7+ months, and how does it feel….

Back in Massachusetts there is a very good friend of mine who plays with swords.
To help finance otherwise non-profit-bearing endeavors such as translating 16th century German longsword manuals, he also does fantastic work as a high school history (and betimes Latin) teacher. It is in this spirit that he posed me the following question/conundrum, one likewise posed to a group of his students: Does the saying ‘tempus fugit’ hold true, such that ‘time flies’ and we are like passive observers watching it sail ahead? Or rather does time flow, and we are active bodies swimming about in its current?

(note- this missive is 98% philisophical, and very long. I have tried very hard to make it readable and at least somewhat nifty. Give it a shot….)

It has been a bit over 7 months now away from all the loverly things I have grown up with, such as grass, my mother and father, indie coffee joints, English, a temperature consistently below 110 degrees, and the ability to use a large and expressive vocabulary. For instance, I haven’t said ‘erudite’ at all since arriving. Apparently it is simply ‘érudite’ in French, but this is somehow not exciting, and anyway French here is inextricably linked to Moré, the language of the dominant Mossi people, and I sincerely doubt Moré has a word for ‘erudite’. To cite some examples of limited word use, the term for HORSE translates to ‘Mossi Bicycle’, PEN likwise equals ‘Mossi Write’, and SHEA BUTTER is ‘Mossi Oil’. In a similar vein, placing ‘nassare’ (WESTERNER) in front of certain words helps distinguish things like green beans and beer. The phrase ‘Yaa Soma’ seems to encompass all possible synonyms for good/great/wonderful/excellent/awesome/superb, save that you can indicate something (most often food) is sweet or tasty by saying ‘Yaa Noogo’; or ‘Noomame’.
For someone learning a language, being able to very legitimately get by on limited vocab is a wooooooooonderful thing! If it weren’t for the fact that the structure of Moré is rather far and away from that of the romance languages, I might even be able to say it’s an easy tongue to pick up. But this is not the case, and for instance if I want to say ‘I am angry because i have no orange juice’, i must always remember to say, ‘there is no orange juice, because of that i am angry’. It gets worse from there…

Already Aaron has just spent the better part of an hour attempting to talk about the vagaries of time and the frustrations of language, with no seeming liason between the two, and at great expense to his fingers and wrists. But let me attempt to bring this otherwise lumpy beginning into a beautiful and serene whole-
I will posit that time flows. In hindsight yes, 7 months have ‘flown’ by (here, ‘flown’ is the past tense of FLY, mind you, and not just some mischevious ‘n’ happening to abut the word ‘flow’), but I’m the weirdo who chose to come to Burkina and break 95% of normal communication with people I have known and Loved for anywhere from one to 26 years. Due to a choice made back in December of 2007, itself based on – I shit you not – about three sentences found in a text I was reading for a Global Public Health course at Tufts University, I am in May 2009 a Peace Corps volunteer reasonably agitated at the acute effects of sharing little to nothing in terms of culture (oh that word….) and ZILCH in terms of language with those around me. When you end up comparing the lauded ‘PC Experience’ to stages of diahreea with one of your fellow volunteers, one realizes things are. . . . not where they started, and that your participation in the flow of time has brought you somewhere other than to feelings of equaniminity and the fulfillment of some noblesse obligé.

I must certainly count myself amongst those who talk of change – not unlike Obama, long may he live – and fixing things that are so eggrigiously broken, righting wrongs, engendering peace, etc. The type of change I desire is probably based on 1.) a long series of human events (one might call this ‘history) I inherit by virtue of being on planet Earth in 1983, and to which 2.) I apply a lucid 20/20 hindsight based on educational endeavors, my happy sense of morality, common decency, and what I perceive to be the general benefits of being doggone friendly. Given this milieu, Aaron concludes certain changes can be made for the betterment of people if not everywhere, then at least within some category of distance or shared social whatever.
However, here now is the somewhat new line of Aaron’s thinking, which, I should add, may only be applicable for the span of a few months before some other intellectual morph comes along, either subtley revising the current philosophies or deeming them trop passé:

Change is a very big thing, and often I do not know what I am changing. This makes me want to curl up in a sandwich shop and spread mayonnaise on bread for a living. Or plant trees.

To explain slightly further, let us return to time and flowing and water and such. Another water-based image involves throwing a stone into a pond and seeing all the ripples it makes. For me this points to at least two things, one being that we have effects in whatever ponds we play in, and two that we can reasonably envision neither the extent nor the scope of all the effects and changes we create. This thinking is on the one hand kind of heady, because it assumes that Aaron is important or dynamic enough to indeed create changes. Yet it is also kind of sweet, in that it admits our best attempts at understanding cause and effect have a difficult time accounting for all possible outcomes in the here and in the after.
Attempting to reconcile the possiblity that you change things wherever you go, with the possiblity that you have no freaking clue what really you are doing and whether your changes are ‘good’, could very well lead to a feeling of paralysis. A feeling of being too uncertain to muck about in the flow of time, to change its eddies, and to try strange and otherwise exciting things. Thus the will to simply make sandwiches and plant trees, activities which seem innocuous enough (although trees live a long time…)
It is with these thoughts in mind that, for example, when I walk into a class of 44 students and proceed to talk about Gonorrhea (la gonococcie) and Chlamydia (la chlamydiose), with only mild response from the kids, that it is not clear what effect I am truly having. I will say I am very heartened by this particular teacher’s (Mnsr. Dango) willingness to jump in and clarify, revisit, and generally bring home the subject to his students (other teachers sometimes stand by as his / her kindergarteners simply gawk at the white thing waving its arms, pointing at soap), but here I am just substituting my time and very recently acquired knowledge for those of Mnsr. Dango. It’s not even a question of opportunity cost or whether my time and effort is better spent elsewhere – my question is more along the lines of ‘should the westerner let the Mossi and Fuefuehlde and Lobirri and Bissa etc. cultures do their thing and not introduce seeds for green beans and export beer to their country?’
Hmm…….. no, the above question is not quite correctly phrased as it appears in my head. Let me try again using stream of consciousness (my brain is frying as we speak). I am rather worried we are making other people want to live like us (americans). I am rather worried that globalization – meaning the introduction of lotttttttttts of outside influences) – makes people think life is better elsewhere and that they are second rate.
There, that’s more what I am getting at – the latter phrase there about being second rate. That seeing what Life is like in the States, for example, makes Life here in Burkina seem behind, seem to be the lesser. I really don’t like that idea at all, of people thinking they are second rate based on someone elses ‘progress’; ergo my hesitancy to make lots of change other than perhaps keeping people content with what is already around.

Yeesh, i knew this email would be tough to churn out. Realistically this is about 8 really solid journal entries (that were never written) synthesized into one missive. I hope it makes sense in some way, because my brain and my fingers are shot. I am going outside and having a mango-papaya. I dropped it, unfortunately, and had to jump into a rather deep drainage ditch to fetch it. Then I dropped it again, and so the mango-papaya is very soft and not as delicious as it otherwise could be. But i will eat it anyway, and then go have lunch at a friend’s house where I will speak in french and not share any significant or easy cultural understandings and wonder why in the bloody hell anyone would every want to leave their country and snug surrounding and live alone claiming to ‘do good’ for two years. We humans are quite an audacious bunch, I tell you….

My best to all. Congrats to any who managed to read this. I am genuinely impressed It feels almost as though I put down my complete thoughts, but can’t shake the feeling that I am missing at least one part of this whole. Eh well…. I am soooo done.

Love
Aaron