2011 In Review. Are you sitting down? This is a long one.
2011 went by so quickly. When I look back at it, my head starts to spin. The months of January through March were spent: packing up my home, divesting myself of some of my belongings, finding great renters for my house, guardians or new parents for all my pets, preparing to leave my job of almost 12 years at the Humboldt Senior Resource Center, turning my legal and financial life over to my brother, and finally, saying goodbye to colleagues, friends, and family. Oh yeah, and trying to decide what to bring with me, and repacking and scaling back as I moved first out of my home to my sister’s and/or Stan’s for a few days, then from there to my mother’s for a few more days before flying out to Philadelphia for staging. I still ended up having my mom send me things and as you might guess, some things I brought have been totally worthless, others lifesavers. It’s a crap shoot, to be sure but I am finding myself well suited to having less, rather than more.
I had a wonderful party before I left where I said goodbye to some of my most special friends and supporters. All the love and support you have shown me has been so important. Many of you have done some truly amazing things to help me along my journey, whether with cash support, purchases of things I couldn’t live without, packages to remind me of home, letters, emails, e-cards, and Facebook contact, or simply my knowing you are there reading my blog and wishing me success. You know who you are and I love you for it.
So far, I have no serious regrets about my decision. Some minor ones, yes. Like giving away the clothing that was too small for me and I figured would never fit me again. Now that I am down to 144 lbs, having lost 20 lbs. (gads!) since arriving here, I really miss that beautiful grey skirt. I also regret not having more shoes that I can walk miles and miles in, but I have two pair that seem to work – one for winter and one for summer, so it’s mostly okay.
In early April, our group of 39 arrived here in Botswana and started our training and medical started giving us all kinds of shots and our anti-malaria medication. It all felt surreal. The training itself wasn’t difficult although it was all consuming for those 9.5 weeks. We spent time learning about Botswana, its language and culture – through both class time and while living with our host families; HIV/AIDS and the particular cultural norms and values that make it more problematic here; the government’s plan of action; working with communities to assess needs and with non profits to help build their capacity, etc. etc.
I had a great host family with a 13 year old “niece” who was kind and fun to be with, my “mother” who, while just 3 years older than me, took her role as my host mom seriously and made sure I knew what I needed to know, including that I was part of the family and loved unconditionally. My brother and his girlfriend lived at the house too, and their 1 ½ year old sun and 3 year old daughter would melt my stress off my shoulders the minute I walked in the front door each evening. Then there were my four sisters, who would visit when they could, and took me in as the eldest sister with much love and affection. I could not have been any luckier. I have become good friends with a nice handful of trainees, and we were sworn into service on June 8th. Although I would miss many of the people I had met up til then, I was glad to be on my way to Otse to begin my service.
Our group has had some attrition, going from 40 starting out in Philadelphia to 39 boarding the plane, three leaving before being sworn in and three more within a month or two at site. We lost three more through the end of the year, plus one who quite PC but has stayed in the country for now. Every one of them had legitimate reasons and no one takes the decision to end their service lightly, but our attrition rate is somewhat spectacular by PC Botswana standards. Those of us who remain continue to do the best we can and continue to learn about ourselves in the process.
From when we arrived at our sites until mid-August we were officially on “lock down” and expected to stay in our communities, get to know our neighbors, community leaders, etc. , do an assessment of needs, and continue to learn the language. Because my placement had a very defined job for me, working on a grant with a time limit, I didn’t have the “luxury” of wandering around my village and getting to know people. Instead, I was working a 40+ hour week and doing the community assessment work on my “off” time. Then, in July, after I had been here for just over a month, my counterpart on the grant gave notice and we had to reexamine how we would continue the grant activities. Most of it landed on me and my work load increased even more.
In these first months, I was also increasingly concerned about my dad’s rapidly failing health. I knew my dad would continue to decline, and that he was unlikely to last through my two year’s of service, but I hadn’t expected things to move so quickly and am grateful that I was able to fly home in August in time to say goodbye to him.
I have to hand it to Peace Corps, because it was less than 24 hours from when my step-mother made the call to the stateside Peace Corps office to when I got the call from our local office that they could have me on a plane that evening. I arrived almost exactly 24 hours before he died.
The rest of my 10 days in the States was spent helping my mother move out of her small apartment into a nice big, open and airy home she was sharing with her new roomie Ann. It kept my body and mind busy and that was a good thing. Besides, it had become tradition that every time my mother moved I was supposed to put up her artwork. Some traditions you just can’t break, even when in the Peace Corps. May they both live long and happy lives in THAT house!
Otse is a great little village. I enjoy my lovely home and garden, my two adopted cats (from departing Bots 8 volunteers), and the beautiful views of the hills that surround us on three sides. I am not too far from the capitol – about 45 minutes by bus – and closer to a smaller town called Lobatse where I go to do most of my shopping and where my Rotary Club is located. I have begun to make friends here and am getting involved in more community activities.
Even though many mornings when I walk out the door, part of me says, “oh great, another day of not understanding more than the basics” most days are good and I can at least greet people properly and more and more they are recognizing me and accepting me in their routines. People are generally friendly and interested in me, and pleased that I am trying to learn the language, although frankly it is very challenging and frustrating. Part of the problem is simply that most people speak English so well that for them to slow down and wait for me to utter something really isn’t worth their or my time, since we know we can do it in English much faster. That said, I do run into people in our support groups who speak very little English and it is for them that I am re-dedicating myself to more tutoring starting this month. It can only help.
All my work with the support groups and the challenges with the grant spending occupied many hours of my weeks and months, right through December. I was still able to spend time with some neighborhood teenage girls who started hanging out at my house on Sunday afternoons. I have also helped with various projects with our local rotary club, including a book drive, a clothing drive and the beginning of work on a project to get one of the disability groups a well so they can start gardening on their plot of land.
I have also been working to help Cathrine get her son Erto’s clubfeet fixed. This included contacting a group in South Africa and getting them to put his story on their web page to raise money. Many of my friends at home have donated and I thank you for that. Erto needs to now have some x-rays taken to be sure there are no other abnormalities causing his inability to walk and if not, we should be able to get treatment started soon. If all I manage in my remaining 17 months is to get to see that kid run around with his older siblings, I will consider myself a happy camper.
I didn’t do anything fancy for Thanksgiving. I was going to travel up north to meet up with some other volunteers, but I didn’t feel like taking the days needed for the bus travel and was scheduled to take a trip to Germany the week after. My predecessors had given me one of those paper turkeys with the tissue paper for the feathers that folds out, so I put him on the table and called it good. The cats liked him and had no idea what they were missing.
I spent about 9 days in Germany, visiting my German parents, my brother Hartmut, his wife Valeria and their two sons. I also visited briefly with my brother Martin at the Frankfurt airport on his way to Korea. (The Germans are so civilized about their airports so non-travelers can visit with travelers INSIDE the airport, no less.) I enjoyed the chance to grab a bit of cool weather, take part in the festive Christmas season as only Germany does it, and visit with a few members of my German family. I also hooked up with a Rotary club while there and they invited me to attend a special Christmas event the four Wiesbaden clubs held together. Boy’s choir, organ music and holiday stories in an old church, followed by German cake and coffee. It is a period I now refer to as my German Cake Incident. Which might have also be made worse by my German Mulled Wine and German Roast Duck Incidents. Hard to say. I enjoyed the chance to walk around in cold weather, ride a bicycle and get a couple of massages, and speak coherently to people in a second language, just to prove I wasn’t a complete idiot, so the good definitely outweighed the Cake.
When I arrived back here, I ran into my former counterpart who “ditched” me in July. His flight had come in the day before from Canada, where he had been studying for the last 6 months, but they had lost a bag so he was back looking for it. It was great to have that kind of Eureka Arcata airport experience even in a “capitol city” airport.
Botswana is like Humboldt County a little in one respect: it seems like everyone knows everyone. When I moved to Humboldt, I knew 50 people and saw them everywhere. Here, I am always running into people I know in unexpected places, even though I don’t know many more than 50 very well. And someone I know is bound to know someone who knows someone who knows some else I know. So, like anywhere, it is smart to watch what you say to who.
After Germany, it was back to the grindstone to finish out the spending and reporting on the European Union Grant. The last check was delivered at 11:45 on Friday, December 30th to an office that had decided to close at noon that day. That morning was a gorey experience and one I don’t want to recount without a therapist present. Things here don’t happen the way you would expect them to a lot more than they don’t happen the way you would expect them to at home.
I did get some relief though, and spent Christmas Eve and day with my Botswana family in Kanye. New Year’s eve I spent quietly with my PC buddy Tom at his place about an hour away. I had brought some of his favorite things back from Germany and we shared a bottle of champagne. Then I went to bed around 10:30. Apparently there were fireworks, but I never heard them.
Since then, my girls have been coming over with a gang of smaller girls to help clean the yard for the planned birthday party on February 4th. They don’t work for long, but we are slowly making progress. They come for the food, but leave with memories to last a lifetime, right? If I could count in my reports how many kids I have taught to play Irish Sevens, that would be nifty.
What have I learned or reaffirmed so far:
· Though I have learned a bit more about myself, I haven’t yet had time to become a better person. It takes so much time and effort and frankly, with the heat the way it is, I just don’t have the energy for self-improvement.
· The less time you have, the longer things take. I am constantly aware of how fast time is going and how long things take to do, Already, I have been here 9 months and only have 17 left.
· It is important to balance efforts and energy between my long term and short term goals and finding daily fulfillment is important and not always measured by “output.”
· Even with priorities, back up plans, and more back up plans, sometimes you just need to let some of it go wherever it is going to go anyway, plans or not. That is hard but getting easier.
· Sometimes just being present for someone is going to have more long term effect than doing something that I can write up in a report. Although I still have to write something up in a report.
· Taking naps is a totally appropriate use of one’s time if one is lucky enough to be near one’s bed when the urge strikes. I am still trying to figure out how to fit that activity into my PC goals.
· I still like kids and old people the best.
· l need my down time and like being home alone to relax, re-energize and simply think. When there is someone constantly around who I have to interact with, I start to get a bit grumpy (Okay, more than a bit grumpy) unless I really, really, REALLY like them. Yet I also have reaffirmed that I like to be around people and if I feel welcome and comfortable, I can be the life of the party. It’s all about balance, of course and not spending too much time at either extreme.
· My enjoyment of writing has increased now that I have time to do it. At home, I wanted to write, but with all the work-related writing, the day-to-day grind, and the distractions that come with a busy life, owning a Blackberry, and having cable and internet at home, I just would never get to it. The walk to and from work each day helps settle my mind and organize the things I want to write about in a way that the short drive to and from work at home never did.
· Long hot baths (in the cold winter) are very soothing. I never had the time, nor thought it was a good use of my time, to do that at home. With the right size tub - long and deep – it is one of the best things ever. When I get home and am looking for a place to live, the right sized tub will be an absolute requirement.
· I don’t need or want a lot of stuff. Even here I am cleaning out my closet and giving things to our Rotary clothing drive or my friends. Granted, they are things that are way too big for me now, but I still don’t like clutter or things that aren’t useful lying around.
· In terms of pets, its: where ever I go, there they are. They are great company, although here too, they get under feet and one day I will be the old lady who dies while accidentally tripping over a beloved furry creature. That day is hopefully still far off.
· I am still not a big fan of hot weather and wonder if I will ever stop sweating more than everyone else. On the upside, some of my aches and pains from constant moist weather in Eureka seem to have lessened.
· I still love chocolate. Not much to add to that.
· I still like to learn languages, but it gets harder to do so later in life. I enjoy trying at least, but need to put more effort into this aspect of my experience. Setswana se thata. (Setswana is hard.) Yeah, that sentence makes it look easy, but I only know easy sentences.
· I can adapt to new situations and ways of living. Granted, living in Botswana is more like living in America than I imagine living in oh, I don’t know, a remote village in China say, would be, but there are a lot of things to adapt to and I haven’t found it as hard as I thought it would be. Like: not understanding what people are saying and being okay with it; doing my laundry in my bathtub; bugs and crawly things; walking almost everywhere, and sitting in crowded buses to everywhere else; and having to carry anything I want, food or otherwise, from there to here.
· I need to slow down more and not worry about my work as much as I do. Things will be what they will be and I can only do my best with what I am given. In 2012 I have devised a plan to work less and travel more. Or just nap more.
Those of my friends who hoped I would learn more patience will be both happy and disheartened. I HAVE learned that whether I am patient or impatient, things happen the way they are going to happen and all my amount of frustration and impatience matters not. So I suppose that could be considered progress. Yet still, there are certain things that drive me nuts and will probably always drive me nuts. I am learning to comment on them less, so that is progress. Right now it helps that most of what would probably frustrate me even more in unintelligible to me.
Overall, I think I am doing well as long as I don’t become complacent and only focus on the skills that come easiest. So I guess it’s time to go do some language acquisition followed by, or perhaps included with, a lesson or two in patience. Can I get a chocolate milkshake with that?
I know the next 17 months will fly by as well. I hope in this time I can make a difference for someone besides myself, but we will just be patient about that. Thanks for listening.
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