One time, in Suriname...

"Freeze," I remember whispering to John Holveck in Suriname during our close of service trip.
After a few days of real coffee, a big swimming pool and really good Javanese food, I'd kind of stopped looking around Suriname. Then I saw this. It wasn't just John's expression of, OK, ummm, what? or the tourist in the background washing off or the sign for showers that made me so happy. It was all three.

Suriname, 2002                                                   photo by Kristen Hare

Ode to my hammock

Lot 12, Adventure          photo by Kristen Hare

by Kristen Hare

Guyana, 2000-2002

     It’s a swinging pea pod, a giant cradle for the giant little girl who lives all alone. It’s a place to rock into daydreams and surrender into naps. In the easy breeze on my verandah, I rarely had to stretch my foot out for a good push. The wind off the Essequibo swayed me side to side, my sun-drying clothes picked up the rhythm, and the palms that stretched overhead rustled along. Some days, it felt like even the clouds were rocking me.

     In those first six months, my cream colored hammock offered escape -- from my own blundering and sweaty life in Guyana, the one I missed back in Missouri, and the ones unfolding underneath my feet.

     In my village of Adventure, the top floor of the little house off a white gravel road was mine. Downstairs lived a 20-year-old mother of one, step-mother of another and her husband. They had one room. One bedroom. She would give me anything I looked at, so I learned to look down when we spoke. During the months I lived at Lot 12, our lives mixed together like the dust that clumped up under my doors, unable to be swept away but hard to ignore.

     All together, there was too much of us filling that little house.

     At first, it was quiet. Nice. I could hear their lives, the hum of the TV or the flushing toilet. We woke up and fell asleep together. She’d gossip with our neighbor while cooking, the harsh scraping of grating a coconut rising to my flat. She could hear my phone calls, my soft steps, my soft and constant singing.

     And then it started.

     Slaps, so hard they’d pull my eyes open in the morning light. It was never a fight. And never when he was home. But her hand flew freely at the little boy who came to her husband five years before she did. Then, I heard stifled cries. I still don’t know which sound was worse. 

     Hit, slap, shut up, shut up. And this 5-year-old is whimpering, denied even the release of a good cry. He doesn’t get the biscuits fast enough. He doesn’t get out of bed before she wakes him. The baby threw up. Every morning. It became my alarm.

     At night, when her husband came home, it stopped. I’d carry something down, mangoes or a little food to share. Slowly, then, I’d climb the stairs back to my hammock.

     Below me, this family sat all evening in the rough brown hammock that was their only furniture. I heard laughter. Singing. He and his son worked on their ABCs. She rocked the baby. They sounded happy.

     The next morning, after he’d left in the dark for work, slap, slap, a sound that wasn’t even a slap, but something hollow, stinging, a small body absorbing force. Who could I tell? Where could I call? I asked myself again and again, what could I do here that wouldn't lead to more harm? What could I do to make it stop? 

     I never really knew.

     So I stuck to my hammock whenever I could and closed my eyes and covered my ears and rocked.

Read any good adventures lately?

   

Guyana, 2012            photo by Kristen Hare

    For many of us who experienced the Peace Corps, life for two years was a daily adventure. Sometimes they were amazing ones, like meeting the person you'll end up marrying. Sometimes they involved rats, snakes and opossums. Sometimes, they were just moments that opened up a new sense of how people live and work and make it. And sometimes, there were errant nipples. I loved my adventures, even the ones I didn't love at the time. And now that those adventures involve deadlines, potty-training and getting used to all the paperwork that comes with kindergarten, (no body warned me!) I also love reading about other people's adventures.
     If you do, too, then you'll enjoy the following:

Peace Corps Worldwide is the long-time home of Peace Corps writers such as John Coyne, and also a place to hear about and read reviews of new Peace Corps books. The site is packed with stories, but I'm especially enjoying the occasional Shriver Stories, which share memories volunteers have about Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps' founding director.

Join Chase is a beautifully-designed blog by a former Guyana volunteer who is now biking, eating and teaching his way through Korea. Stories of his rides are vivid, his photography transporting, and on his Facebook page, his teaching moments feel clever and authentic.

The Minority Peace Corps Association does a nice job sharing stories from volunteers of color, and these stories often reflect right back on our own culture and the reach it has in shaping the experiences of volunteers.

     OK, your turn. Where do you read about great adventures?

Marabout or medi-vac

By Leita Kaldi, Senegal 1993-96

    I lay there with my legs akimbo as the Peace Corps doctor in Dakar poked around looking for something he couldn’t find.  
    “Olive!” he called the Irish nurse in. “I can’t find her cervix.”  
    So she peered inside and agreed in her charming brogue, “Odd! Neither can I, doctor.”  
    “Cathy!” he called in the Ghanaian nurse.  
    She, too, had a look, shook her head, and agreed. “Can’t see a thing. There’s something blocking her cervix.”  

    I began to feel somewhat bored by this conference between my legs and called down to the assembly. 
    “Hey, today’s my birthday. While I have your attention, do you think you could all sing ’Happy Birthday’ to me?” 
    Three faces looked up into mine with big smiles, and they broke into song. There was no cake with candles, though, only a reference to the Lebanese clinic across town where they had an MRI and sonogram. So off I went in a taxi, an unaccustomed luxury, except that at every corner the Taliban kids crowded around the car with their tomato cans stuck through the window, asking for alms for their marabout. I shrank into my seat as we crawled from one block to the next until we arrived at the modern building that housed an excellent medical facility. Peace Corps had a contract with the clinic, and I was treated with utmost respect, one reason being that I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in my fifties.     

Leita Kaldi in Senegal, submitted photo

    I spent that night in the Peace Corps’ “health hut,”  then next morning got back on the road to my village. I had no time to waste. I had projects in mid-stream, like women’s markets for tourists, a latrine for the local middle school, classes in small enterprise development. The morning after arriving back in my village of Fimela, in the Delta Sine Saloum, I walked down the sandy paths to see my friend and marabout, Cheikh Diop, an old man who had taught me about animism and Islam, two sides of the same card, and whose family I cherished. I told him I had a health problem, a blockage in my pelvis. His black eyes focused on mine.
    “I can take care of that.”  

    “Maybe you can,” I replied, and thought about it, walking back to my little house. Many people in the village went to him for herbal remedies and magical incantations, but … the die had been cast. A boy came running towards me.  
    “Adjia Sagar! You have a phone call.” He led me to the one central telephone hut in the village. I picked up the phone. It was the Peace Corps doctor.*

    “We just got your tests back. You have a cervical cyst. It might be cancer. You’re being med-evac’d. Pack up your stuff. All your stuff. You probably won’t be coming back. A car will pick you up tomorrow afternoon and bring you to Dakar. You’re flying to Washington.”

    “But … but …” I stammered.  “I can’t leave now. I have work to do. Pack up all my stuff by tomorrow? Are you kidding.”

    “A car will be there. Be ready.” Then, softening his voice, he added, “I’ll be waiting for you in Dakar. You can stay at our house until your flight leaves.”

    I walked away from the phone hut across the sand. Cancer? I stretched my fingers out in front of me and turned around in a circle, as if I were warding off evil. No! Not this time. I am fine.

    But I packed my things into my one big suitcase that evening, went around next morning to say be bennen yoon … until we meet again … not good-bye, to all my neighbors.

    Two days later I was in Washington D.C. I made my way to Peace Corps Headquarters, then was sent for all kinds of exams and to schedule surgery at George Washington University Hospital. I stayed in a hotel across the Potomac where  volunteers with health problems were housed. I learned it had been a notorious CIA spy den in years past, maybe even as I checked in, which gave the building a special allure.  

     I took advantage of my sojourn to explore Washington between medical appointments --  the Smithsonian, the monuments, amazing bus rides. Standing on a sidewalk in front of Peace Corps one day I saw a sign, “Cellular One.” I’d been away so long I thought it was an Italian restaurant. I tried a McDonald’s hamburger, which I found revolting after my quasi-vegetarian diet in Senegal.

    Within a few days I was admitted to George Washington University Hospital. Skipping the gory details, I had a hysterectomy -- no cancer! -- and the best medical care ever. And it didn’t cost me a dime. Thank you, Peace Corps!  

    But I did have a problem when I told the Peace Corps rep I wanted to return to Senegal. 
    “You’re done,” he responded.   
    I pleaded and cajoled, insisted and demanded, assuring him I’d be just fine after a month’s recuperation, until he finally relented and told me I could go back to finish my third year. So I did rest for a month or so, and returned to Senegal, where I talked to our Peace Corps Director who, I was surprised and happy to know, knew nothing of my medical procedure. They were serious about privacy issues but, of course, I told him everything. I returned to my village to resume work on my projects and quickly became exhausted, but I did manage to get a few things done.  

    Within a few days of my return, I met my beloved marabout, and he asked me where I’d been. When I told him about my excavation, he looked quite indignant.  
    “I could have fixed that,” he reprimanded me.  
    I had to smile.  Who knows.  Maybe he could have.  

* Let me take this opportunity to throw accolades at our Peace Corps Medical Office, Olive, Cathy, and Dr. Richard Clattenburg, who really cared, though he abhorred snakes, burrowing parasites, and begged us, shuddering, not to get guinea worm.

Coming tomorrow...

...writer Leita Kaldi's story of the time she was medically evacuated from Senegal. Leita wrote this piece just for us! Here's a little of what's coming:

    I lay there with my legs akimbo as the Peace Corps doctor in Dakar poked around looking for something he couldn’t find.
“Olive!” he called the Irish nurse in.  “I can’t find her cervix.”

Yep. More tomorrow!

Back to school...

                                                                                                         by Kristen Hare

Students at Johanna Cecilia High School, photo by Kristen Hare

    When the fat packet holding my invitation for the Peace Corps came, I learned I’d be going to Guyana, which I had to look up, and that I’d be a community education promoter.

    OK, that sounds vague, I thought. I can do that. 

    Really, I was there to become a teacher. And in Guyana, when I learned that, I was terrified. Most of the volunteers in my group were. We had college degrees. Some were well-traveled. But we weren’t teachers. We had training, actually good training, and a bit of practice working with classes near the capitol. We had a volunteer from an earlier group who was a real-deal teacher. She helped a lot. 

    Still, when I arrived for my first day at Johanna Cecilia Community High School, I felt clueless and unprepared. Embarrassingly unprepared. My Peace Corps-provided lesson materials were geared toward children in Africa. We were in South America. The cultures and issues were totally different. A few of the young girls in one class quietly and kindly made sure I knew that I wasn't wearing a slip, and everyone could see the outline of my underwear, and this was a really big deal. I spelled words incorrectly on the board, using my American English instead of the British spelling Guyanese use. Specifically and in general, I was just a spectacle.

    Each evening in my tiny two-room top house, where I had a benevolent breeze and a narrow view of the Essequibo River, I worked on the next day’s lesson. I planned and schemed. And, just in case my cluelessness won anyway, I brought along crayons, paper and Harry Potter as my emergency fallback plan each day.

    Shortly after becoming the white miss at JC School, I sat down and wrote this small note to myself during a brief and quiet break one day. I found it recently and, since everyone's heading back to school, it seemed like a good time to share:

    It takes courage to stand up in front of 200 small faces each day and:

1. Get their attention.
2. Say something worthy of that attention once I get it.
3. Not look too long on the beautiful or smart among them. I was neither beautiful nor smart at 12.
4. Remember what it was to be that neither-beautiful-nor-smart girl, instead ugly, round, awkward, but still interesting.
5. Remember what it was like, then, in my smallness, to need my teacher’s attention, and to find a way to give it now, from my bigness, to everyone.
6. To remember names like Hourilall and Dravina. Wait, Druvina?
7. To walk the wide, open halls and not get lost in the palms waving from the green rice fields outside.
8. To walk those same halls and not get lost in the brown-eyed stares and quiet whispers that follow my every step. 

    This is going to be amazing, I thought, sitting at my small desk, feeling the breeze creep through the barred windows, sipping hot water. 

    I’d sweated through my pants already.

    I can do this, I told myself.

    Thirty minutes later, I put my hands to my face, pressing back my fear.

    I’m not a Guyanese teacher. I’m an American reporter. I’m someone who does not like to sweat. I’m someone who might swap my grandma’s ring for a real iced coffee. But I’m still here, at this small desk, sweating through my pants.

    Three months down. Two years to go. 

Remember that time...

... when you were in the Peace Corps and let your neighbor with the beautiful, bouncy curls talk you into getting a perm, which led you to a “stylist” who washed your hair with an old Mello-Creme tub and a ton of perm solution, squirting it generously over your burning scalp while reassuring you “white people hair is different,” and therefore you needed more stinging solution, and then you went to a big neighborhood Hindu celebration for Phagwah, and got hit with lots of pink powder, which turned your now-porous curls pink, and everyone in your Peace Corps group thought you’d gone crazy, but everyone in your village thought your super-curly pink hair was awesome? Yeah. Me neither.