All These Things That I've Done

Well it’s certainly been a while since my last post – a whole term, in fact – but not much has really happened. Life continues, classes progress (at least I hope they did), the rain finally came back, bringing some bug situations (ie. mating – which means biblical quantities of flying bugs appear out of nowhere and then are gone in a matter of days), and the next thing I know I’m staring down my last set of exams to correct and looking forward to an interminable return flight!

But the last term and the end of the year do bring up a lot of questions to ponder, much like the beginning. The biggest, and hardest for a teacher, being did I actually accomplish anything? I started off the year with so many goals and plans, but slowly circumstances, fatigue, and material shortages (or realities) pulled them down to a much simpler level. In my classes I had to be satisfied with the less perfect solution - one class on writing up a lab instead of lab reports every week, looking up Kagame on Wikipedia instead of a long research project - and for my own goals there had to be some improvisation - to study for the GRE I read the New Yorker, reading Martin Meredith's Fate of Africa had to suffice for my Africa background history since it took almost all 10 months to get through!

Now I can see that in some ways I have adjusted a lot - in speed of speech and expectations for my To Do lists, but in many others I’m still the same frustrated New Yorker stuck in a village. In a letter to my friend (that I never sent) in January I explained with exasperation “that’s how things work here – at least if you’re on the outside of the system – they follow an invisible order that looks a lot like disorder”. And 10 months later that still sums up my understanding of how things work – at school, in the country at large. Sometimes disorder is easier to deal with when its expected (as I sit in the airport just hoping my cousin has made her flight, surrounded by airport staff who are unable to answer any questions), but others I am just as on the verge of a meltdown as I was in January (like when the secretary types up my exams with all the answers – even when I wrote them separately in red under the title, ANSWERS).

For a long time I thought that I was failing to live here successfully because I didn’t love it 100% of the time. Now I realize that no one loves it 100% of the time, and that just by staying, sticking it out and completing my job, I have succeeded. And what does this success look like?

You Know You’ve Been Living In Africa A Long Time When:

You consider picking the weevils out of rice and still cooking it for dinner.

You answer to Mzungu like it’s your name.

An internet connection equivalent to good dial up feels amazingly fast; broadband is unimaginable.

You seriously weigh the pros and cons of spending a dollar more on anything.

You phrase questions incorrectly: “You are going to the market?”

You forget that rainy and dry are not the only seasons.

You act like staring openly at people is acceptable behavior.

You think Heineken is an expensive beer.

60 degrees feels absolutely glacial.

The irony of all this, is that now that I feel that I’ve finally adjusted or come to terms with my “culture shock” (for lack of a better term) I have to prepare myself for the whole thing in reverse. And sadly for all of you, this is my final blog, so the only way you’ll hear about my reverse adjustment is witnessing it in person. Thanks for reading! And see you soon…