It's the Little Things

 My favorite, very worn out, shoes.

We were told that PC can pretty much predict when volunteers are most likely to quit.  During training is the very common.  It’s hard, boring, everything is new and you have zero control over your life.  For many, that includes no control over bowels, thanks to new food and water.

We were warned that the next period that inspires PCV’s to head home is the one we’re in now.  The reality of what we’re in for is hitting home, yet we haven’t started teaching yet, so we don’t feel as if we’re contributing anything.

We were also told that sometimes it’s not the big stuff:  not having contemporaries with whom you can have a meaningful conversation, due to language and culture barriers; lack of modern conveniences that we take for granted, but the small things.  The PC described a letter one former volunteer wrote to explain why he was quitting.  His final line was something like “and the salt won’t come out of the salt shaker!”  Yes, he was serving in the Pacific region, where humidity reigns.

I’m not ready to quit, by a long shot.  But there are small things that are annoying.  I try to look beyond them or laugh at them, but sometimes it’s like having a very small pebble in your shoe.  Here are some of the small things that I find annoying.

A small pebble in my shoe.  I was walking back from the store, in my rubber flip flops and it felt like there was a rock in my shoe.  I shook it out.  It’s a flip flop for heaven’s sake, why is it still there?  Because, the paved roads are made of lava stones and loose pieces are sharp.  A small stone had embedded itself in my shoe, just deep enough to irritate every time I took a step. 

As I was silently whining, I heard a small, quiet voice saying “You’re lucky to be able to walk.”  I told the voice to shut the hell up. Sometimes it just feels good to feel sorry for myself.

Dirty feet.  I gave myself a pedicure the other night.  First, I took a shower and used a scrub brush on my feet.  The kind of wooden/nylon bristle brush I use for heavy scrubbing at home.  Then I soaked my feet in a tub of warm water for an hour.  I bought the tub just for this luxury and used my electric kettle to heat the water.  Then I used a cuticle brush on my toes.  Then I did all the other stuff that comes with a pedicure, including painting my toenails and lovely shade of red.  It helped to cover the dirt THAT WAS STILL ON MY TOES!  By the way, I don’t have a chair in my room.  Just the mattress on the floor.  To soak my feet, I laid on my back on the bed, knees bent, with my feet in the tub of water on the floor.  I fondly recall sitting in the massage chair at the salon while I got a pedicure.

Being told my Samoan isn’t very good.  I was reviewing a list of vocabulary words yesterday and proudly realized I know hundreds of words.  I also know how to construct basic sentences in multiple tenses, in both positive and negative forms.  I study Samoan at least an hour a day and take a giant step outside my comfort zone every day to try to use the language.  It’s disheartening, then, to have people respond by looking at me blankly and saying “Your Samoan is bad.”  Some are encouraging and acknowledge my efforts.  I try to remember that this is a culture in which children were routinely hit for answering a question incorrectly.  Mostly, I just want to poke the person with a sharp stick.

Crawly things.  Sorry, Jenny’s mom, but it’s the tropics and if you’re going to visit you need to be prepared for bugs.  Most of the time they don’t bother me. There are tiny ants everywhere, including inside my computer, where I suspect they are silently eating my motherboard.  They don’t bite, so I just brush them off and move on.  Yes, I eat food with ants on it.  There are lizards, there are also cockroaches.  I thought I had a rat in my room because of the scratching noises I heard every night.  I may, since I’ve found what looks like rat poop, but the sound was just herds of cockroaches.  Last night it was hot and humid and I couldn’t sleep.  I started counting bugs, instead of sheep.  I got up to five different varieties of bugs that I killed as they crawled on me before dozing off.  And that was inside my mosquito net. 

Carrying all my junk to the shower.  I shower once or twice a day.  I wash my clothes in a bucket in the shower, usually every other day.  When I do it means taking the following into the shower with me:

• ·         Shower caddy with personal items like soap, shampoo, etc.
• ·         Towel
• ·         Scrub brush for my feet
• ·         Bucket with dirty clothes and detergent
• ·         Clean bucket for rinsing and hauling clean clothes to line to dry
• ·         Cell phone, which has the key to my room attached
• ·         Set of clean clothes to change into after showering

I don’t mind carrying the stuff.  I mind forgetting an item.  I’ve been in the shower, all soaped up and realized I’ve forgotten my towel.  Or, I neglected to put a new bar of soap in my soap dish. Or, I have the dirty clothes, but forgot to put in the detergent.  The permutations are endless.  Going back to my room means a short walk through the open fale, in full view of the neighborhood. 

The small voice reminds me how lucky I am to have running water.  Shut the hell up, voice of reason.

Being awakened at all hours.  I love to sleep.  I’m crazy about that feeling of drifting into sleep.  I adore the feeling of just coming awake, when the world seems perfect and anything is possible.  I love to dream.  So I find it awesomely annoying to have those precious times interrupted, for no reason.  At home, we’re conditioned to whisper and move quietly if someone is sleeping in the house.  I can’t imagine friends in the same time zone calling me at 2 a.m. just to chat.  It’s different here in Samoa. 

I’ve seen everyone sleeping in the house, which is fairly easy to discern, since their bodies are scattered around the floor.  Someone will walk in, singing at the top of their lungs, or yelling at the dog or just asking how everyone is doing.  No one seems to mind, except perhaps me.

In the training village it happened several times.  Like me, my host sister was an early to bed, early to rise type.  One night, we’d retired for the evening, her to the living room floor, me to my bedroom.  About 2 a.m., I heard loud voices in the living room.  I wrapped myself in a lava lava and went to investigate, assuming something tragic had happened.

Nope, an aunt who lived nearby couldn’t sleep so she came over for a chat.  Since she couldn’t walk alone at night she’d called a young man of the family who lived in another house to get up and walk her over.  They made tea and stayed up until sunrise, laughing and talking, loudly.  I was in bed with the pillow over my head.

It’s the same here.  I’d retired about 10 p.m. to read.   Please note I’ve become conditioned to explain why I’m going to bed when I am.  I have yet to announce that I’m going to bed without someone questioning why, since it’s either too early or too late.  Anyway, there was a knock on my door at 2 a.m. Again, I assumed something horrible had happened.  Nope, just checking to see if I was sleeping. Yes, I was sleeping.  Why do you ask?  Just wondered. 

Everything is damp.  I live in Florida, so I know humid.  On a regular basis it doesn’t feel that humid here, although since I live about 2 inches away from the ocean, I know it must be.  What reminds me of the humidity is that everything feels perpetually damp. I’ll take dry clothes off the line, fold them neatly and stack them in their appointed suitcase (have I mentioned how ready I am to NOT be living out of suitcases?)  When I rummage through each morning to select which of my stunning outfits I’ll wear that day, they’re all damp.  How did that happen?  They were dry yesterday when I folded them.  Then I put on my glasses.  They’re covered with a faint film of salt mist.  Just like my clothes

Small annoyances.  I had them in the States, too.   Usually, it helps to listen to the small voice and put them in perspective.  Other times, like today, it helps to wallow in self-pity and allow myself to be annoyed. 

I’m off to annoy others now by speaking to them in my bad Samoan.

 My kitchen and office.  That's my water filter on the right (the white buckets), my stove top and frying pan and computer.  It's open air and where I write these brilliant entries.

The shower and buckets I use for my laundry.  They cost $15 tala each and used to hold lard.

 My bed, where I sleep, read and give myself pedicures.