Lorato o bua.... (Lorato speaks)

Or maybe not so much.....

I had my Peace Corps interview a few days back, and has interestingly been my custom as of late, I spent the morning on the verge of tears in frustration. It seems that as I learn to speak this language, and as I have my extra helpful daily reminders of what little Spanish I know that comes to me freely during those opportune moments in which I am trying to respond to a statement in Setswana, I am becoming ever less adept in my mother tongue. I can’t seem to think of, much less express what I want to convey, in words larger than two syllables, in any language.

In some ways it’s a pretty important interview, being one of the factors that decide where I will be placed for the next two years. At the same time, there are many, many other factors that go into the decision, very few of which I have any control over. The importance and irrelevance of conveying one’s needs and wants in the Peace Corps process of site placement has been expounded on through several avenues, leaving me feeling more than a little impotent in terms of the responses I gave.

As I considered what I wanted to convey in terms of importance of location, geography, amenities, proximity to other volunteers, personal goals, skills, strengths, weaknesses, past experience and future vision and mission, and ideas for projects I had the strongest simultaneously contradictory sensations of knowing and not knowing how I felt about any and all of these areas.

In the end, as is the case for me under conditions of anxiety or stress, I only remember what the conversation entailed in bits and pieces, larger chunks coming back to me throughout the course of the rest of the day. I came away thinking I may have said everything and nothing. The APCD assured me that I had conveyed information, and summarized the notes she has taken for me. I’m left wondering if it was too much, enough?

Lately I have been struggling, really wrestling, with notions of what I am to do here in Botswana. I have had to lean very heavily on the faith that lead me here that whatever cosmic purpose I am to serve will be revealed. It’s not a matter of should I stay here, or is this the right thing for me, but rather what am I doing, what will I do, am I doing enough? What of my past have I processed enough to summarize neatly as strengths and weaknesses and what the hell do I want for my future? What percentage of my angst is useful and should be poured into actively searching for exactly the right project or site to tackle, or lobby for, how much in developing the skills that I don’t yet know I’ll need? How much of this process is, like the APCD said, serendipity and trust?

I guess in the good old U.S. of A. these questions would be lumped together in the category of good old fashioned self doubt, and could be solved by making some sort of mind map or flow chart or graph of pros and cons, thrown into an excel spreadsheet and computed. The best practices could be determined, the path of least resistance or greatest gain could be discovered, and the choice could be made. Or maybe things aren’t that easy no matter where you are.

In coming to Africa, while it seems that although my physical body seems to have made the flight, along with some belongings that look suspiciously like mine, other things have shifted. As I’ve learned to adapt to the palette of shades of similarity and difference on this continent, a process of change and reevaluation has been set actively and disorientingly in motion. Simply, things that mattered before either don’t or do extremely. Things that I miss, I long for. I’ve reprioritzed.

I guess this is what you call growth.