Transitioning

We are coming to the end. The volunteers in my training class have only a few more months to bring projects to a close and spend meaningful time with the friends we have made in Suriname. SUR 14, the fourteenth annual group of volunteers to Suriname recently had a close of service conference to prepare us for our transition out of the jungle and into life in the States.

I grew up in Africa with no Americans of my age anywhere around me, traveling back to the States every two years for furlough. When I was fifteen, in the middle of high school, I moved to Minneapolis, where I literally needed to learn how to be an American teenager. Because I have experienced radical cultural change so many times, I was asked to lead a session on reverse culture shock, the disorientation of realizing that your own country is different than what you know.

I opened with a silent clip from The Hurt Locker, in which an American soldier who had just returned from Iraq walks through a grocery store in bewilderment at the outrageous amount and variety of food. Those of us who had been back to the States later told the rest of us about their similar amazement in malls and supermarkets, and those who had not been back stared in horror at something so regular to American life, shopping for food with infinite choices, as something they had not even thought about for a very long time.

I played a slide show of different aspects of our former lives in America such as family, a city, pets, snow, traffic, and fast food, asking my peers to think about what most represented home for them. The slide show was actually a trick question, as the last slide, a picture of a house in the jungle revealed. Home, for us, is now the jungle because this is where we are comfortable, where people know, and to a degree, understand us, and where living comes naturally.

America will be a place where we will need to take a very active and intentional effort in re-learning our culture. We will need to keep an open mind when the American way of life seems senseless and even wrong, as we reorient our minds to life where we are. Just as we needed to radically adjust when we first came to Suriname, we will need to change again and work through the difficult mental, emotional, and physical weariness of being thrust into an uncertain environment.

We then played a skit, for which I and a few former volunteers among the Peace Corps staff called up an unsuspecting volunteer. We acted as if the volunteer had just returned from Suriname, “in Africa,” as our country director who was in the skit kept insisting. We inundated our poor colleague with a barrage of questions that people unfamiliar with Suriname would ask, and spontaneously started conversations on topics such as fictional music and movies to which the volunteer had not been exposed. Our hapless victim had been back to the States during his service and claimed that he had had practically an identical experience at his church.

Many Americans will be able to relate to our experience in the Amazon rainforest to about the same degree as the people in our village can relate to life in the States. Peace Corps volunteers often find that they cannot relate to anyone, though everyone means well and tries to understand. Being a returned volunteer can be a lonely experience, until we learn not to be concerned so much as being related to as learning to relate to Americans again. As always, we need an outward focus and to take an interest in others rather than focusing on ourselves.

Volunteers often have a fear of losing their international perspective and new, multi-culturalness when presented with the opportunity of enjoying our own country and integrating into American culture again. This is a needless fear for we will never be the same. We are richer (figuratively) and stronger now.

Painting the World

One of the great classic Peace Corps projects is a painted mural of the world. While the geography radio program the Ba Jotie and I have spent countless hours on delves deep into the history and culture of every nation on earth, not everyone knows where Turkmenistan is. To give the program a visual element, I am now spending my afternoons armed with a brush and paints.

To start the project, I needed to ask permission from the paramount chief and the headmistress at the school. A chief agreed to arrange an audience with the Gaanman, and a few days later I was summoned to the paramount chief’s house. Communicating formally through an intermediary, I stressed the importance of retaining local culture while learning about the world outside to better appreciate the context and diversity of where we live.

The language in which the labels of the world map would be written presented a cultural challenge. The Ndjuka take great pride in the Aucan language, but the school on which the map is painted requires the children to study in Dutch. After consulting an older Ndjuka friend, we determined to write the names in Dutch with the Aucan underneath and to paint a traditional timbae border as a cultural affirmation.

Having received permission from the chief to proceed, the headmistress and I found a prominent space on the front of one of the school buildings and visible even from the airstrip. Then I applied for funding. While Unicef was reluctant to fund my isolated project, with help from a friend at the organization, I modified my proposal to tie in with one of Unicef’s media projects, which expanded my own project’s scope and acquired full funding for the mural.

To draw the map, I drew a 28 X 56 grid of 1568 squares on the 9 X 18 foot space. The squares allowed me to follow a pattern in the manual to draw an accurate map by hand. At this point I realized that this project would take a lot of work. I needed to use a plumb line for nine vertical lines before I could use my yardstick to draw the small squares. The grid took seven hours to draw and the continent outline another seven hours.

Then the painting began. Work began at 1 PM, just after school so that the kids could participate as much as possible. The oceans and interior of the countries went very quickly, and the kids painted most of the area of the map, while I worked on the details, and of course, supervision. Watching to make sure certain kids took certain brush sizes and teaching them to wipe off excess paint after each dip in the can was key to avoiding uncharted islands or lakes from appearing at the unconscious whim of my helpers.

As usual, I ambitiously found a way to make the project a lot more work. Instead of painting each country solid colors, we are painting the interior of each country a tan color, with a colored border. This is so that the Diitabiki map can have rivers, mountains, and cities, rather than simply labeled countries, as most Peace Corps world maps have. Later on, in addition to the timbae border, another friend of mine will help me design a timbae north arrow in the corner, and I want to paint the flags of all the countries on the sides. While it has been a lot of work, I have enjoyed working on the mural in the afternoons. Hopefully it will serve as a beautiful landmark for the community for many years.