Up and down, round and round we go

Oof. Life here is so bizarre. I’ve been in village alone (i.e. without Magloire) now for almost a week since returning from my banking trip. This has left me without a ton to do, since he is the very life force behind CAPJ. I’ve had one meeting with GICALAN and today I worked with the club santé, but two meetings does not a whole week’s worth of work make. Yesterday, all I did was suduko. That and cook an okra-tomato dish that was delicious (I think it was the addition of citron). Otherwise I sat around the entire day doing suduko. I didn’t even leave my house once. In fact, when I was getting dressed today, I actually thought, “hmm, I guess I can wear the same clothes as yesterday because it’s not like anyone saw me wearing them yesterday.” At times, I enjoy this lifestyle that allows me to be a complete slacker. At others, I don’t know what to do with myself.
In the absence of the all-consuming schedule I’ve become accustomed to practically all of my academic life, I’ve taken to what some would call neurotic record-keeping; I now keep a record of all my daily activities and one of everything that I purchase. I have a little journal for recording random thoughts, new discoveries and tidbits of info that I want to remember (especially people’s names when I meet them); I write blog entries in addition to maintaining a personal journal; one of my recent projects has been to try to make a more accurate map of the village – around dawn and dusk, I’m out trying to determine which direction the roads face and I’m figuring out distances by timing how long it takes to walk in a given direction. In other words, I’m applying my near-neurotic study habits to my daily life – with interesting overly recorded results. Besides all that, I’ve got a mile-long to-do list for basic home repairs and maintenance and the house can always use a good cleaning (it seems to be immune to sustained cleanliness); in essence, despite Magloire’s absence, I’ve still got a lot to do.
But I’m in no rush to do any of it. Sometimes I chide myself for not being more proactive – for example, for being nervous to approach the landlord and ask her (AGAIN) to please just sign the damn lease that I originally asked her to sign at the beginning of December and can we please work out a deal so I can get my damn ceiling installed that was supposed to have been done before I even moved in? But then I remember something my good friend Dani, former lifeguard, once told me in high school. Dani told me that up on the lifeguard stand, with no one to talk to and pretty much nothing to do (honestly, how often does a drowning or anything resembling one really occur in Clayton??), she would get painfully bored. “Sometimes, I’ll be sitting in class or just doing something and I’ll think something interesting. Then I’ll tell myself, ‘wait, don’t think about this now. Save it for the lifeguard stand!’” she said. At the time, I laughed.
Now I understand. I’ve got a ton to do, but if I do it all now, with typical American expediency, what will I have left to do afterwards? Plus, I don’t have the money to do some of the stuff, like buy living room furniture. And since I’m in Africa, I may as well operate on Africa time, ne c’est pas? So I suppose to spend an entire day doing suduko (actually it was one of those megasudukos and of course, right near the end, after working on it for more than 15 combined hours, I made some fatal mistake and now it is unsolvable. CRAP.), because theoretically I AM working hard. Just in African terms, not American.
Anyhow, in contrast to my utter boredom yesterday, today I had a totally exciting meeting with the health club at the high school. I did an animation about HIV manifests itself in the human body. Which means that I had to write my own “workshop” and then teach it. In French. To students who seemed more nervous to talk to me or ask questions than I of them. I think it went well. Of course, I find it harder to gauge here than in America. Is the silence when I ask them a question to check for comprehension a sign that they haven’t understood or simply a sign that they are nervous because they don’t know how to act with this crazy white woman who’s calling the different white blood cells “factories” and “Mister Captain” according to their function in the immune system? I felt good when we played a game to illustrate how HIV attacks the immune system, and the kids were all laughing (if you’re having fun, you’re 1. engaged and 2. going to remember what you’ve learned much better), and I also felt a lot of the confidence that I usually had when I facilitated workshops for PHE, but I know that it didn’t go perfectly. So, there are things I could improve, and I will try, but I still felt pretty good with today’s work.
After the animation, I walked back toward market with three of the kids, including one of my favorite – a tiny little boy who is far too bold for his age (today he told me he’s 12! I can’t believe it, he looks like he’s only 8 or 9). The very first time I met with all the 35 or so kids of the health club, everyone was very quiet and nervous to introduce themselves. But not Idrissu. He stood right up and cracked a joke that had everyone laughing. And he’s always ready to step up and be the center of attention. I like his swaggering confidence – it’s unlikely in someone so young, and I think I can use him to my advantage somehow, I’ll just have to figure out how. So I’m walking back with them, and for once I’m able to hold a semi-normal conversation.
It’s one of the harder things to adjust here – not knowing what on earth to say, a problem that arises both because I don’t have the same capacities to express myself or ask questions in French as in English, and because I feel like I lack common ground with the people here. My conversations with friends at home are based at least in some capacity on common ground, shared experience – if nothing else, living in and understanding a shared culture. Here I feel like I have very little common ground with people (though it is expanding little by little) and this makes conversation challenging.
Today, however I felt like I had been hit with the chatterbox stick. I was chatting with people left and right, most of whom I hadn’t met before. When I had about 30 minutes to kill before heading to dinner, I was thrilled when the Surveillant Generale (the disciplinarian/vice principal type guy at the high school) invited me to have a drink. And we managed to chat for the whole time! Miraculous! Even his questioning of whether he could by my boyfriend didn’t bother me like usual (this was the first of three such conversations today. I swear to God the romantic attention I get here is enough for a lifetime. I will so happy when I get back to the states and my unshaven legs, baggy clothes, and general plain style of living I employ here will receive the lack of attention it deserves) – this time, instead of the “I already have a boyfriend” tack I usually take (and which is usually easily countered with “but he is in America – how will that work for two years?”), I asked whether he was married. When he said yes, I told him it could never work. I will be no one’s “deuxième bureau.” (i.e. no one’s “dish on the side”) We had a good laugh over that, and were able to move past.
I guess I just find the life here a bit bizarre. One day it’s nothing but suduko followed by a sense of guilt at my slovenliness; the next it’s a high of succeeding at things which had previously inspired terror. Oh this crazy crazy life – how can I make sense of you?