A New Generation

All the Peace Corps volunteers in Suriname are newbies, including those who have been here for two years.

This sentence, which I wrote over a year ago, still rings true. Volunteers from SUR 14, my class, opened up this river for Peace Corps, developed additional villages for more volunteers, and now we are being replaced with a new generation, SUR 16.

Matt, Brittany, and Meagan flew into Diitabiki on the 19th of June for a week in their future region. On the day they flew in, Matt and Meagan were supposed to go to Godolo, where Shelley would teach them the art of volunteer living, while Brittany was to stay in Diitabiki and learn from me. A chief from Godolo, who had come for a formal council, agreed to take the two to his village after the meeting. The parlay was an interesting experience for the newbies, and since traditional meetings of elders usually take place only in Diitabiki, it was good that they flew in here. Unfortunately, the chief’s outboard motor for his boat would not start, and when the volunteers were thoroughly exhausted at 5 PM, I made the call that they should spend the night in Diitabiki. That evening wee cooked up some macaroni and cheese, a luxury for a volunteer, and I imparted my vast wisdom of how to clean rainwater tanks, the best times to fish, and other topics of life in the jungle.

It was encouraging to see how new everything was to the new volunteers so that I could see how much I have learned in two years. Nevertheless, I am only beginning to understand deeper aspects of the culture (such as asking for things that you have just bought is considered very polite), and many common experiences are still difficult for me (such as people expecting me to cook extra food for them to eat). I am still learning new words in the Ndjuka language, and at least a few months ago, my canoeing skills were far from Ndjuka proficiency. People wince for fear of my fingers when I cut coconuts open with a machete.

I recently read a book called, The Riverbones, by a Canadian who traveled for five months in Suriname in search a blue frog and the country’s soul. Andrew Westoll wrote well and accurately depicted some of the places in the city and the mood and life of Peace Corps volunteers three years ahead of me. He critiqued a volunteer named Dara for attempting to turn herself into an Ndjuka, something she could never be, and he worried about Dara’s transition back to the States when her close of service eventually came.

Indeed, Dara struggled with reverse culture shock, and she returned home to Suriname to train SUR 14, my class. My first impression of Dara was similar to Andrew’s, but it came from the experience of having grown up in Africa, yet sill learning about Ethiopian culture when I left. No matter how dedicated volunteers are at integrating into the surrounding culture, they will only begin to see the depth of the peoples’ experience. I found that Dara came to learn this, and she approached her cultural errors with grace and humility, hoping that we could learn from them.

Andrew Westoll, however, is a tourist with a closed, Western perspective. His words rang with a hint of jealousy toward the volunteers who through their challenges experienced a depth that he could not comprehend.

Rapid Fire

Reverse culture shock is a difficult experience, even for those who have grown up overseas. For this reason, I never wanted to return to the States before the close of my service. Nevertheless, when his sister chooses to marry just after graduating from college so that her friends can be there, a good brother goes back.

Thus, on May the second, two weeks short of two years from the time I left home, I returned for the first time to the United States.

I had prepared myself mentally for over a month for the particularities that I remembered from two years ago, the existence of cars, media, refrigerators, hot water, and huge houses, as well as the relative differences such as the dryness of the air in comparison to nearly 100 per cent humidity, the resulting lack of necessity to wash thee times a day, and the fast pace of activity compared to the relaxed timelessness.

Upon my arrival, I walked through the Miami airport, and I cannot express how tremendous that learning experience was. I observed conversations and mannerisms of my countrymen, inspected new gadgets for charging iphones and watching movies on planes, and bought a hamburger. I also noticed that American walk on the right rather than in a chaotic crowd like the rest of the world. After learning this, navigating the terminal became much easier. On my first day back, I went shopping, buying a suit for the wedding, a cell phone, a few new clothes, and my first new music in two years. American commercialism did not bother me in the least. I found elegance in everything, though it all seemed a little foreign, as it always has to me.

As I am used to spending most of my time outside, I needed to take a walk in the woods after two days of being home. The paths were so wide in the preserve, and the underbrush was nearly nonexistent. I sweated on the terrain, but with less than 100% humidity, sweat evaporates and cools people rather than simply drenching clothes. It was wonderful.

My parents and I then drove to Hillsdale College, my alma mater, for my sister’s graduation and wedding. Spending hours with old friends, talking with former professors about my adventures, and seeing my extended family after two years of absence was so very good. The wedding was beautiful.

We went back to Raleigh for two days before my next trip.

My father and I took a trip to Washington to visit Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where I will be going to school in the fall. I found some housing options, worked out financial aid, and made arrangements for testing on Georgetown’s language requirement, all in less than 24 hours. Then it was back to Raleigh again.

When I arrived back in Raleigh, I found that my visa to get back to Suriname had expired. Peace Corps Suriname, Peace Corps Washington, the Foreign Ministry of Suriname, the American Embassy in Suriname, and the Surinamese Embassy in Washington all helped me get approval for a visa in about a day. My last day in the Sates was spent driving to Washington and back again to get my visa in my passport.

My flights back to Suriname became an adventure as well. Our plane was re-routed to Arkansas because of weather, and I got standby tickets to Atlanta and then to Miami to catch my international flight. I was successful in getting on both planes, but just before we boarded in Atlanta, the flight to Miami was canceled. The airline paid for a hotel room, and I continued my journey the next day, arriving in Suriname just after midnight on Monday, the 26th.

I did not have a common experience in returning to America; it was very easy despite the flurry of activity. I did need to take two breaks in the midst of the chaos of the wedding, but my family was very understanding and really quite pleased with the ease of my transition.

 

Monkey Business

Commotion shook the trees behind my house. Well, actually it was George shaking the trees, as I named him later. A young black spider monkey had escaped from the other side of the village and made its way towards the forest on the eastern part of the island. George would look down at us from the trees just behind the village to see if we would give him something to eat, as he had not yet readjusted to scrounging the bush on his own. Visits by George and conversations in monkeyish became a regular part of my day.

An old lady, eager to give the children a nature lesson, told a group of boys, “Look at that spider monkey. Isn’t it wonderful? We could catch it and sell it to foreigners!” I laughed, but to me this epitomized an unfortunate concept—using up unsustainable resources and selling them to buy western things that will break quickly in the harsh jungle environment and end up in a makeshift landfill on the forest’s edge.

Slowly George became braver. The monkey ventured out of the trees behind my house and, watching to make sure the humans were far enough away, he would run to the mango tree in front of my house to check for fruit. To my dismay, George found it especially enjoyable to swing around on my power cable. Another day, George caught an irresistible whiff of food from an open window in the house next to mine. Twice he stole the neighbors’ food, eating it in one of their hammocks, and this put him out of favor with the village.

After George became a nuisance, I saw the same old lady who had told the children how wonderful the monkey was, looking up an Asai palm and shouting, “You are a dog! You and your mother and your father,” a typical Ndjuka curse. Besides the humorous notion of a person standing on the ground cursing an animal invulnerably high by calling it another animal, this displayed another unfortunate tendency. While we should adjust to our environment, such as closing windows or sealing up food when wild animals are around, we tend to want nature to conform to us. We can change where we live of course, or catch the monkeys to sell them to foreigners, but sometimes it is best to modify our own behavior to take advantage of the good things around us.

George later met a dog who had come to visit Diitabiki with his owners. Early in the morning one Sunday, I heard a great hullabaloo as the dog yelped up at George on the roof, and George hooted back. George has been more cautions about wandering into the village in the past few days.

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.