humble pie and chow mein with roti

(March 25, 2011)

Last night was one of the best nights of my life. You don't realize what you have until you step away from it for a while. You learn to miss it. You feel its absence. When the PC truck dropped me off in front of my host family's house in the training community yesterday evening, I felt as if my heart might explode. I heard Anita's voice call out to me from the kitchen and immediately dropped my bags, kicked off my shoes, and felt my entire body sigh with relief when I turned the corner and first saw her vibrant, lively face. We gaffed in the kitchen for hours. We ate pumpkin until we were satisfied and laughed until we had worked it all off. I then took what was the most refreshing bath of my life. A bucket bath, indeed, but I had never felt so clean. I stood completely naked for the first time in 5 days. I had never felt so free, so new, so whole. The anticipation of sleep was almost unbearable. My tired, neglected, and starved body crawled into bed, which might as well have been the palm of God's hand, and I experienced solitude as I never had before. I was alone for the first time in what seemed like a century. No need to think, feel, say, do, or be anything. I just was. I just am.

Self awareness is a slice of humble pie. I thought I really knew myself before I left home, but trust me, you have no idea who you are until you're no longer you. When you open the door of an outhouse and find yourself thinking, "Hey, not bad," you're not you anymore. When you hold a plastic babydoll in your arms and practice breastfeeding so that you can counsel nursing mothers and you think, "Wow, I really do want to have a baby one day," you're not you anymore. When you see a chicken strolling along the road in front of you and your protein-starved self thinks, "Yeah, maybe chickens are food," you definitely are no longer you. When you laugh at how pretentious you were for thinking that living in the bush for two years was somehow your duty to humanity, you are no longer you. You're actually more of yourself than you ever thought possible. You're the real you for the first time in your life. All you can do is laugh at how human you are, how conventional you've always been, and how okay you are with just being normal for the rest of your life.

My site visit was comparable to an episode of Gilligan's Island. I've been assigned to a tiny Amerindian lake community just inland from the Essequibo coast. It takes a mini-bus, a speedboat, two taxis, and another speedboat to get to my village from Georgetown. The journey was interesting enough having only a backpack, a duffel bag, and a life jacket to lug around, so I'm not exactly looking forward to traveling back to my village with all of my stuff, plus a mattress, a two-burner stove, a propane tank, a bucket filtration system, and anything else that I collect along the way. I'll be sure to document the misadventure when the time comes. But there is light at the end of the tunnel: my village is almostly painfully beautiful. Seriously, it's a tropical paradise. I have a waterfront view from my house with palm trees and lush greenery everywhere. It's isolated, completely undeveloped, pristine in its natural beauty, and almost hauntingly quiet.

My house is in the process of being built. It's actually a pavilion that's being converted into a very simple wooden house with a single bedroom and a small sitting area. The decision to convert the pavilion into a house was strategic- it's located right next door to the primary school's kitchen, meaning that my kitchen is the school cafeteria. I'm hoping that I'll at least get a few free lunches out of the deal... It looks like I'll be having the PC experience that I always anticipated- I'll have an outhouse, a washroom to take bucket baths, a rain tank to collect the water that I'll use for bathing, cooking, washing, and drinking, no internet, and no electricity. On the plus side, I will have cell phone reception and the community is placing a small solar panel on my roof, so maybe (fingers crossed) I'll have enough power to have one small bulb and to keep my cellphone and netbook charged. My village feels super isolated, but I'm actually not too far from a cluster of other volunteers along the Essequibo Coast. I also have fairly decent access to several markets and shops in nearby towns.

OK, so let's get to the good stuff... The holy job description... It's almost too good to be true. My village has a small health post with two Community Health Workers (CHWs). One of them is a trained midwife and has been single-handedly delivering all of the babies in the community for the past 17 years. In that time, she's only had to refer 5 mothers to the regional hospital. Pretty impressive, right? So this isn't necessarily part of my job description, but we currently have five pregnant women and I'll be assisting with all of the deliveries! I'm super excited! Back to the job description... Nutritional counseling/education is a huge need in my community. Because the village is so isolated and it's quite costly to get into town, most of the villagers have very poor nutrition. Here's an example of what I was fed one day in site, which can be described as the typical diet of the community: for breakfast I had two huge rotis with channa and porridge (like oatmeal), lunch consisted of an insane mound of white rice with potato curry, a pine tart served as a snack, and dinner (the most painful dinner of my life) was more roti with a plethora of chow mein. My poor belly was swollen for the rest of the week :( In order to save the bellies of my fellow villagers, the CHWs and I will be constructing home gardens throughout the village. Yay for veggies! But it gets better. Family planning and sex education are are at the forefront of the work expected of me. Teen pregnancy is as common in my village as it is in Bartow County. And better yet, the CHWs said that I don't have to teach abstinence-only sex ed! Yay for more young girls taking care of their bodies and staying in school!

My site visit invoked some major fears, doubts, anxieties, and self-realizations that just continued to cumulate throughout the week, as I had zero privacy or time to process everything that was happening around me, to me, and within me. The only time I was alone for 5 days was when I used the latrine. I bathed in the creek morning and night with my host sister. I ate with my host family. I napped in the hammock with a host family member or neighbor only steps away from me. I even slept in the bed with my host sister. There was never time to think, to process, to debrief, or even to relax. Alone time has been very much utilized since returning to the training site. I'm feeling back to myself, my new self, that is. I feel good. I feel ready. And most importantly, I've learned not to take myself so seriously.