The Peace Corps Family

The other day as I was driving to work, I saw a car with a license plate frame that said: PEACE CORPS DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 1985-1987. This may sound strange, but I immediately felt a bond with this stranger. It doesn’t even matter that I didn’t serve in the same part of the world or in the same decade.

He/she could have cut me off on the road and I would have been completely okay with it. In fact, I actually had the urge to whip out a marker and scribble a sign that said “ME TOO! ME TOO! I’M A RETURNED PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEER TOO!!!” and wave it out the window. But, of course, I didn’t. That’s just dangerous while driving. Not to mention, slightly weird.  

I have a lot of friends who have studied abroad or done missions trips and, while I respect them for their courage (because let’s face it- a lot of Americans don’t have any desire to step foot outside of the country unless it’s for a luxury vacation), it’s hard to compare living in a Third World country for TWO YEARS without a salary. “Oh I studied abroad in Spain” isn’t exactly the same kind of experience.

There’s something different about what Peace Corps volunteers do. We don’t go to give money. We don’t go to preach a religion. We don’t go for just a few days, or a few weeks, or even a few months. We’re there. We’re a part of it. It becomes a part of us.

So, when we meet other people who have shared this experience we automatically consider them a friend. They probably slept under a mosquito net too, and took bucket baths, and sat in horrible public transportation, and got called “white person” in the local language, and got stared at and harassed constantly, and struggled to light a charcoal stove, and dealt with bug and rodent infestations at home. They also probably learned another language, and talked about poop with other volunteers, and made friends with the market ladies, and learned what it means to be patient, to be resilient, and to appreciate the simple things in life.

When I lived in Moz, I would sometimes go stay with an expat friend of mine in the capital city and it always such a treat. A free place to stay with running water and a stocked fridge? Couldn’t be happier. She’d always tell me, “Bring your friends! My house is always open to Peace Corps volunteers” and I was so impressed by her generosity. But she’s an Returned Peace Corps Volunteer  too. She gets it.

We’d talk about how different her service was compared to mine. Times are definitely changing. I’ve met RPCV’s who, decades ago, had to ride to their isolated sites on horseback, who didn’t have cell phones to talk to their friends and family every weekend, who didn’t get to keep in touch with their students on Facebook after they returned to the U.S.

And I know that the Peace Corps I served in won’t be the same as the Peace Corps of future generations, as communication and transportation continue to expand in all corners of the globe. Even now, many of the currently serving volunteers I know in Mozambique have handy dandy USB modem dongles that allow them to get (albeit slow) internet at their house, technology that wasn’t nearly as prevalent during my two years. (I’m imagining myself with gray hair, sitting on a rocker: “In MY Peace Corps days, you had to take a stinking crowded chapa to go to the city to check your email on a slow-as-death, virus-laden computer at an internet café.”)

However, Peace Corps will always be a unique experience and a different kind of commitment. While I wouldn’t jump on a plane to do it all over again, per se, I don’t regret a minute of it.

I learned so much. I changed so much. I loved so much. And I met the best people.

So yeah. When I see other RPCV’s driving by, I’ll wave at you like I know you. We are all a part of the Peace Corps family, brought together by shared joys and frustrations. Oh, and poop. Definitely by poop.

Chicken in the bathtub

In a third world context, “chicken in the bathtub” might mean a live chicken flopping around in a plastic basin of water.
In a first world context, this means, quite literally, that last night I ate rotisserie chicken while taking a bubble bath. This strange pairing happened for one basic reason:  lack of time.

Let me explain. Tuesdays are the worst. After being at work since 8am and then going immediately to French class until 9:30pm,   I am completely dead. Zombie dead. All I want to do is take a shower, eat dinner, and crawl in to bed.

Last night, I decided to go a different route. I’d been nursing sore calves all day (from walking up and down nine floors of stairs…twice…in heels…for exercise. I know, I know, first world problems!) so I decided to run  a bubble bath.

The next idea that came to my head wasn’t all that surprising, considering I am an expert multi-tasker.( I do homework while watching the news, play iphone word games while sitting on the toilet, respond to emails while cooking, Facebook while I’m working- er, maybe that last one doesn’t count.)  Really, I’ll do  anything to save time.

I decided I should just eat dinner while bathing, so I could get to bed sooner. Chicken + bath seemed, in my groggy mind, a good idea at the time and a better alternative than falling asleep at the dinner table with my head on my plate. But honestly, it ended up being kind of a mediocre experience that I probably won’t be doing again. As my fiancé pointed out, “That’s just weird.”

 I don’t know what happens to free time in America, but I suspect it gets sucked into some vortex of Perceived Productivity. Maybe it even gets spit back out in Africa, where it occasionally seemed as if there was nothing but time to kill. How many hours did I spend in Mozambique just waiting for people to show up to a meeting, or chilling in line at the bank?

I assumed that, because I kept up my Moz blog for two years, blogging consistently in America would be a piece of cake, considering the availability of flawless electricity and high speed internet. But as you can see, I’ve all but abandoned this blog.

I’ve been home almost five months and sometimes I feel like it’s gone by faster than a week in Africa.

One minute I’m hanging out on the porch with my dogs, wondering how to escape the African heat, and the next I’m sitting at an office desk scheduling meetings and compiling compliance report data for a multi-billion dollar international tech company.

No wonder I feel the need to eat chicken in the bathtub.

Español...we meet again

Tonight, I went in for a Spanish level assessment. At the end of the session, the Spanish teacher says to me, "Wow Vivienne, you've got great conversational skills. You speak so fast and I'd definitely put you in a level 3 class...Except that you speak a LOT of Portuguese." Merp.
This, of course, I suspected. During a game of Spanish Taboo I'm trying to get the other participants to guess the word "ribs" and I'm screaming "los ossos!" which means "bones" in Portuguese, and "bears" in Spanish. Needless to say, they had no idea why I had bears on my body.
Having minored in Spanish in college, I'm a little bummed that I have to take a step backwards and "re-learn" even the basics.
The Portuguese I've spent the last two years speaking has warped my Spanish pronunciation and vocab, just as it occurred the other way around when I was first learning Portuguese in Moz.
"Obrigada" comes out more naturally than "gracias" and well, a lot of the time, I don't even know if the words tumbling out of my mouth are Spanish, Portuguese, or a mix of both.
So I'm commencing a rigorous training program to get back to Spanish because, let's face it, Spanish is what I'll be speaking in Southern California.
But at the same time, I'm terrified of losing my Portuguese. As much as it's helped me- building Portuguese on top of Spanish- because they are so similar, the flip-side is that, um, they're so damn similar.  And to lose my Portuguese would be like losing a huge part of my Peace Corps experience.
To top it all off, I'm starting a French class tomorrow. Can I juggle so many foreign languages, use them effectively, and continue to learn and improve in each of them?  In a way, it's like re-integrating into American culture while keeping all the lessons I learned in Mozambique.
The game here is balance. Now how do I find balance?

Float on

A friend of mine, Cameron, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania at around the same time I served in Moz. While catching up with a mutual friend of ours yesterday, I was told, "Whenever we stalked your pictures online, we always wondered why it looked like Cameron lived in a third world country but you just looked like you were on vacation!"
Haha well, the other PC programs didn't refer to us as "Beach Corps" for nothing.
And now, I look through the Facebook pictures documenting the glorious beach adventures of my friends still serving in Mozambique, and I get so nostalgic. Some days I'd give anything to be back on the beach, soaking in the heat of Africa instead of stressing about finding a job,
paying for a wedding, making rent this month, studying for the FSOT. America's so fast-paced and as the days fly by, I easily get wrapped up in these concepts of "progress" and "productivity." It's no wonder that despite all the luxuries available to us, we as a nation are still so unhappy.

I've  started eating those giant grocery store bananas again, and buying those tiny, expensive, mushy avocados. I won't even talk about how expensive mangoes are here.
I've started driving again, and going to the gym.
I still don't know any of my next door neighbors.
I guess it's all a part of being American.

I move on to another day, 
to a whole new town with a whole new way
Went to the porch to have a thought,
Got to the door and again, I couldn't stop 
You don't know where and you don't know when, 
But you've still got your words and you got your friends 
Walk along to another day,
Work a little harder, work another way 
Well uh-uh baby I ain't got no plan, 
We'll float on maybe, would you understand? 
Gonna float on maybe, would you understand? 
Well float on maybe, would you understand?

- Modest Mouse, "World At Large" 

I'll be home for Christmas

I've been gone, on the road again, for over 3 weeks. My passport's gotten quite a workout and I'm ready, once again, to settle back in to American life.

Here's a brief rundown of my past few holiday seasons:
In 2010, I spent Christmas on a beach in Moz with fellow PCV's. We rented a beach house in Xai Xai and drank beer and reminisced about America, over 100 degree weather. I also attended a Mozambican neighbor's Christmas party.

In 2011, I spent Christmas in Taiwan with my sister and relatives. We gorged ourselves on seafood buffets and celebrated my sister's 20th birthday over tiramisu. I got bronchitis.

This year, 2012, I spent Christmas in LA with my fiancé and his family. I even had a stocking with my name on it! We played games, drank wine, went to church, and opened presents on Christmas morning.

Mozambique, Taiwan, USA. Each of these places has been home to me at some point in my life, and has become a part of me. In each of these places I find people I call my family. Aside from blood relations, "friends are the family we choose" and I'm never alone.

I'm lucky to have roots in different places and be able to see and experience so many things.
My heart is scattered to the East, to the West, to the North, to the South. The world is mine and I am the world's and no matter where I am, as long as I'm with people I care about, I'm always home for Christmas.

Visiting abroad and Peace Corps Goal 3

Much to the surprise of some of my friends, I am abroad once again, less than two months after my return from Africa. This time, I find myself on the delicious continent of Asia visiting friends and family.

I have so far spent four days in South Korea with an old roommate, Natalie, who is teaching English in Seoul. The next leg of my journey is Jakarta, Indonesia, where I will be visiting a Japanese friend named Yoko who was once my neighbor in Chibuto, Mozambique. (So you see, the world is not so vast and it's possible to transcend cultural and linguistic distances to keep up friendships.) The 3rd leg of my journey will be a visit to my motherland, Taiwan, where my little sister is studying Chinese.

Going from "residing abroad" to "visiting abroad" definitely has its differences.

During my two years in Mozambique, I only hosted one American visitor, my boyfriend (now fiance) Kevin, who actually came twice. I feel like it really made a difference in our relationship, because he was able to understand so much better the things I was experiencing in Africa. It was an amazing opportunity for me, to be able to show him a country that would otherwise not have been so accessible to him, and have him see it through my eyes instead of just written in a blog or posted onto Facebook via status updates and photos.
And that's what Peace Corps is about too, Goal 3: Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

I really think that visiting friends abroad is a nice way of bringing a bit of "home" to them, bridging the distance, showing you support their work and are interested in their life. Living abroad for an extended period of time can be super challenging and lonely. (I personally would have loved to have more visitors in Moz.)

And travel costs aside, why wouldn't you take advantage of local connections who can, through their insight and recommendations, take you beyond the normal tourist experience and help you understand better the cultural aspects of what you're seeing? And take you to eat yummy local food.

So anyway. Get out of America and go visit someone who lives in a  cool place!

American Thanksgiving

I've always had a lot to be grateful for, but this year especially. After two years abroad, I was able to come home and spend Thanksgiving in America and ohmigosh, was it GLORIOUS.

Here's a quick breakdown of Mozambique Thanksgiving vs. American Thanksgiving:

Traveling 3 hours by crowded chapa and slow boleia to get to Chokwe vs. 2 hours in a private, air-conditioned car to get to LA
Sweaty 110+ degrees F  vs. Balmy 70 degrees F
Small charcoal one-burner stove to cook with  vs.  Oven and four stove-top burners (oh the possibilities!)
The power keeps going out (cutting off the fan)  vs.  Having an iPhone, laptop, iPad, and TV going at the same time
Dubious packaged turkey meat  vs.  Two full turkeys cooked two ways (fried and oven cooked!)
Cheap wine and liquor   vs.  Fancy vodka/ cranberry / champagne cocktails
Washing the dishes in two buckets of water  vs.  Throwing them in the dishwasher
Playing homemade Apples to Apples (Moz relevant topics)   vs.   Playing 10-Days-In-Africa, a board game [ I have to say, Moz Thanksgiving wins this category ]
Cold bucket baths  vs.  Hot, steamy showers
Sleeping on a straw mat, batting away mosquitoes all night   vs.  Snuggling in a big bed with a room heater and no mosquito net

What I really did appreciate about holidays as a PCV was seeing the determination of Americans to get together, despite distance and other obstacles. Both years we managed to have turkey feasts on Thanksgiving, despite having seen no existence of turkeys in Moz. Which just goes to show, you can always "make it work" even without electricity, running water, or grocery stores.

Of course, two years in Africa has  taught me to really, really appreciate the variety and abundance of food and flavors in America. I can recall countless times in which other PCV's and I sat around drooling while talking about foods that we missed from back home. And this year, Thanksgiving did not disappoint with a delicious home cooked meal of turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, grilled asparagus, cranberry sauce, Kev's chopped veggie salad, pumpkin pie, apple pie, and ice cream.

But of course, the best part was being with my fiancé, friends, and family during this festive time of year. The holidays would be a sad, lonely time if I didn't have them.
I thank God every day that I do.