Part 1: Goodbye
I had heard through the highly efficient gossip grapevine that is the main mode of communication amongst the foreign ex pat community in the widely sprawling but sparsely populated country of Botswana that my new friend had decided to leave. She hadn’t been here altogether too long, but I had looked forward to having another friend in the delta. I text her to see if it was true. When she confirmed her departure I asked if I could stop by and say goodbye.
In addition to knowing I was going to miss her, and wanting to see her off, in some weird way I also felt it my duty, having recently been promoted to the ranks of those who have been in country over a year to check in with her before she left. It’s a big decision to make, as we go through a lot and take a long time to get here in the first place. There was no thought that crossed my mind about trying to talk her out of it, it wasn’t about that. I trusted that she had thought about the decision from all angles, as I said, it’s a huge decision. My main concern was that she was at peace, and that it hadn’t been one particular incident that had pushed her towards leaving.
When you observe the trajectory of the Peace Corps cycle of emotions from arrival in country to departure, you notice that much of our time in this experience is spent feeling vulnerable and or depressed. Incidents that might be sort of a big deal or even a small deal on their own are constantly being coupled with various other discomforts and inconveniences, cultural miscommunications and various other emotional maladies that can make everything feel like a BIG DEAL. Occasionally smallish things, or things that you will adjust to or have the potential to change over time push you over the edge, and to everything you can just feel like saying “F*ck IT!!! I can promise you that every single person in every Peace Corps post in the world has experienced this particular sentiment, and sometimes you need to speak with one of the people who can understand the sentiment to get past it and keep going.
I wanted to provide the ear of someone who would be one of the last people she would encounter who would “get it.” Once she steps off that plane in the States, there will be very few if any people that understand much of anything of what she has just left. When she came here she came alone and when she gets back, she returns alone as well.
I arrived at her place, both the first and last time I would see her space, and it was all packed up (full disclosure: I just had a total Christmas in July. My new friend was incredibly generous in her departure. I may have just received the only non-stick frying pan in the Okavango delta.). We sat and chatted. She was indeed at peace, and very comfortable with her decision, and I had to agree that her reasons were nothing short of solid. It hadn’t been an impulsive decision or one certain thing. She felt it was time for her to go and in that I supported her.
Seronga being where it is (quite near the edge of the end of the Earth, which I believe is officially located in Gudigwa) I haven’t had too much exposure to those who have arrived recently. Peace Corps in Botswana is such that each year a cohort leaves and a new one arrives. So we’re all either the newbies or the old school. With this position of honor comes a certain amount of jadedness and increased cynicism amongst some of us that we try to be somewhat gentle in our exposure to the new class so as not to age them unduly before their time.
It’s a constant mini-circle of life. In May I got used to the idea that the people I’ve come to look to for many things were leaving, and that suddenly I would become the one who would be called on to help the fresh arrivals in any way I could to get through the hardest part of Peace Corps, the first few months in their new villages. I tried to remember what I would have wanted and what I felt I needed when I was in their position, and still try to consider them whenever I learn something new or gain a new resource. Although Peace Corps is a hugely individual endeavor it’s also essential that we work together and try to help each other out when we can, be it through helping each other make contacts and access resources or by just being there to listen and support each other.
Dudu (in Gumare) and I have long agreed that we aren’t the type of people with personalities that would get along or be friends in the States, with that being said I would be pretty fricken lost without her. It’s these sort of relationships based in proximity and circumstance and sharing similar geography and conditions that lead to the sort of odd affections we develop through this experience. An opportunity I was now going to miss out on with my new friend as she was leaving.
I wasn’t in any way mad or disappointed in her, as I said I understood her reasons. Through the conversation we had I noticed many things that struck me. In some ways it’s incredibly weird to see so much of the person I used to be in the new class, and see so much of those who have recently left in myself. Things I have come to have patience with or at least tolerate with the understanding that they are not changing any time soon, or that there’s ways of keeping oneself from being exposed to these upsetting things. You come to a point where you don’t think of it as ignoring or overlooking shocking or upsetting things but rather keeping your own sanity by not dwelling on them. Some of the comments she made and things she was displeased with about the culture or the country that I would have formerly agreed with wholeheartedly, I found that somewhere between here and there just came to accept or at least understand the reasons why things are the way they are.
As I sat nodding about and agreeing with some of the things she expressed indignation with that I have long come to accept as normal, I began to wonder: When did I stop feeling? When did these things that would normally upset me and rile me up cease to even cause a blip in my radar? Was this the emotional direction life in Botswana was taking me? Towards being so constantly immersed in conditions and instances of distress, and grief, circumstances of injustice and hopelessness that I would become emotionally exhausted by it all and begin to check out emotionally? That human suffering would be so part and parcel with daily life that I didn’t care anymore? Was I numb?
I had wondered the same thing on a few separate occasions in recent weeks when I’d felt my eyeballs begin to twitch. It would start when I was extremely frustrated, frustration happens daily in Seronga and it barely fazes me any more, but these were instances where no less than 10 things had suddenly derailed and I was at a loss for which direction to even move into next. My eyeballs would twitch and burn as I sat somberly away from people, a preemptive move I’ve found myself making without even realizing it, in order to keep from flipping out on people who have no contribution to or responsibility for my frustration but might otherwise find themselves in my path. More and more often lately I’ve found myself sitting, staring off into space, waiting for the dull rage to subside.
I realized later that the eye twitching is what usually happens before I cry, what used to be my last resort as a way to react to my frustration or other angsty situation I find myself in. I noted with slight disinterest that I don’t even bother crying anymore, as I’ve learned it does no good. Instead I send out a few choicely worded text messages to friends here whom I know can relate, and wait for the anger and ire to subside, the only joy I get coming from how entertaining or succinct I can be with my venom.
I wonder at this new phase, if it can be interpreted as growth or regression? Am I becoming more zen or just permanently pissed off? Do I even notice any more? I know I feel when I’m happy, because it seems the slightest things make me nearly euphoric which tends to be expressed through big smiles and dancing about, and yes, usually some text messages. When I’m happy I feel really happy. I appreciate and just love my life. I feel lucky and blessed for the opportunities and adventures I’ve had here. I feel any sacrifice I may have made to live this experience for two years has more than been rewarded. Much of the rest of the time I spend in a fugue of either frustration or avoidance of aforementioned frustration. Because if I can’t feasibly DO something about the situation that is irritating me, is there any point in feeling that irritation? If I ignore it, will it go away? Choose your battles?
Part 2: Crash
I revisited these ideas later that night. I left with a hug and well wishes when my friend Colin collected me from her house. I had invited her out for one last night of Botswana fun but she deferred with too much packing to finish. Fair enough. Colin and I went to pursue one of the main (only?) forms of entertainment in the area, heading out to the bar. For a few different reasons I wasn’t drinking that night, but as I have long maintained, I can have as much fun at a good party as the average bear whether I’m drinking or not. It was a long night; I saw a lot of friends, had a great time and was more than ready to go home by the end of the night without the alcohol that often fuels the sort of stubbornness that is what successfully keeps the party going in my system.
In the parking lot many of the revelers were a bit too drunk to be driving, which is a constant danger of being on the road in Sub Saharan Africa (the deadliest place for road accidents in the world). Colin and I got in the car and waited while the cars ahead of us did spin outs and screwed around on the dirt parking lot ahead of us. The squealing tires and flying dirt set the stage for stupid driving, and we just continued to wait back until all of the cars had gotten on their way. We didn’t want to be near any of them on the road as we made our way home.
When the noise and lights of a majority of the cars that were ahead of us were gone, we slowly pulled out behind a guy with a girl on the back of his bike. Outside this particular bar there is a curb along the dirt that breaks in one very small, very specific place so that cars can enter the gate without having to go over this curb. It’s hard to see in the day and nearly impossible at night, so for the most part cars just come across the dirt wherever they can.
This wasn’t what happened that night.
The driver of the bike pulled out of the gate wobbling back and forth a bit, his balance thrown off as he was searching for the break in the curb. As he drove out towards the road he was directly in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, also searching for the break in the curb, but deterred from that by the presence of the bike in the way. The oncoming vehicle swerved (a bit unnecessarily from what I could see from my front row vantage point) and overcorrected, and proceeded to roll three or four times. In excruciatingly slow motion.
The noise was horrifying. The screeching of tires was brief, but the sound of the metal impact on the ground burst forth again and again. The dust that was kicked up and floated in the jarring lights of the headlamps of the car as it rolled.
I began repeating Colin’s name like a question, the fear pulsing through my veins and making his name the only logical thing to ask, as though I expected him to answer that no, we hadn’t actually just seen that. He made a move to get away from the scene but from somewhere else I heard my voice say hesitantly, and then more insistently, “No. We can’t”. He grunted at me and jumped out of the car. I could see people running from in front of me towards the now mangled SUV, which was behind me. They flashed in front of the windscreen like a movie.
Now I was alone, which felt more frightening than anything so I got out of the car and followed the guy who had been riding the bike, his passenger and Colin towards the scene. Through the glow of the headlights, in the hazy smoke of dust and broken glass in the road laid the silhouette of a person. As I got closer I realized it wasn’t a silhouette, it was an actual figure, and it took me a minute to realize that indeed this person might be dead. It was my turn to pause. Colin had recovered from his initial shock and was now attending to the man in the road, asking him questions to determine his identity and injuries.
He had been the passenger in the SUV, and he had been thrown from the vehicle, the driver suffered minor injuries. He had just been getting a lift from this bar to the next, and thus no one really knew who he was. Suddenly there was an influx of drunk people on the scene, they were everywhere. For the most part we all knew each other as most of the white people know the other white people in this country. Most of them were drunk, and a majority of them panicking and talking too loudly, or even screaming. Their voices echoed in my head and I shook it to try to get them out. Colin somehow corralled them and put them somewhere, while other people that, while drunk, were also functioning took over.
In the white ex pat community in Maun it seems people exist almost on their own planet. They are the ones who own or run the lodges and tourism and hunting industries, they are the children of missionaries and other do-gooders, they are the foreign pilots, and they are the “founders” who 20 years ago realized all the lucrative business that could be made in the delta. The common law of going through “procedure” in Botswana and waiting for things forever often don’t apply to them. They have set up their world so that they aren’t too incredibly bothered or influenced by the constraints of life for the other local people. They’ve created their own universe to contain whatever it is they want, and they operate by their own rules. The whites had the vehicle moved to the side of the road, the victim on the way to the hospital and nearly everyone who had witnessed or been a part of the crash gone from the scene before the local police even got there. I remember thinking somewhere in my brain that it might indeed be possible to get away with a murder if you were white and in Maun. The thought made me shudder. I recently heard someone refer to NG11, 12 and 13 (which are the numbers assigned to Seronga and the surrounding areas) as the last frontier. If this is true, then Maun is certainly the Wild West.
Someone called a paramedic, who had likely also just left the bar, and he arrived and assessed the man’s injuries. He called for a blanket, it was night, it was cold and the guy on the ground was at risk of shock. I wordlessly handed over my sweater, and walked over to the fence where all the local Batswana were standing silently observing the wreckage from their front yards.
From somewhere in the depths of my brain came the Setswana words for “give me a blanket,” and I was given one, which I then put on the man on the ground, my sweater was now underneath him protecting his back from the broken glass. I stood there, gazing at the man groaning in pain, a large gash across his face, a stream of blood trailing through his long ginger hair and onto a river on the pavement. Colin was still talking to people around there, sorting things out, and I suddenly realized I was shivering, left only in a tank top.
I walked back to the car and got in and waited for Colin to finish his heroic duties, as there was nothing left for me to do once they loaded the injured man into the makeshift ambulance on the way to the hospital. I sat there in the car, still cold, but mostly numb.
Part 3: The aftermath?
The accident had scared me, but fear was quickly replaced by going into the “deal with it” (also known as “make a plan”) mode that has become the mainstay of my way of life here. Cars wreck. The phone network is out. Malaria. No petrol for the generator. Ferries break. The food is gone. HIV. Water goes out. Children are hungry. Elephants trample. TB. Animals are beaten. People die. Moving on.
People with resources deal with these conditions by imposing the strength of their will and the power of their money into attempts they can make at controlling the nature and conditions of life here. People without resources must trudge along, allocating their meager resources in an attempt to manage misery, while hope, ambition and inspiration are slowly leeched from their spirits. They get by however they can.
I’ve noticed this side we don’t often react to these things emotionally, even though that may have been our human instinct once upon a time. In the bush in Botswana, we make a plan, we deal with the situation at hand so as to move forward with whatever activity we were interrupted from to deal with this newfound inconvenience. A life threatening car crash falls into the same realm as running out of petrol, a minor annoyance to be “sorted out”. And on to the next party. Never mind the blood in the road.
Keep going.
And this is the way it must be. Because eventually it will be dark, and then there are animals, it will be cold, it will be too hot, the petrol will finish, the gas will finish, the ferry can’t go over the river in the dark, both ferries are broken, the rain will come, the rain will finish, there’s a flood, there’s a drought, the children are hungry, people come-people go, the pump is broken, the water is gone, the road is washed out, the generator is broken, the parts, keys, food, materials are too far, the electricity might be coming, the power is gone. Some of these things we can control or prevent. Others we cannot. Any of these conditions can be dangerous or at least highly inconveniencing, and we must thus be prepared to mitigate or ward off the repercussions, and of course make a new plan. There is little control and virtually no predictability. Each move one makes must be weighed against any number of conditions and factors which just cannot be predicted and we thus exist in a state of constant preparation for events and conditions for which we can never reliably plan.
It may not appear so, but we’re quite busy.
It seems that amongst all the time I seem to have found in my life in Botswana the minutes allocated for feeling have grown small. Although sometimes it seems like all I do is feel and ruminate about and pay enormous amounts of time to my feelings, in some ways it seems they’ve also become compartmentalized. Things to be reacted to and dealt with and put away rather than… Felt. The time to feel has been downgraded in priority, things to promote more important (“survival?”) tasks fill the time that might have formerly been used to sort out feelings. Finding and preparing food, fetching or boiling water, securing or waiting for transport to get the above or internet, or airtime, communicating with those not immediately present, cleaning my body or clothing or space, tasks formerly predictable and easy and commandable now time consuming and elusive for all planning purposes.
Emotions have become like most household chores, something to deal with in order of importance. Laundry and dishes, priorities, they must be dealt with when there is water, whether I’m in the mood or not, because who knows how long the water will last or when it will come again. I’ll really figure out how I feel later, when I’ve figured out how I’m getting to location a, b or c, and most of the while in planning (a futile exercise) spent being frustrated, such a constant state as to mask any other minor sub category. Emotions are summoned forth over surprising things, (a tiny child carrying his sibling on his back, a herd of half naked children running towards me, a co-worker giving me a piece of his fish, another reading something he really wants to understand and asking me questions) but more likely I don’t react to things I perhaps should have an emotional reaction to (All five of your children are starving?/ Another of your siblings has died?/ You have HIV? I’m sorry?) The emotions remain in the queue until they demand expression, which can come either from an explosion of some sort of emotional outburst (not extremely culturally common here) or more likely by pushing them deeper. We avoid and do something else to “deal” with the festering emotions.
We drink. We have sex. We sleep. We space out. We want to feel, or we want not to feel, we want relief from our lives. We want to feel good, or at least not feel bad.
When you think about how aspects of the above can reliably contribute to HIV, it puts the epidemic in a whole new light, doesn’t it?
