Adventures of an Idealistically Realistic Dreamer

It’s a few months late, but it’s up!  It should be public domain, but if Facebook doesn’t let you see it then let me know.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151597889755540

I am amazed at this PCV’s ability to so accurately describe life in the Peace Corps.  Every word is completely true.

thesharpiemarkerapproach:

Dear Person Contemplating Joining Peace Corps,

I imagine that you’re at a transition point in your life. Perhaps you’ve just graduated, perhaps you’re going through a career change, perhaps you have an itch for something more that can’t be scratched. Whatever the reason, here you are:…

This is my newest favorite boy on the planet.  Had to have a blog shout-out to my Squish, Adam Hames Boozer, born on 6 February 2013.  I can’t wait to meet him.  It does make being here harder, like when I left my co-favorite boy when he was only 4 months old.  But very soon Aunt Bets will be able to spoil them both completely rotten… excited for the day when I can take them to the zoo and play with them on the beach and watch them open presents from Santa.  Love my boys!

As the title indicates, right now is “Taem Blong Spel,” loosely translated to “OMG It’s Way Too Hot To Do Anything So Let’s Party and Hang Out Until Late February or Maybe Even March.”

The kids are out of school, it rains a lot, and if you’re like me… you can only scratch so many coconuts until you lose your mind. This is the plight of the Peace Corps Volunteer, and one of the reasons why we are usually so well-read. Seriously. Ask us about any book, and chances are, we’ve read it (unless it has come out in the last two years and then you can forget about it). Kindles, however, hate Vanuatu. Maybe it’s the humidity, or maybe just our lifestyle is too rough on them, but they DON’T LAST. I’ve now gone through two. So, pray tell, what does a PCV do when their kindle breaks in the middle of “Taem Blong Spel?”

I polled some other volunteers. These are real things that we have all actually done at some point or another. Don’t judge.

1. Write pointless lists for your blog!

2. Go with some kids to the beach.

3. Paint your fingernails, and subsequently the nails of every kid, boy or girl, and mama in sight.

4. Get a pet. Cat, dog, hermit crab, giant bat… Doesn’t make a difference.

5. Cook. This should kill at least a couple hours since it takes about 45 minutes just to light a fire and boil water.

6. Lay in your hammock and pay homage to “Taem Blong Spel.”

7. Reach whatever you can get your hands on… GRE workbook, computer instruction booklet, paperback from another volunteer, HIV/AIDs pamphlets… again, it doesn’t matter.

8. Scratch coconuts… again.

9. Cut firewood. The bigger your knife, the more fun this is.

10. Make soap. Or just teach other people to do it.

11. Use bamboo to stick fruit off the trees in your yard (for me, nuts, passionfruit, breadfruit {blech} and papaya are in season)

12. Walk aimlessly around the village.

13. Exercise! Just be prepared to sweat… A LOT.

14. Weed the garden. If you’re so inclined.

15. Clean the house. 10 points for each bug you take out.

16. Check the mail. {This kills a whole day for me}

17. Hang out at the medical clinic and hope something interesting passes by.

18. Listen to podcasts til your iPod goes flat.

19. Teach kids to play MASH or make a Cootie Catcher.

20. Find a way to charge your laptop and watch an episode of 5 of the funniest sitcom you can think of.

21. Play endless hours of 7Lock.

22. Play scrabble against yourself.

23. Take a nap… Benadryl induced if you must.

24. Find an equally bored volunteer to text or chat with.

25. Make a paper countdown chain until your next vacation.

26. Do actual planning for actual work.

27. Shave your legs. It confuses the kids.

28. Chase rats. Preferably with a fishing spear.

29. Dig for crabs.

30. Study for the GRE that you have already successfully taken.

31. Play with random babies.

32. Buy phone credit and text BFF in the states, hoping they’re doing something interesting enough to live vicariously through.

33. Read guidebooks about places you don’t actually have any upcoming trips to.

34. Learn to say random things in local language.

35. Learn to curse in language.

36. Dream about/makes lists of all the thing you’re going to eat the next time you go to town.

37. Write letters you never actually get around to mailing because you forget to buy stamps when in town.

38. Read books with kids.

39. Through things at roosters.

40. Do silly things just to confuse the h#&& out of the local people who watch your house {this is a personal favorite and it never gets old}

41. Practice your lassoing skills on whatever happens to walk by your house… goats, chickens, pigs, dogs, children.

42. Go digging for worms or grubs. They make a good snack.

43. Build furniture. Some of us are pretty good woodworkers now.

44. Memorize the tide chart.

45. Read the dictionary forward to backward.

46. Take another nap, benadryl induced if necessary.

47. Spontaneously go to town {if you live in a place where this is possible}.

48. Daydream about your plans for the day when you live in the big city again.

49. Invent something useful.

50. Learn a new hobby, like playing the guitar or sewing or friendship bracelet making or sleeping in 14 hour stretches.

Every time you finish something on the list, you must step back, sigh and say “Yep, that just happened.” Then move on to the next one.

Yes, I’m totally aware that it has been *awhile* since I last managed to write a blog update. (Don’t I always start my blog posts saying… oh, sorry, it has been so long… or something similar?) This time it is at least partially due to the fact that laptop battery is so completely precious when it is the rainy season and when you charge exclusively on solar power, so when I do get it up and running I usually end up getting distracted with episodes of Gilmore Girls or Community or House. My bad. The other (and truer) reason (as, let’s be honest here… I could always first write out a blog post using {gasp} a pen and paper) is that, until this past week I have been totally in a funk of disillusionment with the development process and I wasn’t sure how to get my thoughts across to you all in a Peace Corps approved way. At the one-year mark of my service, I did a sort of personal inventory of perceived accomplishment throughout my village and, honestly, I became a bit depressed. It seemed to me at that point that all of my projects were falling down around me, and that I was failing. Big projects that I had anticipated taking all of a couple months had fizzled out and attendance to small things, like talks or soap workshops, was starting to decline at the end of the year.

And then THIS happened….

but here’s where I have to be careful about what I say….

When I first arrived in the village, we were awarded a grant by the Japanese Aid program for about $70,000 USD, designated to build a brand new health clinic. All year long, I’ve been trying (in vain, I might add) to track that money down through the channels of a certain government department. All year long, each time I would call I would be told that it was taking awhile to be processed but that the money was sitting in an account with our name on it and that we could start building our new clinic soon… but that in the meantime, I should keep looking for more grants to supplement the money that was already there. In fact, they said, I should probably try to double it. $140,000 would build the TAJ MAHAL of health clinics on an outer island, and through my conversations with other volunteers who have more experience with this kind of projectI had my suspicions that something was up. Lonnnnng story short, I eventually met a guy who previously worked with this said government agency and who essentially confirmed for me that the money was, shall we say, “otherwise appropriated”… a whole year ago. So back to square one on that, and it is safe to say that I won’t be seeing this clinic finished while I’m here.

This, combined with a few other projects in which I saw little tangible progress had me feeling for awhile that I was a failure as a volunteer, and that my first year and the sacrifices I’ve made to be here hadn’t been worth it. However, in talking with my Australian volunteer friend Sam “Sambrym,” and so many other volunteers who have had the exact same types of problems lately, I’ve come to a place where I can see things differently. My work hasn’t failed. I look around and I see people making little changes at home in nutrition, or personal hygiene, or who are no longer completely mortified to ask for condoms and who have access to answers to their various health questions…. those are all huge successes. As an American, I am programmed to think that I must be busy all day, every day in order to think that I have been productive, and that my projects have to be these elaborate, physical things. That’s development from the Western perspective… fast-paced, rapid and visible change. Granted, while a new clinic and a new water pipeline would be AMAZING, I have to take a step back and recognize development for what it is and to observe the successes in all the many ways basic health has improved through my service. Maybe the small projects that I have tried to do that haven’t worked out haven’t worked because they were what I myself thought the village needed, and not what the community themselves decided to accomplish. I wasn’t listening to them and what THEY believed the priorities to be. So, sure enough, as soon as I decided to start over and let the village take control of their own development process, all those physical and tangible projects started manifesting themselves, and succeeding! In one month, every family has begun building a new place to bathe, rather than having to bathe in the creek or in the tap in the middle of the village. Next month, every family will have a new, clean VIP (the good kind of pit) toilet! And by March, each area will have a cement sink so that the women aren’t constantly putting so much strain on their backs by bending over to wash clothes. These are projects that I tried hard all year long last year to get off the ground, but then they were MY projects. By relinquishing control and giving them back to the community, they took pride and ownership of them.

So I guess my lesson is this: development is not for the aid worker. It is not my process, and by my perspective the progress may be slow. To them, however, the community has come such a long way and has made significant changes in a year and in the end, it is only THEIR definition of success that matters. They see the changes as improvements and they have taken ownership of their health education, as well as application. I am just a tool, and my own ego is irrelevant. Have I accomplished what I believed I would in a year? Not really. But I’ve done every workshop and talk that I wanted to do, and I am proud of my community and the work we are now doing together. It may take years for that new health clinic to finally be finished, but they’ll do it, because it is their own project…. not that of some short-term volunteer who thought she knew their own needs better than they do.