The One avec le Chaleur

Written April 30

“Et le chaleur?” a smarmy neighbor asks me. And the heat?

My immediate reaction is to get ticked off, defensive. “In America, I lived in the real desert,” I tell them, contrasting a mental snapshot of Arizona against the cactus-less savanna splayed out around me. With stubborn pride I insist: “I’m used to the heat.”

Sure, I’m used to the heat – but not heat like this. The heat I know envelopes you on the walk from one air-conditioned room to another, or scalds your fingertips when you open the door to your car, or compels you to indulge in a popsicle every time you walk by the freezer. But this heat… 115 with none of the respite born of electricity (fans, cold drinks, ice, or, the pinnacle of all fantasies, air-conditioning)… I have stopped kidding myself. I am NOT used to it.

I keep (unsuccessfully) trying to convince myself that hot season is some kind of spiritual obstacle course, a long hard road to the enlightenment stowed away in the Buddhist maxim “Life is suffering.” But, whether that road is just too long or I’ve unwittingly taken a wrong turn, enlightenment never comes – only more heat.

Before you declare me a wimpy brat and stop reading – After all, it’s just heat, right? Buck up, it can’t be that bad! – let me explain. It’s too hot to work, too hot to sleep, too hot to move. It’s too hot to go inside my own house – every dash inside that brick oven of a building is like a race against time (this message will self destruct in 8… 7… 6…). It’s too hot to cook… but hey, it’s also too hot to eat, so that works well! We’re trapped in a merciless process I call the Heat Cycle. It goes a little something like this: Get hot. Get exhausted. Get out of whatever you were so bold to attempt to do ASAP. Guzzle down a liter of [hot] water. Dump a bucket of [hot] water over your head. Find shade. Lay out. Wait for the reprieve of a [hot] breeze (which feels oddly like getting bombarded with a hair drier). Repeat.

Much to my luck, however, a string of work engagements and a vacation led me out of my village – and the heat! – for the entire month of April, delivering me from this dizzying carousel. It was only upon leaving the heat that I could appreciate it for one thing, and one thing only: GRATITUDE. It’s the feeling of sipping a cold bottle of Coke, slipping into a cold shower, sleeping with the humming company of a fan. It’s the feeling of every cell in your body saying thank you to life for finally giving them a break. It’s the feeling of freedom in all its glory – intense, potent, pure. So there it is: I am thankful to the heat for making me thankful for every heatless moment.

But every vacation has its end, and now I’m back in the unrelenting grasp of the Heat Cycle, not liking it one bit. Like everyone else in our village, I’ve given up all hopes of being in any way “productive” until the rains come: my mission is survival. Making it through the day is challenge enough. Invariably, at some point during my restless afternoons when the heat is at its worst, my mind reminds me that I have an out. I can call the Peace Corps office and tell them I’m done. I can hop on a motorbike and a bus and, 16 sweaty hours later, be at that air-conditioned office to get some paperwork and bloodwork and get gone. I can board a cushy plane to Kansas City via Paris and DC. I can retrace my steps back to where it all began… in the nondescript terminal with an iced latte and a bagel… hell, with cool clean water from a public drinking fountain.

The allure of this possibility intoxicates me for anywhere from a couple of minutes to (on a bad day) a couple of hours before something snaps me out of it. It’s the something that chose this, the something that checked the little box designating Sub-Saharan Africa as my “first choice location” on the Peace Corps application, the something that literally jumped up and down squealing upon hearing the words “we have a sustainable agriculture and food security position for you in Francophone West Africa,” the something that dreamed this dream so hard it just had to come true.

I’m not quite sure what that Something is – hope? wanderlust? a tumor stubbornly lodged in the part of my brain responsible for rational decision making? – but apparently it can withstand even the most suffocating swells of discomfort. For better or for worse, it reins in my tormented fantasies and desperate escape plans long enough for me to dump a bucket of water on my head and retreat to the shade. I close my eyes; It calls my name. It takes hold of my sweaty hand and adamantly yanks me along to a place called Surrender.

It is there I rest.

I can’t eliminate the suffering, but I can endure it. This realization doesn’t exactly feel like Buddhist enlightenment, but what do I know.