Pass Fail

Blog 3/30/11

                Things are getting easier…which makes me wonder why things seemed so much harder before. One answer might be culture shock. And that makes me wonder why I didn’t seem to feel culture shock on my other trips. It might be that I was running way from something scarier than what I was confronting in, for good example, South Africa when I landed in Johannesburg to stay a short while with the Quilleys in Kempton Park in ’82. We were speaking English so I I didn’t have a language problem, that is, language requirements. This has made a big difference. Later, in South America, I my Spanish was a serious hindrance and I had to simply become content with being mostly alone because I couldn’t speak much to anyone. It’s the same here with my host family. Their accent is so thick that I’ve been told by my Spanish instructor that it would take two years before I’d be able to understand them. It makes me wonder why I was paired with these folks.

                Things are progressing however; I think they’ve understood that amplitude--my dona has taken to shouting over my left shoulder as though to a deaf parrot eyeing her from there--is not the key to getting me to understand their Spanish. Look at it from my perspective. I hear unfamiliar syllables and try to pair them up with those that I know. My Spanish is limited but basic Spanish communication should be possible. Often, though, I understand just 5 or 10% of what I am hearing, perhaps less. So I find I lose confidence that I might understand. I expect that I will not and part of my mind seems to shut off and I find I am not paying as close attention, not making as much effort to match sounds with those I know…so some of this seems to have to do with confidence that I’ll understand what I am hearing. I haven’t yet managed to tell them that if they want to play the “talk to the gringo” game, I am willing but that it will take patience on their part. For now it seems that this family is content to treat me like a valuable glass object that needs to use the bathroom and to be fed three meals a day.

                I want to write about Dave. As I am cut off from Bobbie for a while (no Internet here therefore no Internet for the next 5 weeks) I am left to process this myself. JoAnne told me Dave ended his life in Bobbie's driveway and that he was discovered, too late, by the UPS guy and that when Bobbie got home the police, etc. were there. I can’t quite imagine what that was like for her. The day before yesterday, I had a small melt-down over it during my (solitary, as usual…and, in this case, fortunately so) lunch.

That might be the end of my emotional processing but there’s more, of course, that I want to think about. It seems only fair to Dave to spend the time thinking about him. I don’t know much about his life, actually. An artist with a problem with depression, probably different than my problem so I don’t really know what he was going through. Still, as perhaps arrogant as it might seem, one might say that it’s hard to imagine the suicide getting what he desires. What, then, might Dave have desired? To be understood? “Saved?” Heard? This he did having more recently been visiting my sister of late. I don’t know what that really means. Bobbie will have to tell me and that will have to wait. Surely I will have moved on by then. I’ve been in this community a week and it feels like at least a month. The newness will wear off but the emotional cycles will continue and, so, the distance in time will continue to expand beyond what I have come to understand as normal back home.

I’m not “happy” here and I am not “doing what I want to do” or what I would “like” to do but I am busy and each day is full. It’s not thrilling me. I am not ending each day feeling fulfilled or even happily anticipating the next but I am sticking it out a day at a time and find the company good and the work do-able. I can do it, so far.

                Back to Dave. I imagined a conversation. I am 62 and Bobbie 59 at this time. We’re older but in this kind of thing I feel that that makes no difference.  I am not “prepared” for this kind of event…even though I have suffered from depression myself and been to the edge…or some edge that might fit the description and, so, qualify me as having some special knowledge about the thing, but, really, I do not. In this, we’re all the same. And for Bobbie…it must be a little like it is for me. He was there, in my mind.  I had invested in him. I cared what happened to him. And suddenly there is an emptiness that cracks the world with its finality. There is no talking this out with him. I would have but was not given the chance. We’re simply left with the final decision and everything after that is silence. Sounds happen. The air is full of them: cars, children’s prattle and shouts, the cock’s crowing (we have several…every neighbor seems to…and they announce themselves starting at 3 AM) the music from the colmado, yet there is another kind of sound that is now absent and loud in its absence. Every sad sounding song can fill my eyes with tears. It’s a surprise. I am one way, thinking of something fully else and a wave breaks over me and takes me away to an empty place of quiet, a place Dave filled that is now collapsing upon itself, a process that will never complete.

                I have a bat. For as long as it wishes to stay. That it’s here is our secret, a secret I will honor and keep. There was a familiar flutter of wings last night in the room, louder then softer as it roams the room the way they do, to this wall, then that. It settled near the foot of my bed and I head some paper scratching and couldn’t imagine what it had found of mine to examine. I turned on my headlamp to try to see it but could not. My mosquito net (mosquitero) obscured it and, anyway, it was out of sight, not even a shape to finally identify it or let me know it was or had been really here. Still, I quickly shut off the lamp because I didn’t want to scare it off. It was, after all, eating mosquitos. I liked its company, knowing it was here. In the morning I peered behind the larger-than-life-sized, thinly framed picture/poster of a little, blue-eyed, blonde girl in a red dress holding a black and white puppy. There it was and there it is now. I’ve figured out how to see it without moving the picture to disturb it. Bats (muscielagos,) it turns out, flutter the same in Spanish as they do in English. I understood it immediately, my recognition instantaneous, without effort, even without my wishing it understood. Its flutter was not simple but filled the air with all that a bat has ever been to me: soft, dark grey, small, sharp teeth, stretched-skin delicate wings, hardly any weight, mosquito snap, bright eyes.

                One of our trainers is a woman of about 27. She’s a good and enthusiastic trainer. In other ways she seems young. She was talking about how her emotional orientation to her PC service evolved and it turns out it’s much like mine. She was here figuring she’d get through 3 months (the training) and see how things sat with her and Peace Corps at that time. She seemed to go by 3 month increments. I feel much the same. What, I wonder, will I learn about myself in 3 months? I can’t imagine being this ambivalent about the work I am doing here in three months and staying on. Why do that. This is not what one would call fun. What keeps me here is wondering what comes next. I have some adjusting to do. Can I adjust? I want to answer that question. I also want to learn Spanish. That’s not coming by itself…at least not in a way I can recognize. Sure, I’m learning some words. Anybody can do that. I’ve done that in other languages and it’s never lead to competency in a language, just a pile of unrelated words I can string together to get by…call them surface coasting tools. With them I can coast across a surface of a country or culture. Actual communication of meaning eludes me…but I’ve only been at this for a month. That’s not enough to tell me I can’t ever do this. So we coast onward. I do, anyway.

                Peace Corps has told us in a number of ways now that the women here (and the men for the women PCVs) are unavailable to us…or should be considered so. They’ve never actually said this this way but that’s what they’ve said…no matter what one might have thought about having that itch scratched while “living and working abroad.” It makes perfect sense. For now, especially with our limited communication skills, any interest a woman, for example, might show in one of us will likely be only a financial interest. Later, some of us might discover a real love here. Every year, so go the statistics, a few of us will marry a local and after a while it’ll be discovered that half of those will survive the first 5 years. Some urges will have to be subdued. Period. But that’s no different than back home. In other words, so what’s new? But the jokes persist and it’s difficult to take part in that, seen from one perspective, sad and pointless joking. My damaged ankle keeps me from getting the exercise I used to use to keep those urges submerged and out of the way. I sure do miss access to my recreations. It just makes things a little harder, a little more like work, just in a foreign place.

                The other day, on the hike, I looked at the homes along the road and had to ask why the people who live here haven’t made for themselves better homes and a prettier personal environment. Beauty, they say, is in the eyes of the beholder. I don’t think this is entirely true. Sure, money’s a part of it but there’s more, a kind of an awareness and desire, perhaps a permission to experiment and express, missing.

A Few Gripes

                This will likely be the first in a series of entries with this title. Never mind.

                Will someone please start a collection to help buy the colmado down the street a second CD? If I have to listen to this one for 5 weeks morning, noon and night (till midnight) I am either going to go nuts or learn all the words on the CD upon which time I will reflexively (and, yes, that is a play on the Spanish construction) inflict them on everyone around me. This puts those around me on notice. Though I have never been able to learn lyrics from any pop song—I am one of those people who, never having been taught the actual words to the Pledge of Allegiance and therefore still thinks it was written for some very important person in US history we don’t hear about in any other context named Richard Stand—I might just learn these. I’ve already pulled out “extrañar” and “corazon”  though it’s a very good bet that word first word which means “to miss” as in, “I miss you” and the second which means “heart” will be found somewhere in any pop song in Latin America. The other night I imagined accompanying harmonies for most of the songs I’ve been listening to. Now it’s time to move on. New music, please. Oo, I’m pretty sure I just heard “borracho”(drunk.)

                I’ve been listening to Dominican Republic music and eating D.R. food for three, going on four weeks and I am ready to offer an indicator of poverty. Keep in mind, this concept, poverty, is something that has been suggested to me and means, near as I can tell, “a lot less money than we have in the US.” It’s my bet that there is a lot more to poverty than that but that’s what we’ve been offered and left with. Given that we are in “development work,” I think this definition is insufficient and that leaving us with this to lead and inspire us for the next two years is perhaps irresponsible.

Clearly, BTW, it’s Sunday afternoon, our “day off,” and it’s been raining so I have time for reflection, that is, time to write.

Anyway, here it is: I think one poverty indicator just might be a lack of imagination as reflected in a lack of appreciation for/desire for variety. (Have I mentioned our collection to buy the colmado on the corner a second CD?) (Need I mention rice and habituelas…and r. and h. and r. and h. and…?) There’s nothing wrong with being easy going; that’s not what I am driving at. But it seems that places that one does not associate with the word, poverty, seem to have greater variety in food and music…architecture, too, and probably other aspects of everyday life I haven’t yet thought of. I’ve not been thinking about this for long. A friend of mine from Argentina said to me once that poverty was a state of mind rather than a lack of anything tangible.

We, my friends and myself, are still skidding across the hard surface of this culture. I have a feeling that this experience I have chosen to engage with Peace Corps is going to push me against these hard surfaces. I am not sinking in. Experts have been trying to define poverty so they can get under the corner of it and “do” something about it for a long time without success. We, here, will be implementing an approach to development—and I am working on a definition for that one, too, which, at the moment seems to be: to help others acquire the same stuff (roads, cars, desires, education, tastes, clothes, hair styles, electricity, health services and attitudes towards health and much more) we have in the US…clearly a definition I need to broaden—that we are being taught. It seems that a sound foundation of the underlying fundamentals as they are understood today and as under development as they, themselves, are, is not necessary for the troops implementing the techniques we’re being taught.

On the hike in the Cordierra Central

It was the lock that caught my eye

Micro Hydro: turns out this one is 18 kW

Close-up...but maybe I didn't have to say that...

Got the technology...in the tollota fields. These plants are a mat elevated 6' above the ground, the ground bare underneath with much and many chemicals applied...which washes into the streams when it rains...and which we bathe and swim in and often drink from.... Tollota: a tasteless, slippery and textureless fruit/vegetable used as food for some reason I haven't worked out that looks like something between a zuccini and a cucumber. Remind me to tell you about "vivires" sometime.

What exactly is poverty and what is development? When the US invaded the DR in 1916 (we have been taught a little DR history) the US did a number of things that are still considered good things to have such as building three good roads here. Apparently, US businesses benefited from the US presence and that that was intended. Given where the DR is now, on the verge of a collapse brought about by reaching the ends of its ability to feed a population that is about to explode (over 40% of Dominicans are under 18 years of age) one might look back and think what might have been done toward a better result. I am not the person to imagine what that might have been but I think it was there in the same sense as the notice that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best time being now.

3/28/11

Another gripe:

My body is letting me down. I’ll have to find a way to work around it. I went for my first hike yesterday. The distance is in question. Either 10 km each way or 15 km. One on-line guide has it as 15 miles making my walk 30 miles. That’s unlikely, but 30 km is a possibility and another guide pegs it at just that. I’d think the first one just got the units wrong. The road is rough and my bad ankle (tobillo) played up. I could hardly walk today and it’s not that much better this evening. I am o.d.-ing on aspirin and hoping for the best.  Don’t want to miss anything in the training and there’s a lot of walking on rough roads. Part of the reason I went for such a long walk is that JoAnne had told me by phone that a friend killed himself last week…just a few days ago, it seems. He has suffered from depression. I’d known that. There was nothing I could have said to him to effect what he did about his problem. Perhaps I’ll learn more shortly…e-mail from Jo when she learns more.

But it’s hard being here and having any perspective on either what  am doing here, the DR itself, and/or anything that’s going on at home. I am adrift here. I’ve decided to float along making no assessments or judgments. One simply can’t. I haven’t enough information to do so and may never have. I can observe. Emily asked if I’d taken the MBTI and said she was a “perceiver.” So am I. She said she’d have bet that I was. We don’t judge quickly. We absorb information. We always have the feeling that we don’t have a critical piece of information needed to make a decision or judgment about a situation. We’d leave peoples alone rather than stick our big feet in. Who do we think we are, anyway, marching around thinking we have answers to others’ issues. It’s infuriating. And our group seems to have more than a share of knee-jerk do-ers. I see little desire to think things through. These guys are soldiers…of God, of the Peace Corps, of a military…whatever. They have some preconceived ideas and, otherwise, just want to be pointed in a direction and have their “on” buttons pressed. I’ve seen them before. It’s the “green is good” set. The “liberals are right, conservatives are wrong” set. Yesterday I was stopped by a Jehova’s Witness. He said, “You believe the Bible is right, don’t you?” with his neat shirt and tie on, hair combed, teeth brushed, shoes polished. Another soldier marching righteously (mindlessly, I think) beneath his banner. My family here went to church, Catholic Church, yesterday. It is expected that I might go, too. But we’re allowed an out…that we are of another faith. Fortunately these exist here. I declared myself a Quaker (I’ve been meaning to go to Quaker meeting for years) and, now, have invited myself into their camp. I’ll go if there’s a chance…but fat chance, I think. I think I’m safe for a while…at least until I get back to the States. So, and true enough, I worship by getting out into nature…my hike into the hills. I didn’t lie. I need the quiet. The last time I did a hike like that, among a simpler people (or so it appears from my remove) and in that shimmering heat at a higher altitude and in the sub-tropics, was in Bolivia. I remembered it like it was last week, all the smells and sounds and the way the earth looks (red) and smells (red.)

3 weeks in and now...CBT, Community Based Training

I’ve been here three weeks and this the first time I’ve been able to sit down and write for the blog. Things have been strange and I am going from day to day. Given things a day at a time, breaking it down like that, though Spanish, for example, is not easy, it’s do-able.

                I am now in my first full day with my new host family. I’ve been speaking (let’s imagine that I actually held up some of my end of the conversation) with my host mom’s 10 year old son, Jave. I actually haven’t seen his name spelled…or anyone elses…so I’m guessing. He has a truck n inner-tube and spends his afternoons tubing down the local, dirty, trickle of a “river” running along one side of the town.

                We have just had our first set of exams. I passed. Now we’re in the second term of training—5-1/2 weeks of heightened Spanish and our first technical training sessions. We’re learning how to do community diagnostics according to the Peace Corps hand book called PACA, fondly referred to as “the PACA book.” Yesterday we got the last set of injections for a while. I think there is one more rabies shot coming  and we’ll be done. I’ve lost track of how many injections we get. Over a dozen. We just line up and get them. One gets over one’s aversion to having our skin pierced and bruised upper arms.

                So much has happened I’d bore you with details if I tried to recount all of it. Each day seems an age long and I feel as though I’ve been away for months. Meeting people one cannot understand, moving into their homes, meeting all the relatives, not remembering the cascade of names or being able to tell who’s a family member and who is just visiting, sitting alone at a table set just for us while we eat a three course meal beautifully prepared and presented are just a sample of day one with, what?, almost 40 to go? We’ll be crammed with enough Spanish to move us up two to three levels on an international scale I can’t remember (and am too lazy to look up at the moment.) We’ll learn how to make fero-cement tanks, latrines, efficient wood stoves, potable water systems and more. We’ve been filled with UN HDI (human development index) statistics that float in space with no context to any other measure and unidentified floating points such as “poverty line,” which remains undefined (i.e. compared to whom?) which appear on the tests…for which, of course, we all dutifully cram for two days before, knowing, now, that things learned this way have a notoriously short retention time. It’s just the hoops we jump through on our way to, in my case, I have only a fuzzy idea where. We in Appropriate Technologies have the understanding that our group is new and experimental and that is exciting and one of the things that keep me going.

It is daunting to think that I will be put into a community by myself and be expected to work my way into that community’s heart and mind with what we know will be insufficient language to perform a diagnostic to find out what we might do for that community…or, rather, in Peace Corps’ terms, what we might help that community discover they need and help them to get that project off the ground as we then get out of the way. I feel that to be unlikely from this distance, yet volunteers do it successfully from seemingly insufficient starts like mine all the time. In our case, about 52 volunteers each 6 months begin the same journey I am on…though, if our group is an example, few will have as much language to learn as I have. Yet I seem to be doing well, actually advancing with the language. A big part of this seems to be getting out of one’s own way. It reminds me of the saying that life is hard and gets easy when one simply accepts that it is hard and gets on with living it.

                3/26/11

                Today we met community members, often young women alone in the house with their children but also a Hatian, perhaps in the DR illegally, a wealthy hardware store owner living in a grand home at the end of a street of poor people of which she has provided 5 with jobs, and my own doña on the porch of her small home. Her accent is so strong (from the Cibao valley) I can understand almost none of what she says to me. I find myself nodding in agreement and smiling at the wrong times. This is an exercise in the style of the community analyses we’ll be doing in our communities. I’m finding language the greatest problem but other problems that I think are systemic and basic are highlighted, too. I think it will be hard to make this system work. To understand a community I think one would Have to have lived there but that runs the risk of that person being such a product of that community he/she wouldn’t recognize its uniqueness.

The town from the mountain rim

How Sly

How slyly ownership of this project has crept out of my control. It was mine at first just as other projects similar to this one have been mine. I dreamed it up. I applied to Peace Corps. I had my reasons and things I wanted to accomplish through the opportunities it offered…as best I could read them through the kaleidoscope eye-piece they offered.

By mine I mean that sense of ownership and responsibility for the trip: all the equipment, that it is the right equipment, that it’s mine, tested and understood, proven even modified to fit my reasons and aspirations and plans, that I have thought of everything, made what I couldn't buy, done what Laurens Van Der Post means when he finally buys sealing wax, that last item known to be the last because it, unique among the others, has no known use to the project. I haven’t been able to accurately define this project so can’t plan for it and it is finally driving me nuts.

I find, recently I have been responding to Peace Corps' description of the project, a project of two years and a bit more, 27 months, and lost track of my own idea of it. When I did my projects—proposed to ride my touring bicycle over the Andes and across South America, for example—I may have not known what I would encounter and I might not be able to use all the camping equipment I’d brought along but all those unknowns were accepted on my terms, I owned the project, mistakes, successes and all.

About this Peace Corps has not been forth coming. Do I bring camping gear or not? They won’t say what we, or I, will be doing. That will be decided after training. I’m an engineer; I’m bringing a multi-tool knife, a scientific calculator and a magnifying lens (loupe.) I’m not bringing a multi meter. They want me to measure voltages on a PV array, they’ll have to supply those tools. I can only do so much guessing and get anywhere close, not be weighed down with stuff I’ll never use.

And what we’ll do on our vacations has been limited by the simple statement in the DR Welcome Book: “Don’t bring a stove; this is not a camping trip,” [approximate quote.] Then what do people do in the national parks or on or near the beaches, for example? Can they camp? Do they? Is there a national ban on camping in the DR? Perhaps camping is not a part of their culture. I hadn’t heard of that and can’t find it on the Internet. Poor as they are, we’re told Dominicans bathe twice a day. What, are they trying to catch up to the Australians (who, I have it from an inside source, shower three times a day)? I’m lucky to get a shower once a week here.

            We’re told in some references to bring a camping stove (Banergee, if I remember correctly.) In that case, I also wonder about bringing a tent. My mosquito netting armed tarp worked well on my “a través” South America trip and might find its way into my duffle. We’re actually told to consider bringing a Thermarest (or equivalent) and a light (yet waterproof) sleeping bag. So far, that last item has eluded me. Are we into tropical expedition equipment now? Waterproof usually means GoreTex. I have a GoreTex bag but talk about expensive!!
            I’ve found my anxiety (Spanish: zozobra) mounting to a point where I could almost hear it and yesterday I decided to make this project mine again, to take it back. My, how slyly it has drifted away…or been lured away from me. There have been so many questions: take the computer? Yes? No? Peace Corps says it can be useful for our work (but be sure to insure it, theft being the problem) and any number of things I’ve bought for this trip/experience/project. I am left sometimes feeling like a fool, an ass, as my mother would have said. I could arrive with all the wrong stuff and then want to hide my reddening face.
            Peace Corps tells us to focus on the language. Fine. And the culture. Fine. Peace Corps recommends we find a balance between work and play. Play? There’s play? Do I bring a cook stove and a tent? They’re small and light. I’m leaving the rock climbing gear behind. It’s an island, surrounded in the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean, ringed with coral reefs. A mask and snorkel were invaluable (and actually enabled me to catch dinner off Malaysia’s east coast islands for myself and a lovely woman I teamed up with) and light enough for me to carry them on the bicycle. Do I bring those? I have no idea (I’ll bring them.) And I don’t know how to find out. We already know I won’t have the where-with-all to go sailboarding or surfing (world class wind and surf…reserved for the tourists, it seems…very expensive) so what do PCVs do when they go to the beach? Lay in the sun? I hate lying about on the beach. Can’t do it, in fact. I’m good for 10 minutes then have to put the book away. What do folks mean when they refer to the “beautiful beaches?” Palm trees and white sand? Okay. Now…what’s there to do? Chat up the girls? That’s pointless in the DR…or so I’m told. (The girls are under lock and key, the key looking rather a lot like a cross with an unhappy, scantily clad male figure nailed to it. This read between the lines in the Peace Corps’ literature on the DR.) I’m leaving whatever girls there may be alone. How’s the surf? That’s what I want to know. Can I get out to it? Drink? I don’t drink. Like I said, how’s the surf?

I’ve actually had very few things stolen on my trips. Those things were travelers checques and my passport (in India…Old Delhi…on a very crowded bus, people pressing against me, the bus swaying as it rounded corners) and an old camera, travelers checques again, and some other papers (in Nairobi…at sunset in the circle near the casino where I was attacked, robbed and beaten…not severely…but I needed the gear they took) So I decided to stop worrying about losing things. That paranoia can build up in me.

            I got out the soldering iron and melted my name into everything I’m taking that’s made of plastic. The back of the computer, the computer’s battery, the wireless keyboard (my hands are too big to use the laptop’s keyboard with any satisfaction,) it’s companion wireless mouse, the laptop’s charger and a number of other things, even the tiny wireless receiver for the mouse and keyboard, marked up, defaced, spoiled, and mine, un-resalable…but fully functional. Pretty is a problem. Pretty is what’s called “an attractive nuisance.” I can’t permanently mark the Leatherman (a recommended item) but will think of some way to make it darned hard to steal. What was I thinking trying to keep them in pristine condition? Spoil them! They work just fine and nobody else wants them. My bicycle was a good example: used, scratched and faded paint, all new spokes, chain rings, derailleurs, internal parts and a comfortable seat but beat-looking.
            That act might not deter thieves as much as I’d like but something in me changed: I took back this project and my two years in the Peace Corps. Now I am free to learn Spanish and “settle in” (whatever that means and if it’s possible) and dig into my assignments. Everything goes by me first. I am responsible. My gear is mine and I am maximizing my opportunities in the DR. Maybe there really will be no opportunity to camp. (This just in from my “Friends of the DR” mentor: nobody goes camping in the DR. I imagine I will learn just why once I’m there a while. I gather, for one thing, that it isn’t safe to do so, therefore, not smart.)

I’ve made some mistakes, but precautions taken ahead of time usually work. Being aware of the scams and ways of thieves is one way to avoid problems…but I have a lot to learn about those. That and keeping a sense of awareness. Just stay present, and don’t get wooly, don’t give away your power. Stay sober (no problem there for me.) Always question what you’re being told. That’s good practice as well as critical advise for surviving in most situations in this new world of scams (and, yes, I am also talking about wind machines on Vermont ridge lines, vast PV arrays in our agricultural fields, the certainty that CO2 is overheating the planet (very likely it isn’t,) and the 9/11 fairy tale (cuenta de hada) the official explanation of events.) Ask questions, stay awake, do your own research. As the bumper sticker says: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Pay attention. Develop your own sniff test and bullshit meter. In this world it is a fine idea to take a course in science in the pursuit of the above. “People” don’t “do” science in the US. We could change that. Put the BSers and eco-scammers back on their heels.

Arrival and a little less

I live here

The view down the hill

and around the corner

can you say in*fra&stru%$ture?

Everyone, forgive me for what I now realize ever better will be intermittent posts here and especially for those who are sending me e-mail, will be long periods between return messages. I will try to read all your messages and will try to answer when I can.

    It has been hectic and awkward, all of it. I have been living without a brain for a week and haven’t gotten it back, and don’t see it coming back soon.

                I am the oldest volunteer (by far)…which I kind of expected and kind of didn’t. Everything is kind of did and didn’t. I wake up almost in tears, fix it, get over it, think it out, get up and get going for a day that, really, is not difficult, just moment to moment different.

                It is Saturday, about 8 am and I’m trying to get this written and copied to my thumb drive to take to an internet café to post. I’ll also spend an hour with e-mail.

                Of all of this, language is the hardest. No surprise there. I am, indeed, behind my fellow volunteers, again no surprise, and the competitive part of me despairs a little, then I catch it at it and chase it away for a while. Basically, I go from minute to minute, from activity to activity and focus closely leaving the rest (and there is a lot else going on) to Peace Corps staff. In all of this I find I put a lot of trust in the staff. I have to let go of my tendency to control my environment. And that’s not hard to do. Great people.

Gotta run. My Dona has breakfast ready and expected me up a while ago. This is “a day off” as is tomorrow. Really, it’s another immersion day in language. That’s tiring, especially as I am still hearing Spanish as a train wreck of syllables ending in “entiendes?” (do you understand?) I do not nod because I really do not understand, nor do I say, no. I look open-eyed as though since it didn’t come in through my ears, maybe I can get it with my eyes somehow. If skin might be a language receptor, I’d turn that up, too.  I try to smile a lot…which isn’t all that hard to do, actually.

    Remind me to tell you about the security situation here. As presented by PC staff, it’s a soft war zone here with uneasy, awkward, white guys like me, targets. I’ve traveled before, of course, by myself and usually without incident of theft (there’s always been a little and I have lost things) but here it’s especially intense. We did skits and a dance about spotting trouble. A lot of time is spent keeping us out of trouble. As a past traveler, I know that information is essential and I used to hunt it down aggressively, probing hostel staff for tidbits, treating them like the gold they are.

    Can’t even type this morning. So it’s off to breakfast.

Later.

Back. It’s Sunday and this hasn’t been posted. The internet café immediately made me wish for the keyboard I’m not typing on…you know…a keyboard on which the backspace key doesn’t stick and I don’t have to press each key so hard I must be leaving impressions of the keys in the tabletop. There was no USB port and I have no other memory means…no CD or, if you remember these, no floppy disks. There’s a floppy drive in the machine I was using at the café. I found, as I was getting started, that I didn’t recognize the floppy drive face front for a while. Finally it clicked.

    I did e-mail deleting whole pages of messages, sorting for those few (7) from JoAnne (3) and a few others, one about a letter that the Burlington Free Press had actually (perhaps a surprise to a few who suspect the BFP is not publishing letters from big-wind opponents) published.  Well, we expect some of the letters to be published. Why they chose mine I don’t know, but I’m pleased they did.  And so should end my involvement in the big-wind issue in Vermont. I just don’t have the bandwidth or time to entertain that issue, as important as it is, and do this, too.

I won't be coming home

    Again and again JoAnne and I have tried to get our heads around this event that's is bearing down on us, my leaving for 27 months. It's daunting. We don't have the bandwidth. She said this morning as we scurried around each other getting breakfast, "I can't imagine your coming home in two years." She meant she couldn't imagine what it would be like, my coming home, arriving, standing here in the kitchen again, going to the bedroom, splitting wood in the yard. Conversations like this spring up out of nowhere (nowhere? isn't that like saying the explosion just came out of nowhere after having assembled the explosives, laid them into the wall and lit the fuse?...and so, apparently much of this experience will be about expanding perspective.)
     "I know," I said. "I can't imagine it either."
      Then, in a flash of insight I said, "I won't be coming home."
      "I won't be here." She said.
      "That's the point of all this," I said. And it is. I--the self writing this, the one just over the mental problems and the one with the habits who believes in a big breakfast and who has chips on his shoulders about so many things, who likes this and doesn't like that, won't be coming home. Or, at least, we hope he won't be. We're both looking forward to me being a different person, keeping the things we like, those aspects of me that work well, having grown out of and left behind those aspects we don't like, that I, especially, don't like, that don't work well, that keep me back from expanding into the world as my truer self. And similar is true for JoAnne. A different JoAnne will be here and a different me will be walking down the driveway in 2 years time, June (or so) 2013. We wonder who those people will be and this is no small source of trepidation.
     Those numbers, that date, doesn't make much sense right now. It, too, is something I will have to grow into. It will come nevertheless just as March 1st is coming at its steady rate. All that will happen but as noted earlier, time is doing some strange things, its tick and tock slurred and unreliable. I can no longer rely on the clock to tell me as much as I thought it did before Christmas, before the blue package landed on my desk and took it up and decided to believe in it.

the acceleration of time due to (apparent) gravity

        It sounds like physics, doesn't it. Given that physics is our account of the universe through observation and independently reproducible experiment, the physics to which the title of this post refers is a personal physics. I'm betting each of us has one and that in such a case as mine. If (and when) you put yourself in my place, see if you don't discover the same things happening to you.
      Time is accelerating, at least mine appears to be. March 2nd is coming at me like a train. When it hits it will absorb me and take me with it into a new dimension. It's a little unnerving. I think I've done this before but can't remember when. There are dates I know when such a thing should have happened, such as the start of an extended bicycle tour--over two years long--but circumstances were different. I was a different person then. 
     I have been changing my life. I've had to and it sometimes feels as though I am losing that life. There is the necessary clean out of desks and of table tops where detritus of my old life rests, the papers and clippings archived there as nature does, chronologically, oldest on the bottom, everything saved in case it's needed someday. It appears that day has past.
     Also there are the e-mails I have to delete from my account and websites that have snuck in through cookies and other means that have been oddly comfortable. Who doesn't want to hear from LL Bean or Campmor once in a while though I don't remember actually signing up for these newsletters. Or the notices from my high school and college, those growing in number in recent months. The groups and clubs to which I belong.  Facebook. Facebook: that cloying, mommy-hug, sense one gets from facebook asking if I would like a new friend. That one makes me shiver and I'm happy to have the excuse to step away from it. I am backing out from all of them because I likely won't have Internet access that will enable me to manage--i.e. delete--the hundreds of messages I'll have in my inbox when I sign in once in a while. Just family and friends--if that's possible--if I want half a change of keeping up.
      Just as cleaning out a desk has a sadness to it and also a relief and the excitement of a clean and clear start, so has this process. I find, uneasily, that I have become used to going on-line each morning (Sunday's, too) to 25 to 50 new messages. Most of them I delete, of course, but it's become a habit...and an intrusion. I find this drift to having my time directed to the computer every day to see ads I never asked for an insult. it's my computer, not theirs, and it's my e-mail account, both of which I pay for...and now it will stop. This, too, will be refreshing. It will be a welcome step back to the way I was before e-mail. Back then, I had more time.
      So this is about management, something I have been bad at for my entire life thus far. Perhaps it's time to learn to recognize what's important to me and to discard the rest. In short, to take [back] control of my life.
      And I am a little wary of losing the scant ability at "the computer" I have. It will spin away from me and I am going to have to let it go. I suppose when I get back in two + years, it'll be a new and faster Internet driven world and I'll have to either leave it alone or come up to the new speed, pick it up then. But this sense I have now of all this flying out of control is worth noting. I don't know what to do about it but let's just put it on the wall as an occasional reminder. There is the positive sense in all this that I will also be gaining both my time and control over my life back.