The pendulum

Sometimes I am filled with the desire to be here, and sometimes it leaves, like a guest.

Sometimes it feels like I'm living a double-speed, doubly thick version of my previous life, becoming, by the moment, something both greater and better, and sometimes it feels as if I've merely transplanted myself like a dead vegetable into new soil.

I feel lonely and melancholy.

I feel odd and silly, like a naive wanderer.

The thing is though, this changes everyday in a revolving, exhausting fashion which is impossible to predict. Everytime I come to the point where my life here seems useless or pretentious and unwanted, something will happen (who knows what) and I'll fall back into the patterned fog of Mauritanian life and stay.

It's almost never because I come to some sort of epiphany about my 'importance' or a rush of feeling about 'making a difference' or some other such (sorry) nonsense. Most recently my mind changed because I started my tree nursery, and I understood every word Brahim said, and because the bread ladies smiled at me.

The difficulties themselves are ungovernable - always shifting, growing stonger here, letting up there, so that I never know when or where to look for them. By the way, I hope no one reading is (still) under any illusions that the 'hard part' of (Peace Corps) existence in the 3rd world is the lack of electricity, or running water, or plumbing (or toilet paper), or consumer goods, or easy transportation, or good food, or for that matter, the constancy of wind/heat/dirt/sand/flies. Good god. Most of those things I almost never think about, not since the first few 'trial by fire' weeks in Mauritania. Infinitely more difficult than not having electric light is the experience of living in a place where you can never fully understand anyone (nor be fully expressed) trying to do work which almost no one wants or cares about (and the value of which you are hardly sure of) in a place where everyone thinks you're both incredibly wealthy and that you're going to hell just for not praying (not to mention the treasure trove of other sins they could condemn you for, if only they knew) and where you exist merely in the thin space between everyone's graciousness and disaster.

It's hard to believe I've been here for eight months. It's hard to believe how brown my arms have become ......

But honestly though, how bad could it be? It's such an unnamed, though pervasive arrogance which causes us to be called 'volunteers' and to advertise 'the experience' with words like 'hardship' and 'sacrifice', as if we, as westerners were by our very nature entitled to be free of those things, and that by giving up that right we are allowed to be self-congratulating and the occasional objects of some sort of misguided admiration. What's a couple of years compared to a life-time lived in 5 square kilometers?

Isn't part of what makes this bearable for us (though we are all loathe to admit it) the knowledge that we will be leaving? That we will never, ever be stuck here, in the way that so many of them are stuck here? (Not to mention the thoughts of future resume lines, the influential connections, the book jacket bio filler) Plus, even if we lived their lives exactly for 2 years, every moment of lusterless boredom shared, every denied want, every disappointment, every symptom of poverty identical, it still wouldn't make us one of them. And even I don't do that, and (no offense) my situation is about as no-frills Peace Corps as it gets, so if I don't do it, probably no one does.

Having said that, I'll say this: if part of what makes this time bearable is the knowledge that it will end, then part of what makes if difficult is knowing what you're missing.

That's not to say, of course, that my 'stress' is significantly added to by thinking that I could, right now be watching the Food Network in my underwear (though I'd be the world's biggest liar if I said that telephone calls, the internet and bacon with toast aren't appealing). But there's no question I'd still trade all that dead and glossy American stuffing for any number of things here which I feel have quantitatively more life-mass - my friend, Cheikh for one, with his too-big smile, his heart-breaking politeness and serious eyes.

It's not anything very specific that I might miss, I guess if I had to put it briefly I would say that, as trite as it sounds, in America one feels like things are generally possible, and in the RIM one generally feels like they aren't.

I miss feeling like I'm part of the world, though if I'm being honest I'm probably much more so now, whatever that means, than I ever was in the US, being depressed, watching the West Wing.....

But one doesn't miss what one never had. For the most part, the people in my village have little idea of( and less curiousity about) what goes on outside of EQ, and therefore no good reason to temper their general contentment (because they are, in fact, content. And why not? Even with the insidious memory of previous conveniences and liberties, I'm still much happier here, and have been so for longer, than I ever was at almost any point during my life before now). I don't pity them, because there's nothing to pity. Pity is a reverse arrogance, anyway. Pity is a smug frown. No matter what your intentions, if you feel sorry for someone who laughs more than you, and who has never thought about 'ending it', because you live in college educated air conditioning, and they're without plumbing, then you're a fool. And fools never did anyone any good. Of course ignorance is bliss, but so be it - bliss is bliss.

(Is there hunger and death and stilted longing that I don't see, even living as close as I do? Surely....but what do you want from me?)

In the end, (here's the thesis coming), maybe everything comes out just about even. I don't think our lives, (meaning 'us', meaning humans in general) are lived on some sort of sliding scale between 1 and 10 where ten wins, but maybe instead on something closer to a series of parallel paths in which everyone lives at basically the same standard deviations of fulfillment, regardless of, I don't know, everything. It's crossing over from one to the other that's a pickle.

So god help those who transition.