Cristy in Benin
Wed Jun 16, 2004
April 2003
04-18-03: It finally hit me today - I'll be living in West Africa in less than two months. Holy shit. Ever since I got my invitation, I've been living in a state of denial. I've been acting as if it's completely normal for people to pack up and move to Africa to live in a mud hut without electricity or running water for two years. I've accepted the challenge as lightly as that of getting myself out of bed every morning, as if it were a simple step- merely a matter of course.
Now I must ask myself: "What have I done?" Failure is, for the first time in my life, a viable threat. Failure at any level can be upsetting, whether it's something as small as bombing that stupid stats quiz or something as big as bombing the interview for that dream job. I think I can safely say that I have never truly failed at anything I've ever done. And even if I did, that failure didn't have a large impact on my life, and it certainly affected nobody other than myself. Now I face the possibility of real failure. I have posed myself this challenge to push myself beyond my comfort zone, to get to know my own limits, my own self. I now realize that this challenge is no longer solely about me. My success or failure will impact an entire fragile community of people hanging on by a thread, with little reason to believe that there is still some hope left in the world. For the first time in my life, I'll be doing real work, important work that doesn't just affect me, that doesn't just affect some corporate investment, that doesn't just affect some insignificant statistic. I'll be doing work that will affect real lives...REAL LIVES...and my failure will also affect real lives. At least I can say that I feel ready to take this challenge, I just hope that I am strong enough to not let them down. For me, the scariest part is not knowing. Not knowing what challenges I will face, not knowing my own courage, my own will, my own strength. All of this not knowing, after 18 years of education....makes that college degree look a little silly, doesn't it?
04-04-03: I have spent a good chunk of time over the past month or so researching life in the Peace Corps. I'm remarkably like a small child, eager for any scrap of information that might throw some light on how and where I might be living abroad. Today, my thoughts turned away from my prospective volunteer experience itself, to the effect it might have on me when I return home. I changed so much as a result of my stay in Switzerland, that I can't even begin to imagine how living in a third-world country will affect me. I put together a little sketch of what I envision for my future. I'm posting it here so that I can read it when I get back and laugh at how silly and naive I once was...
I will be one inch shorter, as my body mass will have shriveled a little under the harsh sub-saharan sun and shrink due to the hard diet of rice, rice and rice. Maybe I will be legally considered a dwarf. I will no longer be afraid of spiders or cockroaches. In fact, I will return home with a family of bugs. I will name them, love them and whisper softly to them in the lonely hours of the night. They will ignore me until I give them food, take my unconditional love for granted (it's impossible to love something that creepy if it's not unconditional) and might even try to escape. I will come home loving America more than I ever thought possible. I will come home hating America, too. I will be more understanding of cultural differences and more sensitive to human suffering. Except of course, when it comes to my own children. They will just have to "deal with it", because they don't know what suffering is until they've seen what I've seen. I won't mind being dirty, and won't even notice being dirty until my little cockroach family councils me on the virtues of good hygiene. As one person recently said, I'll be SO much cooler than anyone else I know. I will gain fluency in a language that few have even heard of and will lose fluency in my native language. I might consider setting up a cultural exchange between the grizzly bear population of Montana and the wild camel population of the Sahara - both being equally misunderstood. I will read German literature in francophone west Africa and I will discuss Middle-Eastern politics with an English ex-patriate in French. My body will be weakend with exotic parasites, except for my neck, which will be brawny from balancing water buckets on my head. I will be a little on the bohemian side, "letting myself go" for the sake of simplicity. I will be ugly on the outside, beautiful but torn on the inside. I will have broken nails, frizzy hair, dry skin and dirty feet. I won't care. I will be completely different, but my name will not change. My country will not have changed, my family and friends will be much the same. I will come home and no longer recognize my own culture, my own home, myself. Then I will build my world again, as a new person with an old rusty name.
