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.

Anthropology

Thoden van Velzen has been traveling to Diitabiki for fifty years. As a young anthropologist, he spent a year and a half learning the language and becoming acquainted with the culture, and since then he has made a great number of return visits. On his most recent trip to Diitabiki, he brought a student of his, a linguist, to study how the Ndjuka language has changed. Memory of the rich polite forms and various greetings for different types of people has all but faded, except in Diitbaiki, the village of the paramount chief. Even here the younger generation rarely uses formal speech.

Thoden van Velzen and his wife have written several books on the Ndjuka. In the Shadow of the Oracle describes and gives the background of Ndjuka politics and their belief system. During my first year, In the Shadow of the Oracle taught me many of the cultural nuances that, as I am not an anthropologist, I had not picked up.

I talked with Thoden at length while he was here, and depending on the subject and who was around, we switched freely between English and Ndjuka. When he lived here, van Velzen was not allowed to have a dugout canoe, as it was considered obvious that foreigners would be thoroughly inept at such activities. The culture has indeed changed significantly in the last fifty years, and the formal events no longer draw the crowds that they used to.

The legacy of Thoden van Velzen has affected the Ndjuka perception of why I live in Diitabiki. Many people assume that I am here to learn the Ndjuka language, and they feel a little frustrated when I do not learn all the forms as enthusiastically as they expect. The chiefs have often called me to observe formal rituals, and have helpfully described the significance of what they do. Many Peace Corps volunteers come with the expectation of teaching other people, forgetting that from the villager’s perspective, the American is the one who needs an education.

Dr. van Velzen’s recommendation to me and to Peace Corps in general is to prepare new volunteers by teaching them about the specific villages in which they will live. Indeed, since volunteers serve a mere two years and even staff work at the most three years in one country, there are few opportunities to build more than a surface knowledge of the places we serve. My final project will be to write down all that I have learned for the volunteer who follows me.

Junglenomics

Wherever rice is cooked in Diitabiki, it is cooked in abundance. A cultural rule is that the pot must have something to eat too, and therefore, a lot of food is thrown away. Nevertheless, almost every day, someone asks me for food. The reasoning behind this phenomenon may provide an answer to why the West has poured trillions of dollars into developing countries with little results.

Insight A: Saving is a foreign and mistrusted concept. Without refrigeration food needs to be consumed quickly. A fish or a tapir must be sold, eaten, or given to someone else right away. Staples, on the other hand, rice and cassava, are planted in abundance, and waste (whatever the pot doesn’t eat) does not mean less for the future.

Insight B: Culturally, planning ahead is unnecessary. I grew up with leftover nights and being told to finish what was on my plate. Ndjuka kids grow up being told that it is rude to eat all of what is cooked because if someone is hungry, you should be able to give them something. Many people anticipate that they will be able to find something to eat if they need it, so few plan ahead for what, if anything, they will cook on any given day.

As an aside, cooking more than what I can eat to give food away is one facet of life that I have decided not to adapt to very often. Unlike my neighbors, I do not have a farm; I need to bring much of my food from the city when I fly in, and paying for extra kilos can be very expensive. I am limited in how long I can stay at home by how long my food supply lasts. In addition, I do not want to contribute to the culture of dependence on outsiders that I see around me, but I try to help in durable, sustainable ways. Though I explain my actions to my neighbors all the time, people think it is strange and probably even rude that I should have a stock of food and not give it away or at least sell it.

Insight C: A stable way of life, not growth and improvement is the principle concern of the Ndjuka. Because a community engages in subsistence farming, it does not mean that they can only grow enough for themselves or even far more than they can eat, only that they do not grow food to sell. Once again, providing what you need for yourself with extra to give away and asking others to give you what you do not have are a normal way of life. There is no economic growth because there are no markets and nothing is saved, but rather, everything is consumed right away. In the West we assume that if people work simply to feed their family they have no alternatives. In places with few jobs available and plenty of land for the population, people feed their families by growing food. The process of preparing a farm becomes an expected male role, as much as mowing the lawn is in the States, and failure to work the ground is equivalent to letting the grass grow for a year. One family, even if they need to carve a new farm out of the bush each year, can easily grow enough to feed several families, but since everyone farms this way, they do not sell anything. A large farm simply serves as a mark of industriousness.

Insight D: Money, to many people in less developed countries, is like anything else: if you have it, you use it right away; if you have too much, you give it to others. When someone goes to the city, they spurge on far more than they need, distributing the excess among the village once they return home, and this is expected. Saving food, money, or anything else is greedy. Similarly, to much of the world, development is the result of some countries having more money than they need, and therefore, giving it away. When the aid gets to less developed countries, they either use it or assume that it goes away, so the effects of development do not last very long. Economic growth is simply not an acceptable behavior in many cultures.

In this mindset, development is a great and potentially insurmountable challenge. For development to work, aid must be invested or used to buy durable goods such as machinery that will spur growth by increasing income in the future. Development is not simply a handout, such as giving someone a fish, but an investment, such as giving someone a fishing pole and teaching them how to use it. In places where this concept is counter-cultural, development only contributes to a dependence on others.

Instead of serving as an instrument of change, development often reinforces a culture of deterioration and creates a dependence on a new, regular source of resources. When cultures that rely on tradition as a way of life encounter development aid, they find a new resource, such as a fruit tree, which may reduce the amount of effort people need to maintain, but not always improve, their original living standards. This is key. Just as stability, not growth, is a goal, if people can maintain a certain standard of life, that is good enough. Something new may not improve their life, but rather act as a substitute for working for what they need. In fact, many people in less developed countries realize that if they actually improve their standard of living, horror of horrors, development organizations may no longer pour their resources into the community. In this way, development has the potential to severely harm a lot of people.

The best way to help improve living conditions in less developed countries is to begin a fair, legitimate business that supplies things that people need, that teaches people the value of saving and investing, and that circulates and invests money within the community. The free market is where I have seen development success in Diitabiki, and I believe it is the only way to effectively combat poverty anywhere.