Unconscious racism

All the things I've wanted to say already spelled out for me:

Feast or Famine

My former site mate used to refer to Peace Corps as a constant experience in "feast or famine." And while he shared many gems of wisdom about the Peace Corps experience such as, "You actually dedicate 5 years to Peace Corps, 2 years of service but the experience takes 3 years off the tail end," or "the best way to deal with iwes is with a stick," I think he really nailed it with the feast/ famine analogy. 

Village life is probably an acquired taste for most Americans. Life moves slower here, we are without constant distractions, there's a strong sense of routine, it takes about double to triple the amount of time to complete a task as it would with appliances, people and animals rise and set with the sun, hygiene is..questionable. It's fairly different than any way I've lived in the US so far.. And I've had a diverse-ish range of experiences:

The poor kid

The church kid

The divorced parents kid (aka the every other weekend kid)

Camp counselor

Poor college kid

Intentional community volunteer (aka suburban mouse goes to the city)

Now, Peace Corps Volunteer

And despite the fact that most of my experiences have had an element of living simply, (often in hopes to be sustainable and ethical)--none of them have been quite as... intense? as my Peace Corps experience.

I think I've finally hit my first real low point in my time of service. Right on cue according to our handy dandy "Cycle of Vulnerability and Adjustment," which is essentially a rollercoaster diagram that predicts our mental stability and happiness at any given point through out our 27 months of service. It's like a big, "FYI: you're life will most likely suck at some point within this 2 month range and then again in another month or so!"

Courtesy of Peace Corps, of course. 

Peace Corps starts us volunteers off living in one or two villages with our homestay families. We spend all day every day in classes and trainings together until we go to site visit and get the first taste of, "Oh shit! This is what this is really like.. And I'm doing it solo." Then we come back and console ourselves with our friends before eventually packing up and moving to our sites for real. 

PST was hard for me because I never got a moment alone to process, decompress, or just not have to interact with another human being. Moving to site was equally as hard because the support net we had built within each other and begun to cling to was suddenly gone, or at least a hell of a lot harder to access. We went from living on top of each other to not seeing one another for four months until we reunite at our next Peace Corps training, IST. 

And so, the cyclical "feast or famine" nature of Peace Corps is born, and no doubt continues throughout the duration of our service.

Unlike a majority of my classmates, I broke the cardinal rule of staying at site or within my catchment area (25 km) for my first 3 months at site. For the record, I see and understand how vital this rule is and why it exists. Nonetheless, I applied for three different programs and was accepted to each. First, I spent a week at Malaria Bootcamp where I learned more about malaria and took an incredible amount of resources home for better prevention work. I came back to my site for 2 days before I left again for Operation Smile which was a two week long endeavor where medical professionals volunteer from all over the world to come and work with patients who have primarily cleft lips and pallets, preforming free surgery. From Operation Smile I went straight to Camp Glow, a girl's empowerment camp and led a session about women's health, menstraution, and pregnancy. 

It's been a whirlwind of learning, awesome experiences, bonding and some fucking great and transcendent-like moments. I actually enjoyed myself dancing. It happened. Though, it has also been almost a month straight of nonstop interaction with Peace Corps vols and other expats. And I mean morning to night. 

Along with some of my peers and classmates who I dearly love and was so happy to reconnect with, it was also a time to say goodbye to some of my closest friends in PC, proximity and otherwise. 

Ever since I came to site, and met them, I've been saying goodbye to some of my Karonga brothers.  It's shaped my experience in an odd way as they have been preparing to leave and for the transition process the whole time I've known them, while I have been figuring out how to survive here.

It was the long goodbye, complicated by the fact that they are just such high quality men, full of PCV Malawi wisdom, and I became close with them, (about as close as you can get in two-ish months, ya know.) I was able to spend a good amount of time with them right before they left, as our time in Lilongwe overlapped almost perfectly. It was beyond lovely.

Despite the fact that this was anticipated, and I'd known all along, saying goodbye and the echoes of those goodbyes has proven harder than I anticipated. It's still beating me up a little bit every now and then. Its just hard to have lost my life lines to America. What's so great about that place anyway? (I know, I know.. Cheese.)

All that jazz, plus some pretty heavy emotional dealings in Lilongwe that really brought me down, and the longest case of stomach illness that I've ever endured, left me feeling wrecked. But on my way back from Glow, I met up with a few other volunteers in their travels to or from Op Smile, Glow, Lilongwe, restocking, whatever--in Mzuzu. It was wonderful. The previously intense social atmosphere and touch of the emotional insanity from Lilongwe was nowhere to be seen. It was then that I realized how much it was going to hurt going back to site alone, especially sans my now dearly departed brothers.

And the feast or famine analogy resurfaces.. (Though maybe frenzy or famine would be more appropriate in this case.) And while it doesn't always rear it's head in the form of social interaction, it surfaces all the time in a variety of ways, with PC surveys, needs and requests, good food options, (boma, restock, city life, baby) trainings, travel--especially travel. 

This is the life we live--all or nothing.

On the flip side, it is of course unfair to refer to village life and rocking it solo as famine. But everytime I leave for more than a couple days it is terribly hard to reacclimate. I love my life here in chifyu, I love everything about it, but it's also easy to resent it when you let yourself remember the rest of the world outside of this beautiful little Karonga bubble. 

In fact, I came to a realization that my coping strategies here are always things that help me escape or take me farther from Malawi. They link me back to America in an attempt to erase my Malawian reality, the very same that I'm trying to experience and be present within-- you know, the world where I am dead set on building a life?! And while I know this has value sometimes, I've decided that I need to find my happiness and my coping strategies here. I need to be grounded here and not always clinging to America, Americans, or anything we've created for mindless entertainment, though all of those things have their merits and times where they are good and effective choices.

And so here I am. On the upswing of my downward slope of a diagram that can apparently and frustratingly tell the future. Damn my predictability.

I appreciate the fact that you made it through what I hope is my whiniest post yet, and for all the love, positive vibes, energy, prayers, astroprojected hugs, whatever being thrown my way. I know that y'all and the universe are in my corner, that none of this is all that bad. 

You've just got to feel all the feels once in awhile, you know?

Becoming

I've always felt like I live in a state of becoming, and that the real world existed just past my finger tips. For the first time in my life I solidly feel like I am who I am, I know who I am, and I'm not seeking or working toward becoming someone or something. 

(I swear I was 1/3 an English major.)

It's a shame that it took me until I was 26 to be comfortable and unapologetic about who I am, embrace it, and love it. Me. 

I was talking to a friend the other day and casually said, "I feel the best about myself now than I ever have before." She just kept repeating, "Damn, that's a good thing to say." I hadn't even thought about it before I said it, but I reexamined it in my head and it was true, deafeningly so.

That's not to say that this time in my life is one without struggle, emotional break downs, or my occasional tendencies towards melancholy, but it's a point where I've finally ponied up and laid it out for that formerly anxious little girl:

This is what I want out of life

This is what is important for me to achieve

This is what I'm proud of

This is what I need to let go of

These are the tendencies that make you unhappy

It's okay not to know what's next

Let things happen

Mostly though, it was learning to let go. 

Letting go of old embarrassments, old loves, and old soul shattering pains. 

Or maybe it was the embracing- myself- my quirks, insecurities, and limitations.

And of course I'm always working towards becoming the best version of myself, it's just finally I'm aware of who I am and that right here and now, as is, I am just okay!