Cans and Can'ts

Things I can do now:

• I can fall asleep with music worse than reggaeton pumping on crappy speakers, half a block away.
• I know the exact hot-to-cold water ratio for the perfect warm bucket bath: 8 little pitchers of cold water, 1 electric kettle of boiled water. That’s only enough for a normal bath though; washing hair is a different ball game
• I can take a bucket bath in such a way that gets the 2.5 foot radius around my body (i.e. the rest of my bathroom) only minimally wet.
• I can fix a plug where the wires have slipped out of the fixture.
• I can make a delicious guacamole from scratch (including picking the lime off the tree) in less than 12 minutes.
• I can lean over my veranda – I don’t even have to step off of it – and pick enough basil and tomatoes to make a delicious salad of just that, or some tasty pasta.
• I can tolerate several hours of non-stop raucous noise, whereas my blow-point used to be around 30 minutes.
• I have a full arsenal of curt responses, dirty looks, and pretend deafness to respond to the nasty remarks I attract when going about town. I used to have witty quips and equally ugly jabs in the arsenal, but I found that using them actually helped the encounters become real memories, where I’d rather they be relegated to my memory’s recycle bin.
• I can make it through most meals without thinking “this would be better with cheese.” This has taken a full 20 months to come about – vegans: I am in awe.
• I have figured out the way to reward people, monetarily, for helping out with here-and-there tasks, finally. Against my instincts, it is based on giving people some money for something they haven’t really earned, then indicating that with more effort, there will be more rewards. My conviction that some sort of agreement should be delineated and shook on beforehand, or people should help out without the promise of reward turned out to be entirely unworkable.
• On the heels of that, I’m getting better at giving, even if people don’t really, really need it, or even if I think they don’t really deserve it. I feel trained to only share with people who I know would, in turn, share with me. Or share only with people who won’t come to expect it, or demand it. I still refuse to give anything to people who just ask because they want something from “the white lady.” I will not give the over-confident high school boy a ride on the back of my bike just so he can boast to his friends, I will not give money to any children who ask for it, just because. I will not give anything to drunken men. In general, actually, I won’t give anything to men unless I know them well and respect them. On the other hand, I realize that 5 meticais has much greater potential for the girl who goes to get bread than it does to me, even though, in the economics of price-for-time in Mandimba, 10 minutes to go get bread by no means warrants 5 meticais. I get that giving the woman who does my laundry 100 meticais instead of the agreed upon 50 makes a huge difference for her, and not much for me. And she will not use the extra 50 mets on clothes, or alcohol, or nail polish. She will buy pieces of goat instead of salt dried fish for dinner. She will grind some extra corn flour to bring to the HIV+ people she cares for. She will buy a piece for her broken bike so she can visit her patients. Perhaps it would be accurate to say I've come to realize my deeply ingrained version of what makes someone “deserving” or “eligible” for help is extremely culturally bound, and in absolute terms, doesn't make sense. Yet to be figured out: crazy people. They are obviously getting food, clothes, and a bath somewhere. I don’t know where. But they ask me for money – with excitement. They treat me like exceptionally yummy prey. They can’t imagine I could possibly deny them some small change. But then, I would be giving something to someone who has done nothing, and never will do anything, for me. I will be encouraging them to ask me – and any other white person – just as expectantly in the future. I will be reinforcing the idea that money is free. I will be giving a go-ahead to the culture of letting the mentally disabled roam the town with complete legal immunity, and no protection either. On the other hand, what if the person giving this malouca a bath, an extra t-shirt, some left-over rice, isn’t their mother or sister or cousin, but another person whose yard they have wandered into? What if it is the collective generosity of the community that keeps the mentally disabled from living in complete squalor? What if by denying that person their 10 meticais, I am unknowingly pushing the burden of this person, who is unable to earn a living, onto someone who is much more generous but has far fewer means than I do?
• I can install one of those annoying locks that one always finds in public bathrooms – the sliding bar on the door that slides into the loop on the door frame – and then always somehow gets off kilter and no longer works.  My wooden bathroom door warped with the frame, my little slidey bar no longer goes into its little loop, but that’s cool because my warped wooden door can keep itself shut now.
• I can use Bluetooth. And mini-SD cards. And internet modems that look like flash drives.
• I can use a smart phone.
• I can make peanut sauce.
• I made a garden. Actually, 2. And little beds in front of my house. And I planted flowers, even though flowers seem like the vainest of agricultural efforts.
• I grew corn, then I picked it, then I boiled it, then I ate it, then I threw the cob in the swamp 3 feet behind the back wall of our yard.
• Follow up: I can litter. I prefer to litter in piles of everyone else’s litter (trash pits, mango peel piles, trash heaps) but I've gotten pretty good at tossing organic matter in any organic looking spot.
• I know, mostly, how long I’ll have to wait for someone. I know, when I make plans with friends and acquaintances, whether they are the type that will be on time, 10 minutes late, 20-30 minutes, late, 1-2 hours late, or 2 days late. I've become the 10-20 minutes late type myself.
• I’m usually prepared to be without electricity for up to 36 hours. I only need electricity for my fan, my fridge, and my electronics. The fan is just a straight loss without power; it’s a pretty significant one too. The fridge is usually well-stocked with water bottles so it stays cold for an extended period of time, and I try to keep my laptop charged, and everything else can charge off of it with USB chargers.  I’m not ready for apocalypses, but power outages are totally cool.
• I can pretend to bargain with a market lady in local language with my tutor, but I’m positive if I tried it in a real-life situation, it would be mortifying.
• I’ve got the gist of how to participate in a substantial weather conversation. It starts with some sort of grunt or exclamation, than is followed with a noun describing the most uncomfortable part of the day (“sun!” “cold.” “mud.” “rain.” “heat.”) My fellow conversationalist repeats the exclamation and the noun, then some platitude, like “but what can you do?” I agree. Then, we can relate the noun to our day. “It is so muddy, I had to bring a pair of shoes to change into when I got to work.” “It rained so much that it starting drizzling in 3 different places inside my house.” “It is so hot, I took 3 bucket baths today.” After the immediate consequences of the weather on life have been discussed, then you can discuss the outlook. What does this weather mean for the crops? When will it stop raining? When will it rain next? How bad will the roads get? What does this weather mean for when our power will go out?
• I wear outfits that clash in totally inappropriate ways.
• I can raise a dog. Not really train, but raise.
• I used to really like that over-priced quintuple quilted, fluffy as a bunny, strong as an ox, whatever as a something toilet paper, and I was chagrined at the recycled, scratchy, thin, flimsy type that reminds you that saving the world won’t happen without you suffering a little. Now, whenever I walk into a bathroom and find toilet paper, I’m impressed, pleased, and relieved.

Things I can’t do anymore:

• Leave home without at least one plastic bag in my purse.
• Go to bed without clean feet.
• Let anyone else wash my underwear.
• Speak Spanish.
• Fit into a couple of clothing items I brought with me.
• Think it makes sense to spend more than $40/month on your phone.
• Flush a toilet without being grateful for plumbing.
• Get any sort of wound without contemplating how likely it is to become infected.
• Hear Rihanna – that one about yellow diamonds or the one about a hopeless place – and think about anything except getting out of here at the end of July.
• Feel content going to bed without the reassuring gauzy fortress of a mosquito net.

The lists both go one, much farther. I love thinking about these things. Often, in volunteers’ eyes and in the outside world’s eyes’, our time is gauged in the amount of difference we made in the community – how many people learned x? How much money was brought in for y project? How many more people now do z behavior than did previously? How many people know something else about “the real USA”?

But, my internal differences are so easy to list, enjoy, laugh at, and they seem so much more concrete.  So, there will come a judgment day, in approximately 3-4 months, where Peace Corps will ask me to sum up everything I've done for my community, where I will be asked to really look at what I've actually done – has my time as a volunteer been valuable? How much? (I’m sure that’s not how it’s phrased, but still.) And that’s totally fair. They put me through a painful 10-week training program where almost every hour, 7 am-5 pm was planned out, they've faithfully deposited my meager monthly subsidy into my crappy Mozambican bank account, and they've flown me down the length of the country – repeatedly – to give me the opportunity to learn new things so I can do a better job of volunteering. So yeah, they can ask what it all came out to. Meanwhile, once in a while, I like the simple, humorous, navel-gazing game of seeing what this 1 and a half years has done for me.

Don’t worry – I know judgment day isn't far off. The list of “what use have I been?” is anxiously fluttering in the back left corner of my head.