Monday, October 17, 2011

Eyes Wide Open

Lately whole entire months are passing by and I seem to keep forgetting that they have. Like- September... I keep thinking it's still then. Work life is so loaded now that last year actually feels kind of like a walk in the park, though I have to say that this year's schedule gives me far more pleasure than that did. Girls' Club has been off to a good start and we seem to finally be establishing a consistent circle of girls who participate every week. They are even noticeable braver already than they were a few weeks ago and it's really exciting to imagine the changes I might actually see in them by the end of the year. My classes are going much better in most respects though some things seem simply unavoidable. I do feel more in control than last year, despite the protests from students half my size as I am kicking them out of my classroom, I feel righteous or something! I am trying to maintain a formation each month with the village women though this has begun to feel like more of a chore than a project. It feels in many ways like a pointless endeavor which serves little purpose except to eat up my time and money and encourage women to stop and ask me for a variety of things constantly. On the other hand, I have also been keeping busy by just trying to spend more time with neighbors or coworkers or other friends around town. Nowadays I really don't even notice the long silences I used to want nothing more than to avoid at all costs. I will probably make a lot of people feel very uncomfortable when I get back to America. As November creeps up I realize that already in just another month and half the bulk of the school year will be over. After December is essentially referred to as holiday season because literally there is a holiday that seems to warrant a whole week of slacking off every few weeks until May. As I filled out my first round of report cards for the first sequence today I couldn't help thinking how before I know it I will already be going to my Close of Service conference and thinking about transitioning back into American life. Or will I... I'm not asking that question to allude to a decision I've made but simply decisions that are actually available to us and that I have certainly already thought quite a lot about. For as long as I can remember I've had a plan. A very specific, to the T picture of exactly where I was going in my life. Any veering off track was a huge disappointment for me and only pushed me harder to correct my steering back to where I'd been headed before. For a long time I think that plan really kept me from falling in love or even looking for real love, or from settling anyplace. I didn't want to be safe, not until I could be here, doing this. Security may have been too tempting to turn away from, and I had just started feeling a bit too comfortable in Los Angeles when my invitation to Cameroon finally came. After Peace Corps my plan was always graduate school and once I had a Master's, that was where I finally had it in my head that I could loosen my collar and take a few breaths and stop worrying so much about being right on schedule. Maybe this whole scheduling thing in the first place was subconsciously my biological clock rushing me through all my adventure before starting to focus on my children's adventures. Whatever it was, after grad school the plan just sort of dropped off, like the way people imagined the world did when they thought it was flat. I had a lot of hopes for how it would all shake out-- perfect husband hopefully debuting around age 27, great job after school allowing me to do pretty much everything I hoped to in going to school for so long to begin with, and at 30-- babies! I have allowed myself so little flexibility in this plan that I almost constantly have this feeling of someone frowning at me if I even just THINK about making a tiny adjustment. Retrospectively I guess I can say that I was raised primarily by 3 very strong women who instilled a lot of very specific ideas in my head about how my life should go in order to pass muster with them. Now one of those women has already passed away and my mother has really let go quite a lot and begun encouraging me to make my own choices. Yet, somehow I still feel this strong pull for approval, for support in every way. At 26 I'm still not sure I have any better idea of what I'm doing than I did at 16. I wonder at this point if we ever quite figure it out. Without planning it, though, the reality is that my plan has bumped a tad off course. Not in a bad way at all, in a very positive one, actually. As it turns out, I am in love, in a time in my life when I had put my guard down and absolutely least expected it and with a person who, being literally from another world, is not the easiest to be so organized and programmed out with. I have been waiting to announce it because we have to get the Peace Corps' permission to follow through with our plans, but I also don't want everybody I know to feel completely shocked or think this was a totally abrupt decision for us. So, Claude and I hope to get married. And quite soon, actually! Hopefully around January. Obviously this puts a bit of a monkey wrench in all my best laid plans for what's next. And actually, no part of me is even discouraged about continuing on the path that I'd hoped to. As far as grad school, I have been working already on applications and the pressure is on to get them wrapped up before visiting home in December so I can ship everything off by then. Even the total bureaucracy that our marriage is forced to take on from the Cameroonian side to the Peace Corps to the Embassy, all feels like it's own little part of our interesting story. What's really beginning to pull my away from the burning desire to do everything the way I always pictured it is the realization that when you are always looking so far ahead, and feeling that push into the future from behind, sometimes I think you forget to notice the present and appreciate all the pushing you did in your past to go to it. After nearly a year and a half in Cameroon, the idea of how difficult adjusting to life back home might be is not lost on me. After all, after spending only 4 months in Senegal I was a wreck for nearly a year upon my return. After being here so long sometimes I notice things about my own noticing of things that makes me laugh. Like, for example, sometimes I think to myself while walking around the village- "Wow! What a clean child! How on earth did that kid stay so clean!?" Or, "Sheesh, that family has a baby bouncer! How chic!" The thing is, I used to see the kids here in their utterly filthy clothes, playing with cars they made out of sardine cans and flip flops cut into wheels and I felt so sorry for them. I felt this gnawing need to cure poverty, to fix everything, and I guess I thought fixing everything meant wearing your Sunday best and having really nice toys! Sometimes I imagine all those ads for Save the Children and all those other charities where the kids are painted in this sad, awful light of hopelessness and instead I think -- hey, that looks just like my neighbors! I mean, it's not that their situation isn't sad or that I no longer comprehend why it's sad. In fact, I think I comprehend better than ever WHAT is actually sad about it. And, on the other side of that coin, what is actually sad about American life that actually is quite present in life here. Some days I yearn for nothing more than grocery store aisles (lame, right, but when I was home with Grandma and was able to sneak out of hospice for a couple of hours, I literally poured over every aisle in Kroger!), iced coffee from a drive-thru window while riding around with the car windows down, nights out with friends, time in laughing and being together with family. I miss those things as basically a constant but the thing is, I know it's there and I know that at some point, be it near or not too terribly far, I am going to reenter that world whether I like it or not and probably be utterly consumed by it and even more probably at some point be very much detached again from this world that seems at present so familiar. Lately I just keep asking myself, will I really be ready for that in another 10 months? It's funny. So much of life gets under your skin here. Like my electric bill for about $16 when it should be about $3. Or the neighbor kids that are even at this very moment, crying hysterically. The kids in the classroom that seem impossible to silence regardless of the ultimatum or punishment presented to them and who sometimes make you just want to scream out "I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M EVEN HERE!" Even the expectations of total perfection from Peace Corps and the community. The trying to fit in someplace where you will always inevitably stand out. The gas tank running out right in the middle of cooking dinner. I could go on and on. So many things that you wish away nearly everyday of service. You just imagine that bright day in the future when you will hop on a plane and leave all those crying babies and aggravations someplace under a blanket of clouds. The thing is, those frustrations melt away the moment you step off the plane. Even going back to the States to deal with Grandma I realized how I was going back to a place that hadn't, in essence, changed a nip, and yet I feel I have changed in every way. How can you reconcile that and will I really be ready to in just 10 more months... or less if grad school is really going to be my next move... and not to mention with a new husband who is learning the language and trying to catch up on the formal education that is so hard to come by here. All of this is neither here nor there because I really have no idea which path I will choose and there are a lot of unknowns yet that will play into that decision-making process. But, a couple things I do know- now is a good time to open my eyes a bit wider and really see where I am, what I'm experiencing right this minute and to finally put down the heavy load I've made myself carry of such a continuum of personal expectations.