Small Successes

It’s hard being where we are and doing what we are doing. Yes, it is hard being a Peace Corps volunteer, but living and growing up in this generation is hard to. Many of us don’t give ourselves enough credit for our accomplishments. We only look at the failures in our lives and forget about all the small successes. When I was in high school all I did was go go go. I had to do everything because I felt that people would think I was a failure if I wasn’t a strait A student, in all the clubs and doing numerous extracurricular activities. I was concerned not only with what my parents thought, but I was concerned with what my future college recruiter would think. At then when I was accepted to college, I started to be concerned with what my future roommate would think about me. Would I be skinny enough? Pretty enough? Rich enough? Smart enough? Good enough? Once I entered college, my thoughts concentrated around my coach and if I was good enough to be on the rowing team. Did I have what it took? For four years of my life, well for much of my teenage and young adult life, all I cared about was what people thought of me. Was I good enough? Was I matching life up? Was this the way I was supposed to act? I never one looked at the small victories in my life. No, I only looked at what I wasn’t doing, or what someone else was doing better.
I always said that I wanted to join the Peace Corps because I wanted to change my life. I wanted to leave my family and friends and come back someone different, someone better. I was so wrong. I am not becoming better here, none of us are. We are all growing into the people we all ready were, but had no time to find. I like to think of one of the most engaging and special moments in Mali to be one, which included a group of women and myself at market. Now, when I tell this story to other people they’re like “really Hannah, that’s your special moment?” – well yes it is. I was sitting there, on a log, at the end of a long market day. Since I am living in Mali, the sun was beating down on me so much that all my clothes, of course, were soaked in sweat. Nonetheless, I sat there, on that log, with this little 5 foot woman who lives in my village. We started talking – aka laughing and pointing at each other – when another woman (im not sure who she actually is) came up to me and said she loved my necklace. I said thank you and jokingly took it off and gave it to her. So she, in return, took hers off and, moving the hair, clipped her necklace onto my sweat soaked neck. She looked at me and said, there, now we’re friends. Then, of course, the necklace I was gave her broke, haha. Well, of course, I felt terrible and tried to give her necklace back. She would not take it, telling me she could fix the necklace and wear it all the time.
This simple act of friendship caught me so off guard I didn’t know what to do. Yes, I had been going to market with these women for months now, and yes we had talked before and yes they were the closest people to “friends” I had in village, but that simple act of kindness blew me away. I sat there on the horse cart going home and began to think about the differences between Malian and American culture. Yes Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a illiteracy rate of around 70%, a malnutrition problem, where children only go to school till the age of, hopefully, around 13 and then – if we’re lucky – wait a couple of years to get married and start reproducing. Yet, with all of these “problems”, the people in Mali are a whole other story. They’re kind. They’re generous. They’re loving. They are funny. They care. Yes, they might not “think the way we do”, but is that bad? Why do we need to live with washers and dryers? Why do we need to drive a car every where we go when walking can do? Why do we need to blow dry our hair every morning, just so we can look cute walking down the street impressing total strangers? Why do we need all these things? I think back on my high school and college years and all I think about are the things I did to impress other people, socially and professionally. I never did anything for myself or because it was simply the right thing to do. I lost everything about myself that I wanted to be, everything that I wanted to grow up to be.
Mali is special in a way because it allows you to look at life simply. It gives you not only another view of the world, but another view of yourself. One of the aspects of the PC that I find so difficult is the way our mental thinking is challenged here. We cannot start a project from beginning to end just in a couple of months. Other things matter or get in the way, which prevent us from doing so. Sometimes it is very difficult. We have grown up in a culture and environment where everything is go go go. We have to get things done and get them done now. If we don’t, we are failures and we don’t deserve to be doing what we’re doing. We never give ourselves credit for our small successes when all we do is look at those few small failures. We are too hard on ourselves. We deserve so much more. For peat sake, we are in the Peace Corps. We are living in AFRICAN VILLAGES BY OURSELVES! We are eating with our hands, living without electricity, speaking new languages, peeing in a hole, sleeping with bugs. We, in its very definition, are a success. We have trained our brains to only think about the big projects, the big steps in life, big big big, yet, sometimes what matters is not big, but is small. The smells of shea ripening in the hot Malian sun, the smile of a friend who understands you and visa versa you understand them, a small gesture of friendship between two very different people. Life is full of small successes. Just because they are small does not mean they matter any less. We forget this. We are, in a way, trained to forget this.
In light of this, I have placed below some small successes. Some are my successes in country so far. Some are cultural gatherings between new friends. And some are plain beauty found in a country full of beauty, grace and eloquence.

First manicures ever! and with sparkelly nail polish too!