The New Guys

I’ve always had a problem fitting the right words to a given situation. My clunky brain grabs its ladle and dips into whatever pot presents itself first- the result sometimes being a half-cooked stew of mostly sensible, though strangely spiced, words. I like the pace of writing by hand on my back porch. The jungle doesn’t roll its eyes at me when I cross a sentence out, and Knut doesn’t take a bite out of my foot (too often) when my brain slips a gear and my pen stalls over paper.

So you can imagine my apprehension was equal to my alacrity to be among the first volunteers to greet the forty-five incoming PC trainees to Sierra Leone. But remembering my own myriad of questions up on arrival here, I had to wonder if my conversational faculties had atrophied past the point of providing sound answers to simple questions. The worst case scenarios of interactions ran through my mind thus:

“So what’s your favorite thing to do in your village?”

“I like to… weather hot… sit naked on my back veranda at night drinking Kool Aid and the BBC…listening.”

Or:

“What are some of the projects you’ve done in your community?”

“Yes.”

In practice, though, I’d like to think I played my part better than dreaded. Unless I repressed the memories I don’t remember saying anything too many shades off color, and at the end of my several weeks with the ‘new guys’ I feel like I left them more knowledgeable about the country. So there must have been a filter working, right? I imagined I shouldn’t bring up the traditional practice of FGC the first evening at the airport, and maybe kettling or illiterate students weren’t meat for conversation the first week. I avoided trainwrecks by saying, “Your body’s tolerance to alcohol greatly reduces in this climate,” instead of “ONE second I’m cracking open a Carlsburg, the NEXT thing I know my naked butt is running towards starlit waves."*

The result of my filter in action, though, was a kind of constant, internal chuckle as I remembered weird stuff that has happened.

“Do you use candles in your house?”
A simple question. But I’m sure my eyes glazed over as I remembered one night maniacally hacking the lid off a can with a knife I’d made earlier at the blacksmisth’s-exploded tomato paste giving me a seemingly bloody visage- when I leaned too far over the candle in my kitchen and spent the next handful of seconds with my head literally on fire. “Yeah, I use candles. With the state of waste disposal here, I’d hate to be throwing out batteries constantly.”

Smooth.

After my few weeks with them I feel surprised and encouraged anew to be in an organization constitued of such like-minded, different people. Even the steps taken to get on- and especially off- the plane in the good mood they did is a testament to the caliber of these ‘new guy’s’ character. Heck, after a couple of week they even made me feel comfortable like I could talk good.

*Naked body surfing is just an example...and (probably) something that I've never done (twice).