(Not) Brave

Beterverwagting, Guyana: The view out Hare's window during training

By Kristen Hare, Guyana 2000-2002

  I was in the Peace Corps. 

  It's almost too easy, starting conversations or getting to know people by telling them this. It always comes out, though, because it begins to explain me, at least a little.

  Sometimes, I think it says, "I'm brave," especially when people sigh and say, "Oh, I always wish I'd done that."

  And while I can usually wrap my two years up in a few funny stories about frogs in my shoes and the rat that ate my underwear, or the work I did, or the Guyanese man I met and married, the story I don't tell is about my first night, my first real night, in Guyana.

  I landed in Guyana in June of 2000, crackling with excitement about this new adventure. The air outside the plane felt hot and heavy. Inside the airport, customs agents waited in ramshackle wooden booths, and once into the Peace Corps vans, I watched the spread of wild green life outside the window.

  The Peace Corps took my group to a nice hotel on the sea wall, and for a few days, I tried new foods and listened to musical accents and began admiring myself for taking on this new challenge.

  Then, I was driven down ­red dirt roads, past skinny cows and houses on stilts, past smelly trenches and rambling rum shops, and dropped off. In front of me was the home of my host family for the next 10 weeks of training. The power went out that night, and the shock of being alone with them, so far from people and food and places I knew, had me choking on tears all through our candlelit dinner. 

  Later, as the power came back on, I tried to be polite and watch TV with the four women who made up my host family. But I couldn't. I could barely speak.

  That night, I crawled under a pink mosquito net into my single bed and began writing.

  "I am now alone and scared and so so full of tears. Dogs are barking everywhere, people talking, a long mosquito net covers my bed. All of the romance, the excitement, the thrill of this, all of it is now gone and replaced with fear ­­and the realization that this is not a vacation. This is two years."

  That weekend passed quietly. I knew there were other volunteers in my village, but I didn't know where. I think I never left the house. 

  On Monday, I found them and we started exercising together every morning on those red dirt roads. Each day, I sweated through my clothes, took cold bucket baths, then sweated through my clothes again. Training began, and soon, the streets of my village became familiar. People stared less and waved more. Allison, my host mother, and Ameara, her young daughter, taught me card games, let me eat cereal for dinner and loved listening to stories about snow.

  I was settling in, but I still wasn't brave.

  After a week, I wrote again: "I woke up in the middle of the night to some cheesy American pop music and it made me realize just how far away I am from everything and, even harder, just how long I'll be this far away."

  A few days later: "Today, it all sort of hit me hard. I do not want to be here, but I am. I do not wish I'd left all of the comfort I had, but I did."

  For most of those 10 weeks, I fell asleep around 7 or 8 at night. It seemed easier to sleep. It made the days pass faster. And eventually, they did, and it was the end of August, the end of training, time to swear in and move out into a new village and begin teaching.

  By the end of training, something new had settled into me. It still wasn't bravery, though. "Two years from now, maybe sooner, I'll be gone from here," I wrote. "Two months have gone by like a flash and like Chinese water torture. I lay in bed this morning fighting awareness, and I thought, I'll never have experiences like this again."

  Despite my choking fear, I never wanted to sigh and regret that I hadn't joined the Peace Corps.

  Two days after landing in country, two days before my first real night in Guyana, I wrote a Georgia O'Keeffe quote in my journal: 

  "I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."

  Eleven years after coming home, I'm so glad I didn't.
  I had amazing adventures in the Peace Corps that included frogs hiding in my shoes, rats eating my underwear and falling in love when I very much didn't expect it. 

  And, I discovered, I am not brave. 

  But that hasn't stopped me yet.

Note: This story was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon

Coming tomorrow...

  I have a few good stories brewing right now, thanks to the people who are submitting. This morning I got an e-mail from a friend whose daughter is considering joining the Peace Corps, and it made me remember what that choice was like for me. So I'm running a piece of my own tomorrow, which originally ran in the St. Louis Beacon, where I've written for the last five years. It's about my first real night in Guyana. That night, I sat down and wrote in my journal: "I am now alone and scared and so so full of tears. Dogs are barking everywhere, people talking, a long mosquito net covers my bed. All of the romance, the excitement, the thrill of this, all of it is now gone and replaced with fear ­­and the realization that this is not a vacation, this is two years." More soon.

The lion in the garden of the Guenet Hotel

John Coyne, right, at the Commercial School in Addis Ababa, 1963

by John Coyne, Ethiopia, 1962-1964

  In the fall of 1962, in the final days of my group’s in-country Peace Corps training in Ethiopia, we had a celebratory dinner at the Guenet Hotel in the Populari section of the capital, Addis Ababa. 

  The Guenet Hotel, even in 1962, was one of the older hotels in Addis Ababa. It wasn’t in the center of town, but south of Smuts Street and down the hill from Mexico Square, several miles from where we were housed in the dormitories of Haile Selassie I University. While out of the way, this small, two story rambling hotel, nevertheless, had a two-lane, American-style bowling alley, tennis courts, and a most surprising of all, a real lion in its lush, tropical garden.

  Surprising, because at that time in the Empire no Ethiopian commoner was allowed to keep a lion, the symbol of His Imperial Majesty’s dynasty. The Emperor, Haile Selassie, whose full title was Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia, and a half dozen other titles, had a private collection of animals, including the Imperial lions, antelopes, monkeys, and cheetahs at Jubilee Palace, his royal residence.

  There was also a small government lion park near the campus of the University. This park had about twenty full-grown lions in a large circular cage and sometimes late at night we would hear them roaring in the distance.

  On a rare occasion a wild lion would wander down from nearby Mt. Entoto looking for food and be spotted by townspeople and that would create headlines and eye-witness accounts in the next day’s morning paper.

  So, seeing a lion up close and personal in the heart of Africa was something special for a group of young Americans new to Africa.We were 275 Peace Corps Volunteer teachers, the first to serve in Ethiopia, arrived in Addis Ababa in September at the end of the African Highland long rains. In our final days of training, before being dispatched to our teaching assignments throughout the Empire, we went off one evening to a farewell dinner at the Guenet Hotel. It was the first time any of us had been to the Populari section of the city or seen the lovely gardens of this hotel or seen their caged lion.

  Well, actually it was a caged lion and a large German Shepherd dog.

Coyne, center, in Fiche, Ethiopia, 1965

 I recall that when I first saw the lion the German Shepherd was stretched out comfortably between its paws, and both the dog and the lion were calmly gazing out through the bars of the small cage at the lot of us. The dog was able to come and go through the narrow bars but we were told by the hotel staff that he always spent the night sleeping inside the cage, curled up with the lion. As it turned out, I was assigned to teach at the Commercial Secondary School in Addis Ababa and in the early fall of that year was living in the Populari section near the Guenet Hotel.
  The Peace Corps had issued bicycles to whomever needed them to get to school and I had gotten into the routine of riding back and forth to classes, and also of stopping off at the Guenet for a coke or coffee after school and to correct my students’ homework while sitting in the gardens of the hotel surrounded by thick bougainvillea bushes, wild roses and carnations, and gnarled eucalyptus draped with streamer-like leaves. It was here that I came to know the lion and the German shepherd, who often slipped out through the bars of their cage to beg food from me while his partner stood at attention inside the cage silently watching the transaction. They were quite an odd but wonderful couple.

  On one of my mid-day rides home for lunch I was tearing down a steep hill, and an American pulled his car up along side me and signaled me to stop. He turned out to be a TWA pilot employed by Ethiopian Airlines who had been in-country for several years, and he invited me, and several others volunteers, to a “home cooked” dinner that weekend. It was his way of welcoming the new Peace Corps to the Empire. During dinner I mentioned the lion and dog in the garden of the Guenet and the pilot asked me if I knew the story of how they had gotten to the hotel.

  It seems that the first American TWA director in Ethiopia had raised the lion from a small cub in his home’s compound along with the family’s dog. The lion was such a household pet that everyone who visited the house treated it as such.

  But there was the time the CEO of TWA worldwide came to Ethiopia to meet the Emperor and visit his overseas operation. Trans World Air Lines had managed Ethiopian Airlines since 1946 and that relationship was one of the great early success stories of private development in Africa. In fact, by the time we reached the country in ’62 over a third of the trained pilots were Ethiopians.

  The CEO arrived at dawn in Addis Ababa on an overnight flight from Europe and immediately took a morning nap at the managing director’s home. Later that afternoon, rested and revived, the CEO was sitting with a half dozen pilots who had stopped by for a drink and to meet their boss. The group was sitting in the living room and the French doors were open to the garden so that they could watch the African sunset and enjoy the first cool breeze of evening. 

  Sometime towards dusk, the full grown lion, who had been asleep in the sunny terrace beyond the French doors, woke up and ambled passed the open door, gazed in at the assembled group, and then ambled off.

  No one commented about the lion, as all the pilots knew about the animal. However, the visiting CEO had no idea that the enormous maned lion was a household pet and sat petrified at the sight of this legendary African beast — on the loose and just yards from him. 

  He didn’t say anything until the next morning when he confessed to his host what he thought he had seen, thinking it must have been a frightening fantasy caused by his fear of being in Africa. The host explained the presence of the lion to him and the CEO’s mind was put somewhat at ease.

  Some time later, the American manager's tour in Ethiopia was scheduled to come to an end and the family decided to give the lion to the nearby hotel as the tame animal could not be returned to the wild. The German Shepherd, however, would go back to America with them.

  In the weeks before their departure, the lion was successfully transferred, but when the family realized the German Shepherd was so lonely and unhappy with the loss of his companion they decided to leave the dog as well, giving both animals to the Guenet where they could live peacefully in the small cage in the hotel gardens.

Coyne in Ethiopia, 1965, when he worked as an
assistant Peace Corps Director after his service

   And it was there that I found them when I arrived in Addis Ababa.              

  I left Ethiopia in the mid-sixties and did not return again until the early ’70s. While I had a short list of old friends in Addis I wanted to see, high on that list also were the lion and the German Shepherd in the gardens of the Guenet.

  A day or so after arriving, I took a taxi to the hotel, which had thankfully not changed much in the years I had been away, and I walked into the garden to find the caged lion and the German Shepherd.

  The cage was where I remembered it. However, the door was wide open and the lion was gone. Sitting alone in the middle of the empty concrete floor was the old German Ahepherd.

  I walked inside to the front desk of the hotel and asked about the lion and was told the animal had died only months before. It had been such a news event that a story was published about his death in the Ethiopian Herald, the English language newspaper in the country. The staff found a copy of the article that detailed the demise of the lion and I sat down in the lobby of the old hotel and read the account.

  Several months earlier when the lion was suffering from an infected tooth, doctors from the Pasteur Institute of Ethiopia decided to drug the animal so the tooth could be extracted. Unfortunately the dart of drugs was too much for the old animal and the lion died before it could be saved.

  The hotel had not yet decided what to do about the lion cage for the dog still lived there, spending his days waiting for his lifelong companion to return.  

  I gave the article back to the receptionist, thanked him for the information, and then I went out into the garden and walked through the open gate and inside the cage. I knelt down beside the German Shepherd and petted the old dog one last time, then I left Addis Ababa and Africa.

  I have never been back.

John Coyne is the author of more than 25 books of fiction and non-fiction. His work covers everything from golf to the Peace Corps. He is the co-founder of Peace Corps Writers and can now be found at Peace Corps Worldwide. This piece was first published in peacecorpswriters.org and is being used with the author's permission.

Coming tomorrow, an unlikely friendship in Addis Ababa

Here's a little nibble from John Coyne's story, running tomorrow...
 
...The Guenet Hotel, even in 1962, was one of the older hotels in Addis Ababa. It wasn’t in the center of town, but south of Smuts Street and down the hill from Mexico Square, several miles from where we were housed in the dormitories of Haile Selassie I University. While out of the way, this small, two story rambling hotel, nevertheless, had a two-lane, American-style bowling alley, tennis courts, and a most surprising of all, a real lion in its lush, tropical garden...

Paper bags and presidents: A conversation with writer John Coyne

After two years in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, John Coyne returned to the U.S. in 1964 and to a job with the Peace Corps in Washington D.C. He’d been among the first groups of Americans heading out into the world at President John F. Kennedy’s call. And, now, he was home.

Sort of.
One day, he pulled open a drawer at his home and found it filled with paper bags.

"And I suddenly realized I had been saving these paper bags every time I got one, because in Ethiopia, they didn’t have them, so any time you got a paper bag, it was valuable.”

John Coyne

During those two years, he learned to work with little. He adjusted to the extra steps it took to do so many things. And he saved his paper bags.

I spoke with John for Hard Corps, and as we talked about writers, expectations people had both then and now, and the need to tell these stories, lots of John's own small stories came out.

He's good at this, of course. He’s an established and well-published writer, the founding editor of Peace Corps Writers, which is now at Peace Corps Worldwide, and a steady voice in the Peace Corps community.

I asked John if he’d be willing to let me interview him about his service and his craft for this project, and he kindly obliged. What follows are portions of our conversation, which was close to an hour. It’s been edited down here.

We talked about how much more savvy volunteers are now, how much more they've traveled. But there’s one thing about the experience that hasn’t changed, he thought -- the reality of learning to live in the third world.

“It takes you out of your comfort zone, throws you into a new world, and you have to adapt, because it’s not going to adapt to you," he said. "You have to adapt to it.”

KH: You have a story on the Peace Corps site about joining the Peace Corps with the first group of volunteers who went to Ethiopia, and before leaving you got to shake JFK’s hand in the Rose Garden at the White House. In the middle of your service, he was assassinated. What do you remember how you found that out?

JC: ...We heard in the middle of the night from a guy that was teaching at the university. My roommate was a teacher at the university, and this American was a teacher at the university, and he came by, I don’t remember if it was 11 or 12 o’clock at night, to tell us ... At that time it was a little unclear that he was dead. It was so early. My roommate and I didn’t have a radio or anything. In those days we did not have iPhones or computers or anything. We were lucky to have lights. I went to a friend’s house who was about a half a mile away and woke him up ...and they had a radio. It said Kennedy has been shot as we turned on the radio. We turned on Voice of America, actually, and mainly they were talking about Johnson being president, and as soon as I heard that, I didn’t stay for anything else, I just left. (The next day) the emperor had closed down all the schools... I went to school anyway ... none of my students, all of them were there, it was a city school and they were on the compound, and no one would come up to me to speak to me until I signaled to one kid, walked over to him and started talking to him, and then immediately they realized that they could talk to me, and they came rushing around to question me, basically about the political procedure. Most of them thought that young John John would become president, because they were interpreting everything in terms of their own emperor... 

KH: Today, the internet abounds with resources, like your site, about the Peace Corps. Most decent-sized universities around the country have recruiters. There are blogs and books. But none of that was around when you joined. What shaped your expectations for the Peace Corps then, and how did that compare with your real experience?

JC: I was an original Kennedy kid, as we were called. I was still in college at St. Louis University and when Kennedy won, and he made that “Ask not what you can do,” (speech).  This triggered in young people, and in older people at the same time, that we can contribute. We can do something. This was the first time you really had that effect in that time period ... no one sort of had asked us to ever do anything as a collection of young people. And everybody felt, yes, we can do something ... I immediately applied and immediately got invited in a letter to come to Ethiopia, and I immediately went and got a map and tried to figure out where Ethiopia was. Our ignorance was profound...We were really unwashed. We could soak in everything...When we arrived in country in September of ‘62, at the tail end of the rainy season, the poverty was quite overwhelming. It was cold. We’d gone to Africa looking for Tarzan and we arrived in a country that was at 8,000 feet. It was rainy. The weather was miserable. It changed very rapidly... It was difficult. The language was difficult. Everything was “foreign” to us. Luckily, we met up with people who were incredibly open and friendly and accepting. We were an oddity, all of these young Americans walking around on foot. Foreigners never really walked anywhere... and there were a lot of us... so walking down the street in groups, we were a sight to be seen...

KH: Your first book was published in 1972 and since you’ve written about golf, a popular collection of American horror stories, and about the Peace Corps. How did your time in Ethiopia shape you as a writer?

JC: Like anybody who wants to be a writer or becomes a writer, one of the things in the back of my mind was... I wanted to get out of the midwest. I needed to get out on a personal level, and also on a writing level...You just wanted the experience. You didn’t know what it was going to be or how you were going to handle it, but you just knew there was more to life than just where you were living...

KH: You have written more than 25 fiction and non-fiction books. Do you have any Peace Corps stories that you haven’t told, ones that you’re saving, or ones that haven’t come out, or have you told all your stories?
JC: My wife would say, please, let’s finish with your stories. But she was a never volunteer, you know... I’m actually writing a novel now which I think in my own humble way is my best book. It has a big Peace Corps element in it, it’s called “Long Ago and Far Away.” I’m working on that now. So we’ll see. 

After John and I spoke, the paper bag story stuck with me. I could picture this young American hoarding paper bags without really knowing why, changed in big ways, but also small ones, by two years in a strange place. So this morning, I e-mailed him one last question. "Do you still find yourself collecting paper bags, or carrying on any other things you picked up from your time in Ethiopia?" I wrote.
"Actually, I do collect books on Africa, books by Peace Corps volunteers," he wrote back. "But not paper bags."

Yesalaam Guad

Tomorrow I'm interviewing writer John Coyne, founder of Peace Corps Writers, now under the umbrella of Peace Corps Worldwide, about his time in Ethiopia just after the founding of the Peace Corps, his life as a writer, and why telling stories is still so important for returned volunteers. And wouldn't you know it, there's a really cool quote from him in a Peace Corps Guyana Newsletter I helped edit 12 years ago, which I dug up recently for this project. Here it is in full, from "The Gaff" February/March 2001:

FAQ’s (Well, not yet, but they probably will be)

Essequibo Coast, Guyana                     photo by Kristen Hare

I’ve started reaching out to some returned Peace Corps volunteers I’ve interviewed over the years, mostly St. Louis folks, and questions are coming up which I’m going to address here. I’ll still answer them if you ask, though, and promise to do so sweetly.

Why are you doing this?

My Uncle Mike has told me for the last decade that I should write a book about my two years in Guyana. But I don’t know if I have a book from that time. I do have some great stories, though, from great moments. I think lots of people feel this way, and wanted to create a space for those stories to live.

So, are you making this into a book?

That would be cool, and it’s where I hope this eventually leads in one way or another, but I can also see this being a forum for ongoing storytelling. I’m good with it either way.

Do you have a word limit?

No. Ask my husband. I literally don’t. Please tell your own story as best you can in whatever way works for you. 

How will I know if you’re going to use my story?

I will contact you. I will also edit your story for grammar, spelling and style. I may make suggestions for changes, but whatever happens, I’ll send it back to you first so that you’re happy with it before publishing.

I have some good stories but I’m not a writer. Can you help?

Yep. I tell other people’s stories for a living, and there are a number of ways we can do that here, including interviews and Q and As. Like with submissions, if I write your story, I’ll send it to you before it gets published to make sure I’m staying true to what you experienced. I can’t do that in my job as a reporter, but I can do that here.

Are you affiliated with the Peace Corps?

No. But we get along pretty well.

Why do I have to include my real name?

No anonymous sources is a carryover from my work life, but I think it’s a good one. Real life is way too crazy to make up, and that’s what I want to share here. 

So you want small stories from my time in the Peace Corps. Is there anything you don't want from these stories?

Yes. I don't want host-country bashing, or host-country-national bashing. I think it's incredibly cool that, since 1961, 139 countries around the world have welcomed the Peace Corps. Despite the challenges, we're their guests and I'd like this site to honor that. However, you should feel free to mock yourself with abandon. 

The queen of all wild things

Sarah's house, Yupukari, Guyana

  by Sarah Ambriz, Guyana, 2008-2011

  She comes home, happy to see her door still cracked ajar. The day before, she’d misplaced her key and kept the door open just enough so that the lock wouldn’t click. 

  “I gotta find those keys,” she says to herself.

  She half limps into the house, walking gingerly thanks to a splinter on the bottom of her foot – the result of chasing horses out of the fenced yard of the Caiman House… barefoot… in the dark. She may or may not have stepped in horse poop in the process (she didn’t check, just rubbed her feet in the grass and moved on.) 

  Her first priorities -- getting her lamps lit and finding tweezers. Her flashlight however, catches one, and then another huge cockroach loitering in the front room and kitchen. 

  It wasn’t many months ago that she feared all the moving things crawling in and around her house, or that she imagined crawled in and around her house. Not now, though. 

  At least, not usually.

Proof of life within...

  But with the second roach, she begins to feel the house slipping from her possession, as well as her perception of the static nature of things. The Invasion of Nature; action is required. 

  She starts to search for the bug-killer spray, but can’t find it. Her crank operated flashlight dims down and she goes to light one of her lanterns. As she puts the glass cover back on after lighting the wick, it slips and falls to the floor with a shattering crash. 

  She sighs and moves on.

  Further search for bug killer unearths a moving THING on a pile of clothes on the couch. A snake. Not feeling as bad ass as the LAST time a snake was in her house, she makes a few attempts to pick it up and only succeeds in getting it to crawl into a crack in the wall. 

  She’s searching, again, for spray and now the snake, and this unearths the misplaced keys - in a corner behind a door. 

  It all comes back to her – she’d thrown the keys back there in an infuriated effort to stop the maddening banter of the bats living within the walls the day before. 

  It hadn’t worked.

  One down… five to go, she tells herself, figuring light, splinter, roach #1, roach #2 and snake were the next tasks at hand. She hears a couple noises as she starts up the search anew for the snake or bug spray, whichever comes first. One sound comes from the trash can, another in the bathroom where she guessed the snake slithered off to. Picking through her trash, she finds a cricket and moves on. It’s the least of her worries. 

  The noise in the bathroom? Oh, it’s the sound of the leaking sink pipe dripping into a bucket. The leak began the day before. When she had tried to stop the leak, the entire tube broke free from the sink and she turned the pipes off, but not before a good drenching. The pipe still leaks. 

  “Gotta get someone to check the pipes out,” she tells herself.

  Along with the leak, though, the sneaking snake is, in fact, in the bathroom, shyly slithering in the open crevice behind the shower. It wasn’t reluctant to come out and she wasn’t reluctant to put her hand in, not with its mouth and fangs facing her way. She leaves the snake for a moment.

  Roach #1 re-appears, finally, and, in a flash of insight, she retraces her steps to her last insect encounter (a trail of ants on the shelves in the kitchen) and finds the spray right where she left it. 

  “Ok roach, prepare for liquidation,” she says, no qualms about execution, gas-chamber style, though she still hasn’t been able to bring herself to squash bugs yet - which would have made things much easier, she admits to herself. 

  She lines up the shot, presses the button and… nothing. She forgot that that brand new bottle she’d bought in Lethem won’t spray for some reason.

Sarah Ambriz and friend

  Pausing to crank her flashlight, she grabs a pointer broom and compromises – death by squishing… by a broom. In two or three whammies, the roach is juicing up the floor and she flicks it outside with a few twists of the wrist. She then finds the time to pluck out the splinter from her foot and sweep the broken glass into a pile before she lights her other lantern and goes to check on the snake. 

  Now, not only is the snake out of the crevice enough to grab, but cockroach #2 is right in the line of fire. She decides to go for the big potatoes (i.e. the snake. Even though she’s fascinated by them, she’ll have a harder time sleeping knowing one is silently by slithering around in her house). The snake pops back into the crevice, though, when she’s AGAIN too skittish to keep hold of it. Taking her frustrations out on roach #2 is no problem and she ferociously annihilates it and sweeps it outside. Ok, 5 down, 1 to go.

  Deciding it’s time for Defcon 5, she finds a forked branch to use on the snake and fashions a makeshift headlight out of a headband and her wind up flashlight (noting wryly she’d used the headband to construct a makeshift safety glove for the last snake she caught.) She’ll use the stick to pin down the snake behind its head to safely grasp it and the "headlight" for an easier hands-free approach at the attack. The Y of the stick too big, though, the snake retreats. 

  She waits again for an opportune moment. 

  The headlight falls off. 

  She waits again for an opportune moment. And she talks to the snake. “I’m not gonna hurt you, I just want you out of my house. YOU want to get out, I want you out. C’mon, c’mon!” The Y on the stick still too big, the snake slithers into a cupboard. Another attempt. The snake slithers into a crack in the boards.

  In chasing the snake around the house, she finds all sorts of proof of life within. Poop of many varieties, cobwebs, dead and alive spiders. 

  Hmm. 

  Finally, sleep overrides all her other supercharged senses. And though she vowed not to go to sleep until she carried that snake outside, she gives in and gives up. 

  In the beginning, she worried that being on her own in Guyana’s remote interior would be lonely, and maybe she’d get bored.

  But here, she’s never alone. Things are never still. It’s never quiet. Never predictable. Tucking her mosquito net securely in at all sides of the bed, she falls asleep, surrounded by her loyal subjects, the reluctant queen of all wild things.

Where the wild things were

I have a fresh (and freaky) story ready for tomorrow from another former Guyana Peace Corps Volunteer. And I'd like to preface it with this photo. Eeeek! More soon...

Fredericks of Guyana

By Kristen Hare
Guyana, 2000-2002
  By the time my mom and sister came to visit for my first Christmas in Guyana, I had been through all the early stages of settling in to the Peace Corps.

  There were the very early days, when I felt dazzled by my own bravery for setting out on such an adventure. 

  Two days later, there were about three months of absolute humility and doubt, where I lay under my flowy mosquito net each night listening to Mariah Carey and Meatloaf as rain fell on the tin roof, silently counting the days until I was home again.

Lot 12, Adventure, Guyana, 2000

  There was a growing understanding of how I was expected to behave if I wanted to be accepted (no drinking beer in public and no drinking from bottles, period.)

  And there was an appreciation, slow-growing, for the way beauty and ugliness lived side by side in Guyana.

  So by the time my mom and sister came, I knew my way around the market, knew how to cook a few dishes, how to navigate around the loud and aggressive mini-bus drivers, and how to wash my own clothes by hand. 

  It was after their visit when the first sign of trouble appeared -- in my laundry basket.

In the top house where I lived, I washed my intimates in the kitchen sink or in sloshy buckets in the tiled shower, then hung them in the yellow wooden bathroom to dry. I figured the spectacle of a big, tall white girl was quite enough without adding her big, tall underwear to flutter in the near-equatorial sun. 

  Standing in front of the kitchen sink one January day, I pulled a pair out from my laundry basket and immersed it in the soapy water. As I began to scrub, I noticed a hole. In the crotch?

  Weird.

  Life in Guyana felt so hard in such fundamental ways, though, that it didn’t phase me much to consider that my underwear would just give up. I tossed it aside and grabbed the next pair. 

  Soak. Scrub. Hole.

  Weird.

  Another: Soak. Scrub. Hole.

  Now I was curious. So I grabbed every pair of underwear in my basket and found in every single pair a hole in the crotch.

  I stood there staring at my underwear for a while. 

  Finally, I dropped them all into the trash, hoping what little stock of sturdy American panties that remained fully-crotched would last until my next trip to the capitol. When I did make it to Georgetown a few weeks later, I mentioned the mystery of the missing crotch to a fellow volunteer, who wondered if I had a caustic crotch. Possible, I thought. Maybe it was the malaria medicine. So I started washing my panties while in the shower instead of leaving them in my laundry basket to apparently fester and fizzle away.

  Again, a few weeks passed, my underwear remained in tact, and for a bit I forgot about the whole thing. Then, after a day of teaching, I came home, sticky with a mix of dust, sweat and sunblock, and melted into my hammock for a nap. 

  Something made me open my eyes. 

  And when I did, that something sat directly in my line of sight -- a large gray rat, perched contentedly on one of the ceiling beams.

  It wasn't creeping from my laundry basket or caught with a strip of panty on one tooth, but seeing that rat made it all click into place. 

  Those missing crotches didn’t fizzle away. 

  They were chewed out. 

  “The crotch rat,” I whispered to myself, awed and totally disgusted that such a thing could exist. 

  But it did. It did. 

  And while swinging in my hammock or sleeping under my dreamy mosquito net, feeling all together quite impressed with myself for making it through another day, the crotch rat crawled into my laundry basket and had a little snack.

The toughest job...

  Even if you haven’t experienced it, you probably think still you know about the Peace Corps.

  It’s two years in a foreign country. 

  You come back with cool art and hairy legs. 

  And you come home changed. 

  That may all be true, at least in part. But Peace Corps volunteers will also tell you that the Peace Corps isn’t so much a hero’s journey as it is humbling, hot (or freezing) and hard.

  If you know me well you probably know some of my best Peace Corps stories, like the one about the time I was talked in to perming my hair (not good,) or the time I found the frog in my shoe (which was on my foot,) or my real-life meet cute with the Guyanese who is now my real-life husband. 

  As an RPCV and a journalist, I have gotten to share and report on small moments from other people’s Peace Corps experiences. The result is that I think there’s a lot more out there, and I’d like to help tell them. These aren’t the stories you tell prospective college groups, perhaps, but the ones that come out after knocking back a few. 

  This is not a place for sharing tips on how to get in or how to readjust once you get out. You won’t find two years summed up in 1,000 words. 

  Instead, it’s a place for pieces of the Peace Corps. 

  A day. 

  An hour. 

  A moment. 

  I want the stories you tell your friends. 

  So, go on, then. What’s your story?