Over Six Months In...

                Well, I've officially been away from home for over 6 months now. The time feels particularly long with the Holiday season slowly rolling by and me missing everything familiar about home. The time has also gone by quickly though and that gives me hope for the next 20 months continuing to fly by.

                Those of you who are reading this and know me know I have a tattoo on the inside of my right wrist. Those of you who know me really well know that tattoo reads “serenity”. Those of you who know me better than I know myself some days know that the tattoo is a bit of an ironic homage to my father and, because we are so much the same, to myself as well.

                When people ask what my tattoo means and I tell them “serenity” they ask if I’m a recovering alcoholic or they do the weird thing from some Seinfeld episode I never saw. Some people even ask if it’s a reference to the short lived TV show by Joss Whedon. It is inspired, not by these things, but by my father’s repetitive mumblings of the serenity prayer when I was a kid. I always thought it was particularly odd since he is one of the least serene people I know. Nonetheless, growing up my Dad always told me to have the courage to change the things I could, the serenity to except the things I couldn’t and the wisdom to know the difference. When I was 20 years old I was itching for my second tattoo and I eventually decided on the simple black kanji that is now inked on my right wrist, where I see it every single day.

                I said that it was an ironic homage to myself and my father because we are two of the most high-strung, quick tempered, non-serene people I know. We don’t know how not to get our way and we deal with incompetence and imperfection even less gracefully. So, I got “serenity” tattooed on my wrist, not because I am a recovering alcoholic, an avid TV fan of one sort or the other or a particularly serene person; I got it as a reminder to try and take it down a notch. The older I get, the calmer I get (and thank God so does Dad) and the more I realize that growing up really is summed up in that one short mantra.

                Be brave: Have the guts to stand up for what you know is right. “Be the change you wish to see in the world” and chose a genuine path of honesty and integrity over the people pleasing complacence that plagues our world. Don’t be courageous for egos sake but also don’t be a coward in reverence of the same thing.

                Be serene: Know that not everything is in your power to change or to control. Sometimes the best leaders are those that know when to hand over the reins, when to fold and when to all out admit they were wrong. Sometimes you have to step back and just let things happen as they will. Serenity is not complacence but tranquility in the face of a storm. It is taking a deep breath instead of screaming in someone’s face. Many times it is being the bigger person because someone else cannot be.

                Grow wise: I don’t know that anyone ever ‘becomes’ wise or is inherently so, no matter how old they might be. The key is learning from your mistakes and letting each experience prepare you more fully for the next one. Wisdom is not perfection, rather the admitted absence of it.

                Being here has really tested my serenity at times. My family sent me a package for Christmas that some things were taken out of. It really sucks and it’s really, really hard to not be upset about it. And I am upset about it, just not as much as I would have been a few years ago. The fact is we knew it was a risk sending anything worth even a few dollars in a package to Africa. People here are really poor and a ten dollar item could mean they can feed their family for a week. Still, it sucks. I was really looking forward to my package and, though it was still awesome to get, it was kind of a buzz-kill to discover that not everything was there. As my mom said, “guess there are thieves everywhere.” Isn’t that the truth.

                Growing up is also about knowing when to tackle a problem head on and when to stop, breathe, strategize and come at it from a different angle. I walk through the villages and see kids who are literally starving to death. They are skin and bones without shoes or whole articles of clothing. There are 5 year old working in the fields and it is the hardest thing in the world to not want to scream at the parents, to pick the kid up and take it home with you. “Why don’t you feed the kid? Why don’t you have less children? Why is he not in school, why have you not taken him to the clinic for the free immunizations?” I want to ask (scream) at the mothers. But, I don’t. I bite my tongue and shake my head and fight back tears of sadness, frustration and incredulous humility. Screaming at the mother might feel good for a minute, might make me feel like I’m doing but growing up, having wisdom in this situation, is knowing that screaming at the mother now would only shoot me in the foot. If I want to change anything, to really change anything, I need to be someone the community trusts. I need to observe and learn and only then can I begin to understand what I can do to help.

                My father asked me what it is I exactly do here. It’s a very good question. It’s a question I ask myself a lot. What the hell am I really accomplishing here? What am I even trying to accomplish. I explained it to my dad and to myself, like this:

                Peace Corps is a very different volunteer organization than most others. For one thing, we spend over 2 years here. Most of what we do is learn and only a small part is actual implementation. Maybe you think that sounds like a waste of time and money. Maybe you think your tax dollars would be better spent on giving money or supplies to Kenyans rather than supporting an American to live in their village for 2 years. Let me tell you something I’ve already learned here… Throwing money or things at these people isn’t solving their problems. In fact, in some ways it’s making them worse. They see white people now as donors, people who come to drop things off, people who don’t know anything about them but have deep pockets. That’s a really big challenge for someone like myself who actually does know about their culture, someone who speaks the language and (mostly) eats the food and who doesn’t have any money at all to give them.

                Large donors come here and give away things without doing any research, without doing any education or training and that, my friends, is the true waste of money. One aid project I’ve had direct experience with gave away hundreds of thousands of household water filtering units. No one uses them. I go into the villagers houses and see them collecting dust in a corner. These filters are a fantastic idea; they are cheap to upkeep (you just have to rinse out the filter!), easy to use and effective at making water safe for people to drink. Why don’t people use them? They are slow and they are different. We’re talking about people with little to no education who don’t understand why or how it works. Beyond that they don’t understand why they should filter there water at all, they’ve never done it before, why start now? I’ve heard of people taking them apart and using part of the filter as a club to beat their kids with. I had someone tell me the filter put drugs into the water and would cause infertility.

                The point of that story is that the filters, while in essence were a good idea, were a huge waste of money. The donor spent millions and accomplished next to nothing because they didn’t do the leg work first.  Peace Corps is about the leg work. We don’t have lots of money to throw at people or organizations. We are about making small, appreciable changes that can have a big effect in the long run. If I can find out why that mother is having so many children and why she can’t feed or clothe them and if I can do something to change that at the root level of the problem, that has the capacity to change everything.

                So what am I doing? I’m learning, I’m observing, I’m gathering information and finding out the “why”s behind the problems before I try to do anything about fixing them. Why does that mother have 9 kids? She’s been told that taking hormonal birth control causes infertility. How do I know that? Not because she told me (she in this case is a fictitious amalgamation of the average woman in the village) but because I listened to conversations women didn’t know I understood and because the teachers in my primary school, women who have gone to college told me the same thing; that using birth control will make you unable to have kids again.

                If I had come in guns blazing my first week at site and lectured women on how they should use birth control I would have been wasting my time. They know what it is; they are just misinformed about it. It’s not about telling them they should use it, it’s about telling them it’s safe to do so. Beyond that it’s about convincing their husbands of the same thing and showing them that it’s economically advisable to reduce family size. Husbands here still have all the power; it is not uncommon to hear about a man beating his wife bloody because he found out she is taking birth control. So, the point is, the story is much bigger than just supplying birth control, it’s about education and empowerment and that is what Peace Corps is all about.

                Peace Corps is teaching me about what my tattoo mean to me all over again. It reminds me to have the courage to try and change the way things are. To remember to have the serenity to know my limitations and to understand that some things are not within my power to change. It prompts me to think before I act, to be wise enough to tackle the projects I can be successful at, those that will make small but appreciable changes and will be sustainable rather than those that are big and flashy but will flounder and fail when I leave and will, in the long run, change nothing.