Yesterday, instead of going to the Embassy to meet with the relevant secretary, I spent pretty much all day sleeping on the couch in the volunteer lounge, or shitting out my guts in the volunteer lounge bathroom. Whereas in the States, bodily waste is either number 1 or number 2, here in PC/Togo we have 1,2,3, and 4. The first two are the same; 3 is when you don't so much shit as you piss out your ass; 4, which is more common than I care to reflect upon, is when you both shit (either type-2 or type-3) and puke at the same time. Yesterday I held steady at number 3. This was accompanied by extreme abdominal pain, extreme headache, extreme nausea, and general weakness that left me either unable to get up or on the brink of fainting every time I did.
Today, however, I am fine.
In terms of health, I'm probably one of the most resilient volunteers here in Togo. There are other volunteers who rarely get ill, and when they do their illnesses last only for the short term, and require little medication but lots of rest. There are also those who have had no health problems but who then become gravely, frighteningly ill.
I can't really accurately say what the average health/sickness cycle is for most volunteers, because many of the illnesses (amoebas, giardia, other shit living intestinally) last for a long time (often due to lack of treatment due to unwillingness on volunteers' part to go to the med unit) and become part of the daily ignorable routine. I do know, however, that my girlfriend gets 'sick enough' about once every month or so. Not so sick that she has to be rushed down to Lome, but sick enough that she's in pain/on the toilet for more than one day in a row. Not to reveal anything too personal, but she was the first person to define number 4 for us, from experience.
So I consider myself lucky, when it comes to health. The sickest I've ever been was the night of a cluster-mate's going away party. The four of us in the cluster got matching bubus, with are like mumus, and then had ourselves a beer and tchouk crawl. I personally drank 3 liters, 30 centileters of beer, and three calabashes of tchouk (chugged; we were racing against some Togolese dudes at the tchouk stand). Needless to say, the rest of the night was immemorable.
My relatively good health here in Togo, in conjuction with my capable language abilities, often leaves me (usually while sitting at a bar) thinking to myself that, yes, I can handle being overseas. I can survive living in Togo, or another part of Africa, or even a place a little more 'accepting' of my skin color. But right after I have this thought, I realize that I don't want to survive in these countries, I want to go home. This always leaves me feeling slightly guilty.
Guilty because it brings up the questions that I sort of addressed in the last post, about privilege and luxury and all the aspects of zero-sum theory, which, at its most basic, says that one cannot have without depriving another. My good life in the States must is directly correlated to the poor life of someone somewhere else. If I'm totally wrong on my interpretation of zero-sum, I apologize, and would look forward to explanations helping me understand it further.
I try not to let the guilt overtake me. Dave Eggers wrote, in, I believe, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, though it might have been AHWOSG, that being born into privilege (in my case, white middle class in the United States) is so far beyond the choice or guidance of the individual that to feel guilty is useless. What are you going to do, give away everything you have, become poor and suffering on the side of the street? Sure, you could, but being a semi-utilitarian, I think you should never throw away the opportunities you already have. After all, my privilege has brought me to Africa, in an attempt to help an apathetic populace (my remarks are very editorial), which most people would say is a good thing, which deep down I still believe has merit and value, despite the reality that I've seen here face to face.
The other thing that eases my guilt is the simple and plain fact that I love the United States. Geographicall, socially, politically (despite some really frustrating shit), and emotionally. I am not a European, or an Asian, or an African, I am an American. It's weird how I'm just now beginning to get comfortable with that. When I was young (like, 22 and below) I thought so highly of people who spent long stretches of time living overseas. I thought that any capable, intelligent person would not only be able to live in a foreign country, but would choose to do so, and that those who could not, or would not were missing some key element in their lives. I no longer hold the expats in such high regard (though neither do I fault them; to each his own). It's both humbling and comforting to realize how important my life in the States is to me, and that I don't ever want to let it go again.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Je suis dumbass
Also, I just found out that 'quotidian' is an English word used much like the French word 'quotidienne', which I misspelled in the email post.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
An Email to My Friend, Which I Decided to Share With You All, Except for the Juicy Parts
I've been away from my village for sixteen days now, and I'm loving it. Kara, Lome, Agou, Atakpame, and now back in Lome. I don't really want to go back, to have to start again teaching sixty kids to a class, with their inability to spell or form complete sentences. But the money won't last me here in Lome, and as much as I hate my village, I suppose I'm committed to helping them out. After all, it's only one more year.
I hate to harp on things, even, if not especially, good things, but our AIM conversation the other week really pumped my spirits up, and I guess this little email is my attempt to carry on a conversation with you again.
I'm alone in the Peace Corps bureau, which is rare. There is a volunteer lounge, most definitely the filthiest part of the building, because sometimes upwards of fifteen or twenty volunteers occupy it at one time. There are couches, filled bookshelves, a water cooler, bathroom with a shower, and a computer room, as well as sixty or so lockable cubby holes that volunteers countrywide use to store Lome-usable-only items. On the coffee table at the center of the square of couches is an internet hub that those with laptops use since the two computers in the computer room are almost always occupied. At least, that's how it's been every day I've ever been in here, until today.
I'm not in town just to dick around, though most of my time is spent doing just that. Yesterday I got some information about funding sources for a palm plantation I'm trying to get started, and I touched base with my boss about revamping the technical information binder that every volunteer in my program gets, in preparation for the new group of trainees, who arrive Saturday.
So, this morning one of the tech. trainers and I went over the binder, pulled out what was useless, added what was missing, made the necessary recopies and adjustments, and then by two o'clock sent the final product to the general secretary so that he could ship it off to the printers before the week is out. Tomorrow I have an appointment at 9 a.m. at the U.S. Embassy to have the palm plantation project proposal 'edited' by the woman who reviews them for the ambassador, and then I'll spend the afternoon sending out requests for funds from private donors, because I'm almost positive that the villagers won't get the amount of money they've asked for from the Embassy. And then Friday I'll head back up to village and start teaching again. I'll have two breaks, the last week of October and the last week of November, when I'll be at the training site, teaching the young 'uns about Togo's educational system, and approaches we can take to implement environmental education into the curriculum.
If that sounds exciting, maybe it is, but for me there will still be plenty hours of boredom in between the occasional one or two hours of real work each day.
As you went through life did you ever ask yourself the question, When will I really grow up? You get your driver's license and think, this must be it, this is responsibility; but then you hit eighteen and graduate high school, and realize that this time it's for real, that is until twenty-one comes along, and then a year later college is over and now, really, this time you know you're a competent, knowledgeable adult. But time goes on and your confidence in this conviction rises and falls, is one day at one end of the spectrum, another day at the other end, passing back and forth like a sunflower following the sun. So you sign up for something responsible, like a job, or the Peace Corps, saying to yourself that now you'll take the time to really think about the future, to put off adulthood with this little excursion, that once this is done you'll be ready to accept whatever comes your way, no surprises, but then--well, i'm still in the middle of this last part, so I don't really know what comes next.
One of my favorite authors recently died. It was a suicide, hanging. Obviously, I never knew him, but you know what it's like when you really admire somebody, someone who, through every piece of writing, every interview, every televised reading, comes off as one of the most genuine people you could hope to know. You get sad, and you begin to doubt once again what you thought was a sure thing, no matter how simple. For someone who has given up religion, it shares whispers and shadows of the kind of mental devastation that comes with a loss of faith. I'm not incapable of continuing to believe in his writing, but now every time I read something he wrote, I'm going to interpret that curiosity and penchant for minutiae as the search for some kind of truth, a search not desperate, but casual, accepted, like a blind woman's gentle hands on your face, feeling out your features. He wrote a lot for Harper's Magazine, and right now they're offering an in memoriam of all his articles they published, so my time will be long occupied with that while I'm still here in Lome. If you want to check it out, go to http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557. I recommend reading, at the very least, Ticket to the Fair, about the Illinois State Fair. It's absolutely hilarious.
What really gets to me, though, is that I would consider myself searching for the same kind of thing I imagine he searched for. A reason, unbreakable and without caveat, to believe in humanity, and purpose to the universe. He believed in God, though I don't know exactly how, and even though I believe in a thing you could call God, I still think that he's not the answer to the worth of all that he has laid bare before us. I wasn't planning on finding any solution in my time, but I was buckling in for what I figured would be, as most would probably glean from his writing, an amusing and wacky journey into the quotidenne, which is French for 'daily,' and I'm sure used as incorrectly as its English equivalent would have been in that sentence. So if someone as intelligent, capable, and seemingly comfortable as DFW was unable to find anything to keep him around, I worry about the eventual fruits of my future labor. Granted, according the newspapers, his problem may have been chemical, as he was on anti-depressants for many years, and I, fortunately, can disengage myself enough from disappointment and frustration that I could never be honestly labelled as 'depressive'. But that's kind of what bugs me, too. It's kind of like that blog post I wrote a while ago, about how you have to leave behind your thoughts to be happy, and if that's the kind of existence you have to lead, then why lead it? That post was in a very Togo-specific setting, but when I think about how in the States I can think all I want and still be fine, then I wonder about luxury and excess being the breeding ground for idle thoughts, and the injustice of the world, the zero-sum game of resources and development, racism, jingoism, obesity, genocide, teen pregnancy, famine, global warming, injustice--and then I take a deep breath before I pass out, and search for a bar.
I hate to harp on things, even, if not especially, good things, but our AIM conversation the other week really pumped my spirits up, and I guess this little email is my attempt to carry on a conversation with you again.
I'm alone in the Peace Corps bureau, which is rare. There is a volunteer lounge, most definitely the filthiest part of the building, because sometimes upwards of fifteen or twenty volunteers occupy it at one time. There are couches, filled bookshelves, a water cooler, bathroom with a shower, and a computer room, as well as sixty or so lockable cubby holes that volunteers countrywide use to store Lome-usable-only items. On the coffee table at the center of the square of couches is an internet hub that those with laptops use since the two computers in the computer room are almost always occupied. At least, that's how it's been every day I've ever been in here, until today.
I'm not in town just to dick around, though most of my time is spent doing just that. Yesterday I got some information about funding sources for a palm plantation I'm trying to get started, and I touched base with my boss about revamping the technical information binder that every volunteer in my program gets, in preparation for the new group of trainees, who arrive Saturday.
So, this morning one of the tech. trainers and I went over the binder, pulled out what was useless, added what was missing, made the necessary recopies and adjustments, and then by two o'clock sent the final product to the general secretary so that he could ship it off to the printers before the week is out. Tomorrow I have an appointment at 9 a.m. at the U.S. Embassy to have the palm plantation project proposal 'edited' by the woman who reviews them for the ambassador, and then I'll spend the afternoon sending out requests for funds from private donors, because I'm almost positive that the villagers won't get the amount of money they've asked for from the Embassy. And then Friday I'll head back up to village and start teaching again. I'll have two breaks, the last week of October and the last week of November, when I'll be at the training site, teaching the young 'uns about Togo's educational system, and approaches we can take to implement environmental education into the curriculum.
If that sounds exciting, maybe it is, but for me there will still be plenty hours of boredom in between the occasional one or two hours of real work each day.
As you went through life did you ever ask yourself the question, When will I really grow up? You get your driver's license and think, this must be it, this is responsibility; but then you hit eighteen and graduate high school, and realize that this time it's for real, that is until twenty-one comes along, and then a year later college is over and now, really, this time you know you're a competent, knowledgeable adult. But time goes on and your confidence in this conviction rises and falls, is one day at one end of the spectrum, another day at the other end, passing back and forth like a sunflower following the sun. So you sign up for something responsible, like a job, or the Peace Corps, saying to yourself that now you'll take the time to really think about the future, to put off adulthood with this little excursion, that once this is done you'll be ready to accept whatever comes your way, no surprises, but then--well, i'm still in the middle of this last part, so I don't really know what comes next.
One of my favorite authors recently died. It was a suicide, hanging. Obviously, I never knew him, but you know what it's like when you really admire somebody, someone who, through every piece of writing, every interview, every televised reading, comes off as one of the most genuine people you could hope to know. You get sad, and you begin to doubt once again what you thought was a sure thing, no matter how simple. For someone who has given up religion, it shares whispers and shadows of the kind of mental devastation that comes with a loss of faith. I'm not incapable of continuing to believe in his writing, but now every time I read something he wrote, I'm going to interpret that curiosity and penchant for minutiae as the search for some kind of truth, a search not desperate, but casual, accepted, like a blind woman's gentle hands on your face, feeling out your features. He wrote a lot for Harper's Magazine, and right now they're offering an in memoriam of all his articles they published, so my time will be long occupied with that while I'm still here in Lome. If you want to check it out, go to http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557. I recommend reading, at the very least, Ticket to the Fair, about the Illinois State Fair. It's absolutely hilarious.
What really gets to me, though, is that I would consider myself searching for the same kind of thing I imagine he searched for. A reason, unbreakable and without caveat, to believe in humanity, and purpose to the universe. He believed in God, though I don't know exactly how, and even though I believe in a thing you could call God, I still think that he's not the answer to the worth of all that he has laid bare before us. I wasn't planning on finding any solution in my time, but I was buckling in for what I figured would be, as most would probably glean from his writing, an amusing and wacky journey into the quotidenne, which is French for 'daily,' and I'm sure used as incorrectly as its English equivalent would have been in that sentence. So if someone as intelligent, capable, and seemingly comfortable as DFW was unable to find anything to keep him around, I worry about the eventual fruits of my future labor. Granted, according the newspapers, his problem may have been chemical, as he was on anti-depressants for many years, and I, fortunately, can disengage myself enough from disappointment and frustration that I could never be honestly labelled as 'depressive'. But that's kind of what bugs me, too. It's kind of like that blog post I wrote a while ago, about how you have to leave behind your thoughts to be happy, and if that's the kind of existence you have to lead, then why lead it? That post was in a very Togo-specific setting, but when I think about how in the States I can think all I want and still be fine, then I wonder about luxury and excess being the breeding ground for idle thoughts, and the injustice of the world, the zero-sum game of resources and development, racism, jingoism, obesity, genocide, teen pregnancy, famine, global warming, injustice--and then I take a deep breath before I pass out, and search for a bar.
Monday, September 15, 2008
I Believe in You
Maman had heard we were coming, but she hadn't the credit to call me and confirm it. When the Peace Corps van rolled into Nyogbo, Maman was at the end of the driveway, standing behind a table containing bowls, colognes, and expensive woven shirts. I waved to her, and she stared at me, which I always take to mean, "Oh, really, so you're back now?" but which I like to think is just Maman's way of saying, "You're home, and this is good, this is what normal should be."
Catching up started as it always does; I complained about my village, Maman gave out the locations and status of my host-siblings, all away on summer break except Daniel. Daniel was shy at first, like he was at the funeral, but he remembered me, and after some minimal prodding he was showing me the completed pages of the coloring book I'd brought for him a year ago, as well as his new cat, Chance. "Tony, regardes." He picked Chance up by her back, turned her upside down, and without hesitation threw the cat feet up into the air. When she landed on her feet and tried to slink away, he laughed and grabbed her and repeated the trick six or seven more times. Daniel's smile is more space than teeth.
We were in town for just three days, designing the training program for the new group coming soon. I'll be teaching them about the joys of working in the Togolese school system. Yippee. Because we were there as volunteer trainers and not trainees, we slept at the tech house, and not with our host families. Many of us ate from fufu stands along the road, or grabbed cent francs of koliko and fried plantains. Aside from a communal trip to a fancy restaurant in the nearby bigger town, and pizza night at Edith's house, I ate every meal with Maman and Daniel. Couscous with fried chicken and veggies; rice and tuna spaghetti sauce; koliko and fried plantains with spaghetti and chicken; etc.
Meal time was Our Time during training. If I wasn't helping prepare (they only let me do that rarely), I was always sitting on a small stool in the kitchen, talking to Maman, Kommi, and Angel while they cooked, playing with Daniel while we waited to eat. Then, because the children ate apart from us, and Papa usually enjoyed his meals in the living room, Maman and I would sit across from each other at the table and go over the day's events. This visit, things were no different, except, of course, that Papa was not there.
I'd been wanting to ask her about how she's been since his death, but didn't know how to approach the subject. On our last day in town, eating the spaghetti she'd prepared for me the night before, not knowing that I was at the fancy restaurant, I saw an in to the subject and took it. "Since he died, I don't understand anything," she said. Well, I said, all we can do is keep living. God knows his affairs.
It was at this last comment, a common one in Togo, that she looked up. She seemed tired, like a person who has finally settled for an argument by giving up her side completely. "Do you believe that?" she asked. "I guess I have to," I said. She stared at her plate, resigned, and said simply, "Oh."
One of our big lunchtime discussions during training had been about religion. Maman had pried out of me that I didn't go to any church, and that this was a conscious decision. We had a conversation eerily reminiscent of one my grandmother and I had had years ago, and almost as reassuring. God was what she loved, church was just the easiest way to get to him sometimes.
The distance between these two conversations is a long and disturbing whisper. I don't believe in religion, but I believe in Faith, in the comfort and necessity of believing in something beyond yourself. Often, we rely on this Faith, attribute to it powers, make it divine, expect it to let things ride when all is well, and to support us when times are hard. It is there to explain the inexplicable. When it can't, there is no hope, simply devastation.
Catching up started as it always does; I complained about my village, Maman gave out the locations and status of my host-siblings, all away on summer break except Daniel. Daniel was shy at first, like he was at the funeral, but he remembered me, and after some minimal prodding he was showing me the completed pages of the coloring book I'd brought for him a year ago, as well as his new cat, Chance. "Tony, regardes." He picked Chance up by her back, turned her upside down, and without hesitation threw the cat feet up into the air. When she landed on her feet and tried to slink away, he laughed and grabbed her and repeated the trick six or seven more times. Daniel's smile is more space than teeth.
We were in town for just three days, designing the training program for the new group coming soon. I'll be teaching them about the joys of working in the Togolese school system. Yippee. Because we were there as volunteer trainers and not trainees, we slept at the tech house, and not with our host families. Many of us ate from fufu stands along the road, or grabbed cent francs of koliko and fried plantains. Aside from a communal trip to a fancy restaurant in the nearby bigger town, and pizza night at Edith's house, I ate every meal with Maman and Daniel. Couscous with fried chicken and veggies; rice and tuna spaghetti sauce; koliko and fried plantains with spaghetti and chicken; etc.
Meal time was Our Time during training. If I wasn't helping prepare (they only let me do that rarely), I was always sitting on a small stool in the kitchen, talking to Maman, Kommi, and Angel while they cooked, playing with Daniel while we waited to eat. Then, because the children ate apart from us, and Papa usually enjoyed his meals in the living room, Maman and I would sit across from each other at the table and go over the day's events. This visit, things were no different, except, of course, that Papa was not there.
I'd been wanting to ask her about how she's been since his death, but didn't know how to approach the subject. On our last day in town, eating the spaghetti she'd prepared for me the night before, not knowing that I was at the fancy restaurant, I saw an in to the subject and took it. "Since he died, I don't understand anything," she said. Well, I said, all we can do is keep living. God knows his affairs.
It was at this last comment, a common one in Togo, that she looked up. She seemed tired, like a person who has finally settled for an argument by giving up her side completely. "Do you believe that?" she asked. "I guess I have to," I said. She stared at her plate, resigned, and said simply, "Oh."
One of our big lunchtime discussions during training had been about religion. Maman had pried out of me that I didn't go to any church, and that this was a conscious decision. We had a conversation eerily reminiscent of one my grandmother and I had had years ago, and almost as reassuring. God was what she loved, church was just the easiest way to get to him sometimes.
The distance between these two conversations is a long and disturbing whisper. I don't believe in religion, but I believe in Faith, in the comfort and necessity of believing in something beyond yourself. Often, we rely on this Faith, attribute to it powers, make it divine, expect it to let things ride when all is well, and to support us when times are hard. It is there to explain the inexplicable. When it can't, there is no hope, simply devastation.
DFW, 1962-2008
David Foster Wallace is dead.
There's the old cliche which has now reared its head with the news of his death: "His writing meant so much to me." I can't see any way to get around that.
It was just so damn good. I've recommended him to anybody I've ever met who likes writing.
I'd like to write more, but I never knew him beyond his writing, and I think speculation on his final thoughts (which I can't help but to do) would be grotesque and insensitive to put in writing on a fan's stupid blog.
Read him.
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