Msr. le Partant, Soyez le Bienvenue

It all started June 15th. Or likely before that.
If we reconstruct the history of Aaron’s Peace Corps Experience, v.2.010, I appear to have mutated from a predominantly village-based existence to some sort of village + organizational hybrid, with flecks of travel in there for good measure. Back in the day, all workdays in Waga, visits to PCVs, bureau meetings, etc. were planned around making sure I sat my tô-sauce fed butt au village for significant periods of time. Some combination of latent work ethic, healthy guilt complex, and a smidgeon of masochism, led me to believe I should be in village for stints of 4-weeks before feeling I’d earned a few nights of psychological or cultural repos. This is/was probably an excellent thing, and I am glad my past-self decided to roll accordingly. However it now appears my past self and my present self should be at odds, given that ever since this past March I am lucky if I stay put for a string of 12 days.
Over the past five months, I appear to have strayed/strode into a somewhat more business-ish world of Peace Corps service, including advisory committees, conferences, and the all-consuming monstrosity that is stage. The sum total of these things is a feeling that my presence in village is less important for me; whereas before I may have turned down various outings because I felt a.) village trumped all, and b.) said outings didn’t intimately involve PC goals one through three, I now feel more likely to validate reasons for leaving Sabce. A marriage in Gaoua? Super important. Tree planting? Heck yea! Last-chance visit to an outgoing stage-mate’s site? Now or never! Family coming? Off to Togo and Benin!!
Regardless of whether it feels ‘full’ or not, our time au village is the basis for so many challenges, opportunities, uncertainties, and revelations. We have it drilled in our heads – and rightly so, I will argue – that our days and nights in banco abodes are critical to seeing our work bear any sort of fruit. Indeed there are several things happening in Sabce that, had I felt less tethered to village earlier on, would currently not be going as smoothly. On the one hand this is fabulous news – work I’ve helped initiate is running by itself, and I can step back and be a homo-sapiens ex-machina. On the other hand, I have been seeing/feeling some repercussions in terms of how well my summer camp is going – attendance fluctuates a lot compared to last year, some kids have never once shown up, and the girls simply ain’t got no respect (NB: we had a biscuit-sharing fiasco, which supposedly led to 5 girls boycotting one day of camp).
Recognizing this broad change in my service has been weird and sad, although the idea of an evolving PC experience is definitely corroborated by other PCVs. I’m beginning to feel like a necessary servant for non-village work, and less gung-ho about rockin the projects at site. I’m sitting here now in my neighbor’s totally sweet boarding-school digs (NEIGHBOR!), having spent the day organizing computer files, buying material for a swear-in outfit, and ordering fancy sling-back chairs for my parents to sit in. Not exactly PC goal-achieving activities, except for e-mailing a few thoughts on how Burkina summer camps compare to American ones. Part of me feels as though all this wonderful self-awareness should encourage me to really drink up the last few moments of village life; the experience of so many RPCVs shows that we simply can’t get our time back. Au même moment, I’m looking ahead at the next couple months and seeing that I will very likely be wanted/needed/useful/ out of village again. In addition to trying to see an out-going stage mate’s site, swear in, and traveling with my parents, there is – drum roll please – a second health stage. As any good Yid would say, oy vay is mir.
Peace Corps is such a bizarre mental place to be in work-wise. Most of our life decisions revolve around one basic binary choice – Do I stay in village? We’re expected to really throw our entire selves into this gig, with very little separation between travail, repos, et bien-être. Most of us shoot for whatever level of balance leaves us reasonably fulfilled and passably sane, our holy grail being a level of ‘integration’ that makes advanced calculus look like poorly executed hop-scotch. Such intense acceptance by a community demands time and commitment, as per the universal laws on how to build trust in a community where your foreign-ness makes children cry. The weirdness that hit me recently, however, is a feeling that I may not be deserving of the trust and the apparent good vibes I’m currently enjoying in Sabce. While I feel I really hit the ground running in 2009, and kept good momentum into the beginning of 2010, my mental state is now one of having ‘peaked’ a bit early and being ready to fly off.
Which brings me finally to the title of this piece, and the idea of being emphatically welcomed back ‘home’. Between June 15th and August 1, I was in village for one (1) day. ONE. And the month of May was not exactly stellar either. Such extended absence is not totally unheard of in volunteer life, but definitely bordering on the ridiculous if you made it a priority to eat dried gumbo sauce at the house of a Peuhl elder once a week. So when I stepped off of STAF on August 2nd, smelled the ‘ol country air for the first time in many weeks, and had my bags taken by three different village friends…. my brain immediately asked: is this ok? On the one hand I’m completely thrilled I can come back to place and have people waiting to meet me as I get off the bus, see eyes light up and big smiles when I wander through the marché for the first time in 45 days. It’s just… stunning.
The part that makes me cringe, however, is while I definitely see the fruit of all my efforts (guilty admission – a couple of village friendships at times fall under the category of ‘efforts’) towards integration and building relationships, my ability/responsibility to run off in a fairly unrestrained manner can’t be a good thing in terms of trust or mutual understanding. I have this awkward sense that while I’m still a decent PC volunteer, I’m not as good a . . . citizen . . . of Sabce as I used to be. One day I started thinking about volunteering gigs I had back in the states, and realized that in a very real way I have worked myself away from such simply useful positions here. I now feel so hung up on capacity building, organizational blah blah blah, and pretending I have no money, that I somehow seem to have forgotten I can just, y’know, lend a helping hand in Sabce.
Or perhaps I’m just thinking too much. Perhaps I should be feeling as though I am working myself out of a job (although I don’t like feeling as though I am working my way out of a community). Sur la terrain people are glad when I’m around, and understand I have some other stuff to do when I disappear, so that’s cool, right? It just feels odd, slightly dishonest even, because I’m pretty sure I am standing on a solid foundation with my village, one that I’ve been very deliberately building since December 2008. The possibly major change is that, at this point, things are finally built. I’ve entered into some sort of maintenance period, albeit one where people still think I periodically fly home to mam yiiri (i.e. the US). If the lovely people of Sabce now see me as a firmly footed member of the community, then the major personal battle is to not feel as though I am abusing the trust we’ve built and any expectations I’ve created. Instead, I should continue being a decent citizen, and helping out with the tools I have available.
One final thought before you are forced to liberate yourselves from this missive (i.e. the article ends) – some of the work for Peace Corps, and most notably stage, is shared. If one person takes time out of site to engage in bureau-esque work, that should likewise mean a different person remains free to do their thang in village. This may be dumb on my part, but I kind of figure that if I consent to handle responsibilities in Ouaga, then other people don’t have to. And if I manage to do good things in Ouaga, and said other people do good things in village, then really we might have an overall win-win situation. Or so I like to tell myself…
So yes. I will be in and out of village, perhaps not pretending to be as much of a Burkinabe as in the past, but still rocking whatever worlds need to be rocked and doing decent (or at least non-harmful) things in the place I am always trying to call home. Maybe this is not our parents’ Peace Corps (good lord that phrase is annoying….) but then again it’s not even my own Peace Corps compared to 2009.
Much love, and who wants to work the October stage? Woohoo!