport parking lot. This may have something to do with the beer in my blood, the breeze in the air, or the anticipation in my gut. Whatever it is, it’s a welcome respite from the muggy heat and the daily grind. I am here with a small but spirited group of Peace Corps Volunteers and administrators to welcome the new group of Trainees, fresh from Philly via JFK and Brussels.

Our first glimpse of them is from across the lot, where they stand huddled together in magical confusion. They are smiling, dazed, exhausted. Before we even load the bus to their hotel, they’re flooding us with questions – and just like that, we are the experts now. The answers to their questions taste good rolling off my tongue; there’s a strange satisfaction in having been around the block. I know how you feel, I say. It seems like just yesterday that I was you. They nod along, glued to the bus windows, awestruck by the lively street vendors and labyrinthine roads. And so their excitement rubs off on me like soot and I’m swept up by the exhilaration of commencing a grand adventure all over again.

Yes, it was wild. Yes, it was strange. Yes, it was deliciously nostalgic, a real full-circle moment. But if I told you it was climactic in its glory, I’d be stretching the truth. Rather it was a humble breed of elation that crept up on me, like roots not flowers, conveying the secure, unassuming peace that comes from being at home in your own life.

Our wide-eyed new arrivals, however, are far from home. Rushed off the plane and solicited for bribes on the runway, they see Togo in its natural state of (dis)order, defiant in its rawness: It never changes; you change. The biggest thing you figure out is that you will never really Figure Out a damn thing, so why not love the mystery.

***

I’ve been living in Togo for a year now. The dragonflies left months ago; no idea where they went, but no doubt they’ll come back when the season dictates. Gone, too, is my compulsion to ask Big Questions of small things… for the most part, anyway Having spent a year like pocket change, I recognize it’s only natural to pause and use this as a benchmark for reflection. So I could bore you with the requisite summation of this formative year (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” yada yada yada) but I don’t think you need a bow tied up all nice and neat. Did the dragonflies need to analyze themselves for me?

Seeking and making meaning is only human, and everyone does it to varying degrees. Did you see The Fighter? It seemed to me that those spiteful sisters did not pass much time in the grips of existential hand-writhing. I, on the other hand, am what one might call a meaning slut, searching for it everywhere and inventing it where it’s not readily found. But Togo has introduced me to a world whose boundaries extend past the confines of meaning, a world where things simply happen:

Americans move to villages.
Rains come in July.
People laugh at the same joke long after its humor is gone.
Pringles make a wholly satisfying meal when you’re too lazy to cook.
And dragonflies sleep in trees.

We all want a meaningful existence, but sometimes just existing is meaning enough.

The One Where I’m Awesome at Sports

In what is at most a brave display of my village’s progressive commitment to gender equity – and at least a fun excuse for the women to do something other than cook, clean, and fetch water – the ladies in my village are gearing up for a soccer match against a neighboring village. They have been practicing zealously, and I, of course, have been joining them. Since March Madness was such a downer this year, I’ve gotta get my sports fix somehow!

To my surprise, this turns out to be good old fashioned amateur sports kitsch at its finest. We have the usual cast of characters: The hyper-competitive Type-A one out for blood. The slow, heavyset one resigned to playing goalie. The whistle-happy coach offering correction after correction to these misfits, nobly fighting the battle that could never be won. The amused bystanders spouting commentary from the sidelines. And, of course, the one who gets picked last… none other than yours truly. I was hardly expecting to get picked – not wanting to get picked, preferring as always to provide moral support – but then someone yells out “Pak-yendu should play!” Everyone laughs, but agrees.

I am promptly called up from my spot on the sidelines, the novelty pick (“Look, the white girl can play!”). Since I have no actual “talent” or “athletic ability” to speak of, I rely on brute strength. Oh wait, I don’t have that either. But I do have shoes, which is more than anyone else on the field can say.

So out I go, jogging behind my team like a baby chick. I shuffle my feet around in the corner of the defensive side, avoiding the action at all costs. But then, watching the ladies scramble around one another and miss the ball like Charlie Brown, I gain some self-assurance: if ever there were a group of people as athletically challenged as me, it would be village women! Yeah! I can do this!

So there I see it: the ball. It is coming my way, as is a woman from the opposing team. I start racing her to it… and I get there! Woo! Go me! So I do what you do when you get to the ball: gather up all my strength, gear up to kick, eye on the ball, and…

Fall. Hard. Flat on my butt

As my little brother Nick would say, classic.

The crowd – hundreds of people, basically my entire village – descends into an uproar of laughter. Regaining my footing, I can’t help but crack up too. This way they can’t be laughing at me, right?

The One with the Potty Humor

Written April 10

Alas, my first ever business trip to Ghana (conference-expat-heaven) has come to an end. We have been cruising along back to Togo for quite some time when I lock eyes with my friend Whitney. She motions for me to pull my headphones out of my ears.

“What’s up Whit?”

“Do you have to pee?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Umm, will you ask the driver to pull over?”

For some reason we both start cracking up at her request. The trip from Accra to Lomé is not a long one, but it is a while to hold a pee.

“I just don’t wanna ask!” she adds between laughs.

I crack up again. “Yeah, no problem.”

I compose myself, swallowing the slew of giggles bubbling in my throat. Then I hesitantly, over-politely lean forward and tap the guy sitting in front of me.

“Excuse me, sir.” Nothing. I whisper a little louder. “Um, excuse me, sir.” He looks over his shoulder. “Could you please ask the driver to stop a moment?”

He whips around and hollers at the driver in a local language. The driver doesn’t understand. So the man yells in English:

“The WHITE LADY has to URINATE. Will you STOP for her?”

Well, that’s one way to put it.

The driver promptly pulls over. Whitney and I squeeze past the other passengers and scurry over to the side of the road to pop a squat. We are again dying with laughter. But at least we’re not dying of the need to pee.