Ask any PCV and they will tell you similar stories as to how you can go from feeling so great and fulfilled and “this is exactly where I want to be, man!” in one moment to wondering why the hell you have put yourself in such an isolated, lonely, and degrading situation the next. These feelings are especially fresh in your first year of service, when things are new and language still difficult. I guess I had a particularly bad year due to problems in my first site, but I know that the feeling is mutual among us all. Some days are so good and others are so, so bad. Oh the bipolar disorder of the Peace Corps volunteer.
My best days as a Peace Corps volunteer have been the ones where we are out all day farming rice. We start early in the morning and go until after noon. If I’m with a good group, the morning will be spent gossiping (or at least them gossiping and me listening along). Then we find our way to some pre-chosen tree where the cooks of the day have been building fires and cooking rice for the last two hours. Farming days are always the best for food; we always get beans. And Malagasies know how to do rice and beans, let me tell you. After I show how good of a Malagasy I can be by eating a mountain of rice, we clear the mat and it is naptime. I love the tradition of siesta-ing, though I can never really fall asleep. To me it’s simply reading time placed right into my day! After about an hour, we start up again. The afternoon planting is always fun because people are tired and therefore goofy but also want to get it done so they move faster. I like this because I once had (before joining Peace Corps) a serious need for efficiency and so it is the one time in my life here that I feel I can act on this virtue (or fault, depending on how you look at it). And I am secretly quite competitive so I get to challenge myself to transplant faster than the rest. (Okay, two annoying personality traits brought out there…but I am who I am). The best part of the day comes around 5 when we are in our last half hour of planting and the evening has set in. It is outrageously beautiful out there, gazing across all those straight green lines of seedlings as the sun goes down across the farm. I have always loved a good mountaintop view, a sunset at the beach, but there is nothing to me like the night fading into a field freshly planted.
My worst days as a volunteer are those where I feel the most isolated. I’ll say that thus far in my second year I have been quite content at site, feeling really welcomed by my community and finding sincere friendship in the people. The days that are bad for me now are actually those where I go into the city for work or market and end up having to crash there by myself. Where in the village you can never quite feel alone, the city engulfs me in solitude. Interactions with people on the street are not the friendly ones of my village, but are based on my white skin and the idea that it determines how much money I must have. Either that or its being called “vazaha” or “Cherie” constantly by every man you walk by. For the most part, I’ve gotten used to the harassment of the Malagasy men (who by the way have NO game…a fact that has been confirmed to me by many a Malagasy woman). Generally I just make a joke out of it and cat-call them right back, surprising them with my Malagasy. But when you are alone in the city for a couple of days it really gets to you. Or to me anyways. Furthermore, when I’m stuck in the city for too long I end up on the internet too much. Which is something that, if you are not used to it in your life, can make you go a bit crazy. It always makes me go crazy and I generally end up getting upset over something in my past life (back when I was an Amerrriicannnn). My friends back home must think I’m nuts by now and I hope that if I ever move back near them they will forgive me for making them listen to my lamenting about completely irrelevant things.
Of course, people have good and bad days everywhere in the world. I know that even in the states I went through down times that felt the worst and high times that felt magnificent. I think that the real difference is simply the pace in which you can move from one emotion to another. In this blog I have written about full days gone well or terrible, but in reality its more like an hour of this that dramatically changes to that. I can wake up in the morning and cringe thinking “There is no way I can speak ‘gasy today” and twenty minutes later I am out at my coffee stand gossiping away with Mama Café. The next minute someone makes fun of a mispronounced word, everyone laughs, and there I am all discouraged again. Then of course I am handed a little nugget of a baby to hold while the mother runs an errand and I am uplifted again.
It’s a very emotional time, the Peace Corps-ing!
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