Summertime Freefall

“A good toiling is what I need.”

My ancestors' Mennonite blood was simmering, and, like the Mongols of old who felt compelled to plunder and raze from their perch atop swift horses, I too was feeling compelled to descend with all the wrath and fury of a pacifist-farmer on the square of dirt behind my house. My genes were demanding in chorus from their tiny Nuclear Parliaments- Must! Garden!

You see, I was having an extremely “Levin” or “Constantine Dmitrich” moment. After seeing farmers working every day on their plots as I went and came from school, I needed to get a tool in my hands and do something tactile. Far from a matter of survival (no matter what you see in those awful commercials, food is abundant in this country) planting then pulling food from the ground just seemed right.

Any first step for the novice agriculturist? Lacking The Home Depot, let’s go to The Blacksmith.

I didn’t do anything nearly so epic as give my new ho a name, but I tried a few handles till I found a good fit, then sat and watched as Ibrahim smacked, heated, plied, bent, and beat the head nito the handle. I left boasting a smirking swagger and an embarrassingly clean tool.

Fast forward forty-eight hours and one seed buying trip to ROkupr, you’ll find me thoroughly cured of my need to toil. Less concerned with making mounds and straight rows, I’m more concerned about a sore back and wondering what the heck I’m going to do in a few months when fifty stalks offer me one hundred ears of corn. Maybe make an extremely linear corn maze for the neighborhood kids…

Mennonite ancestors-  appeased.

Anyway, besides mucking around and throwing seeds over my shoulder, I’ve been placed in a frightening situation as of late- summer vacation. It’s as if all the rush-hour traffic that made you buy those books on tape has disappeared- completely. All the lines at Sam’s club keeping you from getting home to dinner have evaporated- entirely. All those electric harbingers of busywork and meetings laying siege to your inbox have seemingly deleted themselves from existence. No voicemails to answer, no projects t complete, no deadlines to beat by a day… sudden freefall. Besides the making and subsequent devouring of my lunch’s vivacious cucumber salad, my obligation meter for the day is laying down dead on zero. September 10^th is the next time the seal on my school will be broken, and that leaves me feeling about as important and needed as a river steamboat captain in Indianapolis.

Far from being frustrating, though, after recovering from the initial stomach-lurch of obligation freefall, I’ve charged myself with a new set of chores. Learn another language, read more, learn how to throw a clay pot, write a grant, make home improvements, cook edible things, train for a marathon, help with community projects, and do whatever else- all outside the borders of alarm clocks and pressure.

Sound like a workload you’d be interested in? Well, https://www.peacecorps.gov/apply/now/index.cfm?clearform=1 I'll bet you won't though.

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).