Soooo... What do you DO all day?

In the Peace Corps, this is the million dollar question. From the time you sign on to this insanity to the time you’re on the plane home, this ends up being the number one question in your mind as a PCV. For most of my writing I focus on certain instances that happen, or occurrences that make me think, or are interesting. I try to share interesting contradictions and stories that differ from the life I remember living back in the states. Lately several people have posed the million dollar question, and when I realized that even my boyfriend had no idea what I do all day, I figured perhaps I should address it here.
What do you do all day? In some ways the answer is a bit complex at least in its simplicity. The answer, by American standards, is often “nothing,” and this is often what I say when people from back home ask. During the first few (maybe sometimes 6???!!!) months at site you are to just observe. Absorb the culture of your community, find their strengths and weaknesses, look for potential areas to build capacity, improve community life, and reduce HIV and AIDS. Practice language. Meet the Kgosi, the police, the teachers, anyone and everyone. Build relationships. Identify resources. This is all well and good in theory. The Peace Corps spends a great deal of time in training teaching us about different maps and analysis we can do in our community, different meetings we should try to schedule, people we should meet, possible projects, ect. Sometimes I try to do some of these. Sometimes I try to just talk to people and walk around making notes and writing thoughts in a little book. I try to find people who are invested in the community and willing to advocate for change. I try to think of projects that could help the many women who ask me for a job every day could participate in to earn money to help support their families. Sometimes I go home to my house and cry. I attempt to come up with projects the community would stand behind and help build, and that would be here and go on after I leave. I spent an entire afternoon coloring a sign the head nurse asked me to make with colored pencils, and was grateful as hell for a task I could do from state to finish and have something to show for it. I read the newspaper. I read magazines. I try to occasionally use an article here or there as a jumping off point for a conversation with someone. I ask people to tell me stories. I try to locate vegetables and meat to procure. I show up at the clinic in the morning and sometimes spend the whole day in the dispensary counting out pills to make the nurses jobs a little easier that day. This is a good opportunity to chat with them about what they think could help in the community. I try to figure out when I can logistically get to the internet, to Maun to bank, when there might be water to do my laundry or cook, and when there’s not water, I spend time fetching it. I write letters and blogs. I think about life and who I am and who I want to be. I ruminate. When I’m feeling blissful I will try to see the art and beauty of something. When I’m feeling shitty I will damn it to hell.
As an American, it’s sometimes very difficult to not have tangible projects and lists of things to do and check off. It’s hard to see how slow things move, and the ways of logic that are so different, and feel like you’re a worthwhile human being, and that you are accomplishing something, or that you have something to offer.
There’s very rarely a day when at the end of the day I don’t have to try very hard to come up with something tangible I learned or did that day. I’ve put a big white sheet of paper on the wall and wrote “successes and achievements” on it. Sometimes at the end of the day I just write the date, and the fact that I survived the day, and am not on a plane home. The biggest writing on the page right now says “I’m still here”. Some days it comes easier than others, and I will have had a conversation with someone who really appears interested or gives me good insight on anything about the community. I will have interacted with some children and made them smile, or held a happy baby. Many days I feel as though I’ve been banging my head against the wall. On one occasion I spent some time throwing concrete blocks at holes in the fence trying to prove (to whom? myself?) that the holes could be mended and we could build a community garden. Many days I feel as though I’ve done nothing. Those are the days I try to give myself credit for just being here, which some days is absolutely enough, in that it feels like too much.
In many ways this experience so far has completely bent my mind in half, or shattered it, or in some way shown me that it has been irrevocably changed and will never again return to its former state. It’s given me a lot of time to go more than a little crazy. On my good days I can laugh, or at least appreciate the growth I am experiencing. Bad days can be very dark. I try to remember that bad days happen in the states all the time. I was recently openly thrilled when a fellow PCV flatly stated that he asks himself every day what he’s doing here. I do as well. I generally consider the greatest accomplishment of every day to be that I have stayed here through this day, and am going to give tomorrow another go. I can almost hear the gasps of people reading this and thinking “that’s no way to live, day to day, barely getting by! What about searching for and achieving happiness?” I would argue that I’m learning that this is the only way to live, being fully aware that you have gotten by that day, as it reminds you every single day that you’re living. And you’ve chosen your life, rather than defining your life by the tasks you’ve chosen to accomplish in this day. Happiness falls into that category of moments you are lucky enough to have an occasional glimpse of if you’re open to it, rather than some mythical state of being that one can expect to be in for any permanent length of time…
I was reading a fellow Peace Corps blog today (it’s linked to mine as “hottie Brent’s blog”) and his latest entry is worth a read as it very eloquently states the theoretical basis for what community capacity builders are supposed to be doing, and a bit more background on the PMTCT (preventing mother to child transmission) and home based care programs. He states better than I what a community capacity builder does or is supposed to do every day.