What is hard about being a volunteer?

Peace Corps applicants recently nominated for a program, asked on their blog, "What is the hardest part of being a volunteer?"

For me it has been the stress I create for myself because of my personal reactions towards different practices within the culture. Every volunteer has certain things that frustrate them. They are not the same for everyone.

For me in Africa, I hmm.... didn't have many moments of frustration. Or have I just forgotten?

1. Catching students who cheat annoyed me.
2. aggressive sellers in the market and getting cheated by taxi drivers and merchants

In China, I feel like I have had many more moments of frustration:

1. catching students who cheat and plagiarize (I later realized that teachers here don't usually care and are not out to try to catch cheaters. It has sort of made it easier, but still I react negatively to cheating.)
2. not being told what I feel is important information (For example, not being told that a course I am teaching will have no final or grade.)
3. being told I am not allowed to do something like travel
4. having an erratic schedule that is full of unknowns with instant changes (For example, I often receive phone calls, "Come now." Drop everything and come now. It is important.)

Some people say that the hardest parts about being a volunteer are

1. too much free time
2. the slow progress of getting anything accomplished
3. having to redefine success because it isn't the same as it is in America

Maybe I have been a volunteer too long which is why I've learned how to deal with the above three reasons.

How do I deal with my frustrations? I talk about them, write about them, try my hardest to let them go, and sometimes go on a bike ride or a run. Usually a good night's sleep will wash away my stress.

Gender Equality: America, Africa, China

In America, the fight for gender equality has become a subtle fight where probably most Americans feel that the big war is over and now we are just trying to fine tune it. I never feel like a second class citizen just because I am female, and I rarely feel that I am treated differently than males. America's history for the fight for gender equality has created a day where females take it for granted that we are equal to men.

In Guinea and Burkina Faso, there has not been the fight for gender equality. Instead the conditions are being prepared for a future war. Women and men are not equal. Men have power, status, education and the leisure to relax and play. Women are second class citizens who do most of the work with little recognition, have babies, and struggle every minute of their lives to please the men, to keep their children alive, and to keep themselves from drowning in the poverty of West Africa.

As the visiting foreigner, I felt like a third gender. I was female but I had power, status, education, and the leisure to relax and play. I was not seen as a second class female citizen, but as a gender closer to males and was treated as such. Being on the top of the hierarchy, I didn't ever really personally feel that I was being treated differently just because I was female. As a daughter of the American fight for equality, I of course noticed the gender inequalities.

If I had been married, it would have been a different story, and I would have personally felt the gender inequality. I would have been ignored while my husband was acknowledged. Messages would have been passed to me by way of the male of the household even if it had nothing to do with him. He would have been asked to fight my fights, to solve my problems, to be the leader of the pair as I just sit quietly and look pretty.

In China where I see road and construction crews with a noticeable female worker presence, I wonder what is the status of gender equality in China? Did the increase of female employment during the Mao era create gender equality? One of Chairman Mao's sayings was "Women hold up half the sky."

Okay so I hold up half the sky; therefore, treat me as an equal. It is here in China where I have personally felt the inequality of being female. At a wedding of a personal friend who we have known for over a year, neither I nor my sitemate were asked to give a speech. Instead, the newly arrived American male foreigner who worked at the bride's father's school was asked to say some words. He had only arrived three days ago and had never even met the bride.

Another time that I felt the effects of gender inequality was at a restaurant. There were three of us, one American male, and two American females where one of them, me looks Chinese. The waiter come up to our table and started giving us a speech. No, let me rephrase that, the waiter instead of talking to the table and talking to everyone, turned and faced directly towards our American male and proceeded to explain something to him in Chinese. Maybe the waiter incorrectly assumed that our male companion had amazing Chinese language skills. Maybe the waiter didn't notice the Chinese American girl who is always assumed to speak Chinese. Or maybe gender inequality is still strongly alive in China.

One could assume that in China there is a push towards equality. Girls are educated as boys are. Women work and there is a claim of equal pay. There is an idea that women can do work that men do. But the true answer I believe is in the day to day interactions between males and females. Males are acknowledged and females are ignored. Males still have the higher status and females have very little.

Every country has its problems with gender inequality and I can only hope that we continue the fight, continue educating, continue thinking and acknowledging the problems. Change does happen. Sometimes it takes living in another country to realize just how lucky I am to be female living in America and how thankful I should be towards those women and men who fought in the war for gender equality.

I love Africa but

instead of doing a third year, I left. I would have loved to do a third year, but the mosquitoes drove me out of the country. Every mosquito bite turned into a staph infection and I ended up with nasty quarter size and sometimes larger black scars. Lucky for me my legs didn't end up as bad as some volunteers' polka dotted legs.

Sometimes during the summer my legs and feet would be covered with band aids and a huge number of flies would land on each covered sore. It was gross.

I could have stayed in Africa if I had been willing to wear pants, socks, and shoes, but it was so hot. Plus have you ever tried to pee in an empty field with your butt exposed to the world? Skirts were practical pieces of clothing, easy to go to the bathroom in, easy to create a bit of privacy in a country with few bushes and trees, easy to hide from the bush taxi eyes as they followed the foreigner who has to pee, easy to be modest and create a bit of respect from the Muslim men.

Lucky for me I moved to Gansu, a dry desert where the mosquitoes are few.

However, last week I went to Chengdu for the national holiday and mid-autumn's day. In that wet humid climate, a city filled with water canals, and a teahouse culture where you sit by the water drinking tall glasses of chrysanthemum and green tea for hours at a time, the mosquitoes attacked.

PS. Have you heard Peace Corps Guinea volunteers are being moved out of the country again? Remember when that happened to me?

Did living in Africa, change the way I do things?

When I first moved to China, I was still wearing African fashions, the big airy shirts that add a couple of pounds and that allow the skin to breathe under the hot sun. I was still wearing a lot of skirts and was not feeling really comfortable wearing form fitting pants. Plus they were hot and skirts were more practical for squat toilets.
Nowadays though, I live in a part of China where the weather is cold. Pants and long underwear are necessary. I have given up my desire to be Little House on the Prairie modest in long ankle length skirts and have adopted the more practical fashion of pants. I am still not very comfortable in tight jeans; although, lately I have been wearing them and have gotten used to them again.

In Africa, laundry was done by hand, two buckets, one with soapy water and one with clean water for rinsing. In China, I have a washing machine that uses electricity to agitate the soapy water, spin one way, spin the other. One must manually add water and drain the water. There is a spinner that is like a scientific centrifuge that spins out water while stretching out your clothes. I still do part of the wash the African way. I use a bucket to rinse out the soap and use muscle to squeeze out the water.

In Africa, I did not have a refrigerator. I would sometimes put leftovers in a clay cannery to keep the food cold. If it smelled all right and didn't have a slimy texture, I might eat it for breakfast.

In China, I have a refrigerator, but haven't figured out how to fill it. My fridge right now is completely empty. In a city, where I can eat out, three meals for $3 a day, I don't cook much and even if I did, I'd probably walk to the supermarket once a day like the locals do. For some reason, vegetables don't keep very well in fridges. They get slimy by the next day.

So did living in Africa change the way I live life or do things?

Not really.

What changes the way I do things, is what is available in the country in which I'm living. In Africa, I wore skirts, cooked small individual sized meals, and washed my clothes by hand. In China, I use the washing machine. I eat out and shop for food like the locals. I wear pants.

When I return to the states, I will probably start using a dryer unless I am living in the countryside. I will probably cook with an oven and drive a car unless I am in a bike friendly city.

Living abroad has taught me that I adapt. I don't hang onto my old ways, but follow the ways of the place I am living. Will I adopt the wasteful ways of the US? I hope not, but my track record of adopting a particular country's ways tells a different story.

April 19

The Peace Corps hostel in Ouaga has about 20 beds in the form of metal bunk beds; however, it is too hot to sleep indoors.

Still it is luxurious sleeping in Ouaga. I pull a good firm mattress off of the bunk beds and take it to the screen enclosed porch and place it right under the ceiling fan. It is a step up from village where I sleep under a mosquito net hanging from the rafters of my straw covered porch, sleeping on a rough, firm nylon strung cot.

Yet last night I was unable to sleep.

Why? Was it the lack of the braying donkeys, dogs, and guinea fowl? Was it that I was too cold from the cooling fan?

No.

Ants

Not your ordinary ants, like the little black ones that will quickly cover a chocolate chip cookie.
No, these were those big ones where you don't need a magnifying glass to see the different balloon parts of the scurrying creature.
Scurry here, scurry there, scurry all over my bed, and all over me.

It was like a dream, but not.

April 14

The UN is calling for international support for the World Food Bank. A food shortage is foreseen for the future. The rising cost of food will create famine.

The people of Burkina Faso are protesting the rising cost of goods demanding the government to do something. Little did I know that this is a global problem, one that is complicated. I am a chemist not an economist.

April 13

Last summer a group of us dug up dirt, mud, clay-like earth and moved it by the bucketful to raise the front porch in front of my door. We had a tapping fest packing the earth into a hardened floor, no need for cement.

This is the floor I live on. It is the floor of my living room, my kitchen, and my bedroom. Each day it fills with trash onion skins, mango skins, the stems of the wild eggplant plants from which we tore the leaves, peanut shells, candy wrappers, and bones from a goat stew. Trash is thrown onto my living space ground. Each evening before dark, I sweep the dirt using brooms made out of dried grass. Amazing how clean dirt can become and how dirty I become in the dust cloud.

Today one of my 2 year old visitors announced, "I have to pee."

But before she could get her underwear down and off to the latrine she peed right on the spot where I lay my head each night to sleep. Dirt is easier to clean than carpet. Is potty training easier in a life lived outside?

December 18

I love giving candy to my kids. They love receiving it too! It is a rare treat. 3 pieces cost 25 FCFA (4 cents), rarely does a kid have 25 FCFA. Plus they'd rather buy a boiled sweet potato or a gateau, something a little more filling than sweets.

On Monday, a day of no classes except calculating student averages some of my kids were all about working for candy.

We had a fraction fest with parentheses and brackets galore. It was fun and I liked it coz I could individualize the problem depending on the student's skill level as well as show each student what was wrong.

Sometimes the kids make me frown when they work on other homework from other classes or start gabbing when I'm talking.

And sometimes they make me smile at their enthusiasm to learn, hands stretched as high as they can go hoping to be the hand that catches my eye to be called upon.

December 16

Computers are nice.

Calculating the first trimester's grades for 260 students, weighting each subject differently, math and French valued more than the other subjects, plus having to have each student verify their averages by hand is time consuming. Time consuming! At least I have a calculator. I am thankful for my portable solar powered piece of technology.

December 15

Coming from the supermarket culture of the states, it feels weird being given raw peanuts and then boiling them in salted water.

Homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers are nothing new.

But peanuts, homegrown peanuts are new to me. Peanuts come on shelves in cans with a seal of freshness.

Washing off the dirt that provided the nutrients for my peanuts and then boiling them, or shelling them, or grilling them, or pounding them into peanut butter really puts you into the ground level of processing, a processing by the human hand instead of by an idea out of the human head that mass processes peanuts.

I don't know what I really want to say about this. All I know is that it feels different than picking a tomato, washing it, and eating it.

December 14

Nothing seems special anymore.
I have adapted and my world has equilibrated into normal:

the latrine
the bucket baths
the stars

I remember my first days learning how to squat. My muscles complained and my aim was a bit off.

My first bucket bath wasn't very cleansing or conserving. Most of the water missed me washing the floor quite well, taking twice as much water as was necessary.

Star gazing used to be a favorite pastime, now I just fall asleep.

December 13

I can tell the morning time by the color of the sky.

Instead of looking over at an alarm clock with big read numbers sitting on a nightstand, I peer out into the morning sky:

gray = not yet 6 am
orange = 6 am
back to gray = time to get up and get ready for school (6:10)

December 12

I never though in my life that I would have ever said the following:

I wish I had been a cheerleader.

It is the last week of classes at the middle school and the kids have organized a football tournament between the different grades.

The kids would love to cheer their team on with cheers. I don't know any cheers. They never stuck in my head while playing basketball or going to football games and pep rallies.

Man, I wish I had been a cheerleader.

December 11

My village in Burkina has a lot more than my village in Guinea: rice ladies, a daily taxi to Ouaga, many people who'll take your portrait for a fee, a catholic and protestant church, stores stacked high of goods, an ambulance, a cell tower, a dance club, fridges and freezers run on a bottle of gas, a movie shack.

My village in Guinea had oranges and avocados galore, a water faucet right outside my door, freshly baked French bread, and two kids who sold a table full of goods for their parents.

My Burkina village has a lot more amenities. It is a bigger village. Just like how a city has a certain coldness due to the number of strangers, my Burkina village has a certain coldness. Just like how it is harder to make friends, to find community in a big city, I also find this difficulty in my Burkina village.

My Guinea village was small and I was quickly absorbed into the community becoming an active participant, trekking 5 km by foot to attend funerals and fetes.

Sunday my Burkina village left for a big fete in a neighboring village. No one told me.

December 9

Today I went on a 4 hour bike ride.

Half of the trip was on a good dirt road used by all vehicles. The other half was on a lonely dirt path in the wilderness. I'm amazed that even being in new territory on a new path, hills have a sense of familiarity. During a feeling of being lost, a small part of me felt not lost. I recognize that hill. I'm getting close to my destination.

One can never really be lost in the wilderness because all paths lead to people and water. And people will get you back on the right path that will lead to your destination.

It gets scary when a path turns into nothing. And voila you're in the wilderness, lost.

Bling bling

December 8

I have a stack of pens on my desk, nice gel pens from the US that have run out of ink.

As I was about to throw them out, my students said, "No, we want them."

I replied, "They don't work."

"They're pretty. We can attach it to our shirts and people will say that's a pretty pen from the U.S."

I gave them the pens. I guess they are more useful as a piece of jewellery than down the latrine.

A dining experience

December 7

It is a bit unappetizing being served a whole, hot, freshly, deep fried froggy in a clear plastic baggy.

Do I actually bite the head off and start chewing? the webbed feet? It kind of makes me feel a bit queasy.

I've had frog legs before. They were fried up and yummingly reminiscent of chicken. But a whole green frog that looks like it could jump off my plate?

Just close your eyes and start tearing apart!

Well it does taste like chicken a rare taste au village. Chickens are expensive. I miss chicken. Have I found the replacement? Frogs for a quarter each?

Hmm.... I'm not feeling too good.

The legs are tasty.

But I think I'll leave the back, a fried piece of green skin and the head for the dogs and cats. I'm not putting the head in my mouth at least not yet.

I don't know. Maybe I'll leave the frogs for the locals. I waste too much of it. A kid would love the parts I'm throwing out, but its dark and there are no kids around.

I hope my stomach can hold the fine rubbery delicacy.

I think I'll brush my teeth, not sure if my stomach likes the thought or feel of frog gristle between my teeth.

December 5

Watermelons are still in season,
still red,
still dirt cheap,
50 cents for a huge ol'melon,
but a new delicacy has appeared on the food buffet
frogs
not just frog legs mind you
whole frogs that have been gutted
and deep fried.

December 4

A lone chick's unending cry pierced the air.
Would it live or die?
Could I catch and protect it till its mother came back?
I decided to wait and see how nature handled it.

Making her rounds with her 20 chick brood, she returned in search for my watermelon rinds.

Unnoticed to be missing, it ran to its family and stopped crying.

Life won today.

December 3

Our volleyball had an unfortunate accident with a thorn tree, thorns longer than your pinkie, thorns like miniature spears, strong not flimsy. The volleyball received two puncture wounds. But don't worry hopefully the patient is recovering with its treatment of super glue.