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!

This is Peace Corps Life

In the beginning, we were told we would go on a roller coaster ride of emotions throughout our Peace Corps service. In this beginning, I thought I was doing great in terms of dealing with the culture shock and transition to living in Mali. PST was an experience, but generally I regarded the process with a sort of indifference to my surroundings. I had been away from home for months at a time, been in countries were I could not understand the language and been culturally and environmentally different from my own. Furthermore, I was living in a village with seven other Americans, many of them becoming my closest friends in Mali. Through this process, and after I swore in as a PCV, I went to site and felt ok with my situation. It was different, for sure, but I felt like I was dealing with my current predicament in a stable and mature manor. I knew I was having hard times. My previous blog postings depict that fact very well. My ramblings on about things that now seem irrelevant or overly personal was my way of “dealing”. I thought if I were open with the way I was feeling, I would get a positive feedback from my peers. Also, I thought that I was dealing similar to other PCV’s in my current situation. Well… this may not have been true. Some of my previous postings did receive a bit of feedback from my fellow PCV’s saying I was actually writing down what everyone else as feeling. This made me feel a little less lonely in my brusse village in east Mali.

Looking back on my previous postings, and reexamining my feelings during the first couple of months in Mali, I have discovered I was probably in my low slump of this roller coaster ride that is the Peace Corps. Additionally and unfortunately I feel like I am still in this slump. Returning to site after IST has been a challenge. It has caused me to revise my thinking on why I am here, what I am doing, and what I expect of myself. Also, I am confronted with what I call the Real Peace Corps Life and what that means. I am not living life in my village, counting down the days to IST where I will visit my friends anymore. Now, my village is even more represented as my home. That is where I live. I am not on vacation anymore. And I am definitely not at home in the states. I am having to reinterpret my views of who I am as a person, who I represent, who I want to represent, what is important in life, where I want to go, who I want to be and basically who I am. This is the easiest way to describe my emotional status:

I am in the desert and look around. There is nothing to see for miles but sand. I am alone. There are no paths to take, no sun to even get a general direction of where I am. I am lost. Completely and irrevocably lost.

The thing with the Peace Corps is you have so much time to yourself you start to examine parts of your life that you may have “accidentally missed” before. Things that happened to you or around you, experiences you had, or people you’ve met, and now you have the time to start mentally processing all of this. This is a good thing, especially for me. Its good I am learning how to scrutinize who I am as a person, and discovering new ways to either keep that behavior up, or change it for the better. Although this “mental examination” is good, it tends to leave me in a slump. A terrible, low, slump. A slump that sucks.
Now, I was told by some fellow PCV’s that I either needed to 1) stop blog posting or 2) stop blog posting because my blog posts were too negative and that the Peace Corps Admin would be reading it. Now, this got me thinking and I want to make some things perfectly clear:

1)Mali is great. Malians are great. My village is great. The people are generous, kind, and very friendly AND I have learned so much already being here for five months, that I am excited about my future as a PCV.
2)The Peace Corps is great. The people I have met are incredible and phenomenally strong individuals that I look up to with great respect. I am so lucky and blessed to be able to be surrounded by such caring, courageous and inspirations people.
3)ALTHOUGH THIS IS TRUE……THIS IS THE PEACE CORPS AND THIS IS MALI…this means……
a.ITS HARD! Its SUPPOSED to be hard. So I’m sorry and apologize for being negative, but sometimes that how it is and I don’t want to sugar coat anything for anyone. For people who are reading my blog and thinking about joining, it is important for them to know how it really is here. That this is no vacation. This is hard work, which will test you physically and mentally. There will be days you will cry alone in your hut. There will be days you will be so filled with joy and happiness because of an experience at site (although I have not had one of these days yet, I am hopefully that they will come). There will be days you will feel confused, lonely and well just plan upset. The Peace Corps is not supposed to be a walk in the park. This experience will change your life. It will mold you into a new person. But before you can grow, you have to build the bricks, and sometimes churning that cement and putting that cement in the mold is hard, excruciatingly difficult and strenuous work.

b.Not sugar coating my blog and writing as it is, is not only good for other volunteers to read but its good for our families. For the other volunteers, it’s great to hear that someone else is having the same problems and might be feeling similar feelings. We have a network of friends here, but we are all dispersed throughout the country. Knowing someone else is there, that you are not alone, is HUGE, sometimes it’s all you have. As for our families, I have found it is incredibly difficult to explain how it is to live in Mali. What that feels like, how that affects us and the relationships we have; both in country and at home. Writing what is actually happening on the ground and how I am feeling, hopefully, will allow my family and friends to try and start to comprehend what I am doing here and how I am living. We are so scared to actually tell others how we are feeling because of some due consequence that might befriend us. Being truthful with yourself and others, and admitting what is actually going on, is far more courageous than shutting yourself up and lying, telling yourself nothing is wrong. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to allow someone else in, where this is precisely what we must do to survive and thrive.

Being a PCV is hard. Sometimes it even sucks. But this is 100% the place I want to be. I feel like it is right for me to be here and to be doing the work I am doing. Peace Corps life is just a more “in your face” example of real life, it IS real life. Sometimes its hard, so hard we don’t want to go on with it anymore. Sometimes its gives you the most joy and happiness, and all you want to do is bask in the radiance of the beauty of life. In the states, we don’t see it this way as much. We have so much to distract us from what reality is, that we forget the life we are living. Mali has been the most amazing experience to allow me to see the true face and reality that is life; the joy, the pain, the hardship. Just because sometimes it is difficult, does not mean you have to give up, it just means you have to work harder to get to the finish line, and hopefully, in the process, you will grow into the person you want to be, the person you can be, the person you were meant to be.

An Explanation

I would like to start out by apologizing to everyone for my last blog posting. I understand that some of you might have taken offense by it. I would like to explain myself and to explain my blog in general.

When I started a blog I wanted it to be one thing. Yes, I wanted people to be able to track my adventures in Mali and the lessons I learn here. But really, I wanted, I want my blog to be an outlet for my thoughts and allow other people, who are not in the Peace Corps, to be able to get an idea of the mentality and physiological affect this place and what this institution has on people. I hoped that over time, with the succession of my blog, one would be able to determine my “calendar of emotions”, the railroad that is the Peace Corps, through my blog.

It is difficult to explain to people at home what we are going through here. This is not a vacation. This is not just a job. This is a life changing opportunity, time, where we give up everything we had at home, every comfort of America and our families and friends and come to a completely different environment and place and are alone. Doing this with someone is a different deal. You know that person. You know who they are really, and there are no secrets. But if you are alone, if you come here by yourself, which most of us do, we are all alone. We are alone because everyone has secrets and hiding them is hard. Everyone has a past, and for some our pasts are tragic, and hurtful and sad. For some our secrets dominate our lives. They decide every move we make, how we act, react and how we think. When we come here alone, the people we count on at home who know us and where no explanation for actions is needed are gone. This makes us downright alone. Coming to a whole new world (which is what it really is) is not only hard physically, but mentally. We have to not only learn how to trust people and take a huge faithful step, hopefully in the right direction, but we have to deal with all the other issues the Peace Corps throws at us; a COMPLETELY different and strange language, a new culture, a new way of thinking. Here, you are the minority. Here, you HAVE to change the way you think and live your life to be able to get to the next day.

Have you ever been so scared to go to sleep because the conditioning of America has told you that all Africans are barbaric, and you’re terrified that you won’t wake back up? Even though you remind yourself that that is not true and that Malians are the most generous, caring and loving people, you still have this fear that motivates your every move, which prevents you from sleeping. It takes every amount of effort to pretend your sleeping until your body takes control and nature wins. That’s what I go through every night.

Have you ever woken up and feel completely alone because not one person around you knows who you really are? You feel like you are living a fake life, one of courage and strength, when in reality you are just trying to get to the next day and not fall apart. Every one here wants to project that image that we are strong, confident people, that nothing can push us down because we got into the Peace Corps and we are here. Really though, this is all a façade. Everyone here is struggling, or has struggled to get from one day to the next. We silently, or not so silently cry and tell ourselves to just deal and to not be weak. We look at other people and tell ourselves to not compare ourselves, but then look on in jealousy or desperate longing to be that person, or to just be with that person, so we are not so alone.

Have you ever experienced not seeing the people you love for 27 months? Not one touch, not one kiss, not one smell of their sent? I cannot think about my mother or my sister or my friends because when I can’t help but cry. I cannot think about all the people I am missing, who usually are just a phone call away, because it is such a daunting thought that I have to purposefully push it out of my mind, hoping that the next day will be different. It never is.

My point, to all of you out there, is that no one at home can ever understand what we are going through. Its not there fault either, it’s just a Peace Corps thing. If you have done it, you know. If you haven’t, no matter how hard you want to understand you simply can’t. And that is why, although we call home and talk to friends, we sometimes still feel so alone. No matter how much we want to share with these people who have completely defined our lives, we can’t, and that boundary kills. It can kill our spirit and our hope. Therefore, we have to depend on the people here to be our new family. So we can go to them when we are sad, or alone, or out of our minds crazy. Yet, once here, everyone is trying to be someone they aren’t, not until you really know them, and breaking that barrier can be tragically difficult. Allowing yourself to trust someone you don’t know and hoping beyond belief they will respect you and keep your secret is, well, now that is hard. That is a bloody hard thing to do. We all come in with secrets, and we all come in trying to find something; something about ourselves, something about humanity, something about blind human nature. We are all searching and the question of the day is will we find it? We all have fears; will we be able to combat them? Everyone has things about themselves they don’t like, will we settle or try and change them? We all come here somewhat broken, and are hoping beyond belief that we will be fixed by this experience; by the people we meet here.

All I’m trying to say is there is a reason people say the Peace Corps is the hardest job you’ll ever love. We all want to be here, and we all love something about this place, but the pressure to succeed, change, and excel push us to physiological limits. I guess that is why it is said that this will change your life, why you leave home one person and come back another. It is hard. And although we can do it, sometimes it sucks. Sometimes there are the most amazing moments and sometimes we just feel completely and utterly alone.