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.
