1 month in. 23 to go.

If Peace Corps is a person, we would have been together for one whole month already. Alas, we are not two high school teenagers so there won’t be a movie date, so I’d just blog about it instead.

The past month has been a roller coaster of emotion.  Yes, that was very cliché, and I don’t regret it. There were tears and there were joy, but I woke up today (May 23^rd) completely positive that there is no where else I would rather be.

I’ve talked about my site, a little village in the Upper West Region, named Goli. It is about 4-5 hours away from the Burkina Faso border and positively 15 hours away from the nearest movie theater, on a good day. 

Since I’ve been here, I’ve done a lot of sitting.  Everywhere I go, stools/benches/chairs are placed under my ass without request. My legs would be tired from walking at the end of the day but my ass would be sore from sitting in the equivalent amount. Some other PCVs from my group are placed with partner NGOs, and though I am not sure how their schedule is like, I hear that it can be quiet busy sometime. As for us upper regions people, like the chicken roaming in front of our houses, we are free ranged.  That means we don’t really have a schedule and our days could be as idle or as casual as we want. Which is why it is so important to embrace small successes, when life just seems to  be passing you by meaninglessly while you haven’t done shit for the entire day, the little things in life start to look grand. And they keep you going.

My job as a Health Water and Sanitation (or at least  what I got out of training) is to guide my village to achieve a healthier living environment. And that include getting them to stop pooping in bushes and drinking gross water while making healthy life choices like wearing a condom.

I could be easy if people understand that certain of their behaviors need to change before they stop getting sick all the time. But Peace Corps isn’t ‘the easiest job you’d ever love’ (that was college) so it takes time for us to get them to that point. If you haven’t tried it, going number 2 or even number 1 in the bushes can be a very liberating experience. Old habits die hard, and some/most/the majority of the people in my village are very old.

Anyway, the one month at site has seen greats and grave. Most of the day, I sit in various places in the village and try to learn the local languages by listening to their conversation about me, and make an effort to remember their names. People know me know that I am very bad with names, and it is fortunate that most Ghanaians have English based name like Felicia and Emanuel, but add the Ghanaian accent and it’s a salad of some different sound.  Everyone is someone else’s brother or sister of mother or father because everyone in the village is in a big family so that also need processing and figuring out time.

Someday, it is extremely delightful to see grown men walking around town holding hands from the pinky (because even though homosexuality is illegal here, there is no limit to same sex interaction) or during high noon time, women would be bare chested, hanging low without a care (to the four lovely ladies who flashed me before I left, you got competition).

Other day (the entire duration of the 3^rd week at site) all I want to do is sit on my porch and read and try not to drown in my own sweat in the waves of loneliness of being the only foreigner in a 45 minutes radius by car. Or if one more person laughs at me after I’ve spoke Dagaare and greet them, I’d lose it and curse out their mothers.

Roller coaster of emotions. Didn’t I say it?

But I’ll say it again, there is not where else I would rather be. I signed up for this. Waited for it. Excited for it. And now it is all mine, and I’ve just begun. There are latrines to be build, malaria to b prevented, and talking condom mural to be painted – all in the next 23 months. It’ll be the longest relationship to date, but I’m in it to win it.