Setting the stage for clavicle disaster

And its blog time……I don’t even know where to begin. I believe this is my sixth day in Pretoria, as it turns out it looks like I am going to be here a minute. The surgeon who was so kind screw the metal plate into my clavicle isn’t scheduled to remove my stitches and check my progress until either the 15^th or the 17^th. I’ve been told that he’ll want me to do some physical therapy after removing the bandage and stitches and the concern is that as its getting close to Christmas they might not be able to start physical therapy until after the holidays. I ask you is it that damn important that I do physical therapy, perhaps it is, who knows, and really aside from the fact that I have been out of site for a small eternity which stresses me out and I will expand on later I guess I don’t mind being here for Christmas, I didn’t really know what to do with myself in Malawi for Christmas so maybe staying here would just make things more clear cut in that respect.

The issue with Christmas in Malawi is actually a good segue into the strange month that was Novemeber and thank holy christ that shits done with. To be clear there is nothing terribly wrong here, nothing bad happened aside from the broken bone it was just a strange and long month. You all know my propensity to get a bit angsty from time to time, well November turned into an angst and emo filled month. Why is that you may wonder? Well I think what started the snowball of angst and self doubt rolling was two fold and that would be being out of site for so long and in service training being a bit of a let down and thinking back on it I was feeling a bit out of sorts in terms of trying to get a handle on what my role here is prior to IST and so having IST be what it was I think exacerbated a general feeling of lack of purpose and direction.

So our story begins….I was out of site for just about a month. In service training was two weeks long and you have to add a day on each end of that for travel and I had left site a few days before IST to go down to Zomba, and then after IST I went up to Tikumbo (which is right by my site) for about four days as my site mates Courtney and Mel were having their girls camp, Women 2 Women, there and I was participating in that. There’s much to be said about Women 2 Women, for the moment I’ll just go with the fact that they did an amazing job, it was incredible to see these girls so on fire and I got more from their camp then from nearly all of IST. I suppose the IST debacle merits some sort of explanation. So as you may recall I was pretty pumped for IST as I saw this as the point at which I would be getting many of the tools I feel as if I am lacking at site and in all fairness I did get some of them but not nearly to the degree that I thought we would. For example we had a session and a half (about three hours out of two weeks) on proposal writing and funding sources, which felt terribly inadequate, given this was one of the things I was most excited to learn about and really dig into. We did get some good info on income generating activities but again by in large I just didn’t feel like they handed us a whole lot of useful info. And of course theres the joy of group dynamics, twenty very different people, one hostel with no and I mean no running water. I can’t quite tell you what four toilets look like after one day of use with that many people, that bathroom was perhaps the most fetid environment that I have ever seen. This time of the year water scarcity is an issue everywhere and Peace Corps generally anticipates having water problems at the college. By problems what they were banking on was only having water for a few hours in the morning and maybe for an hour later in the day, what they did not forsee was that one of the main pipes to the college would break, leaving us with absolutely no water. It was no joy, granted I didn’t have to haul any water so that was a bonus, but I think I would have preferred hauling and having water to four days no shower and then finally scrounging up some water for a bucket bath that must be taken in a room that smells like the bowels of all humanity. In all honesty vile though the bathroom was and in spite of the rash of O to F (Oral to Fecal) diarrhea and vomiting related illnesses that swept through our group, the first week of IST wasn’t so bad. There are some really chill and decent people in my group who I don’t get to see often as they are in the southern districts and it was nice to see those folks. I’m sure if you’ve seen the pictures on facebook you can infer that there were some good times had. Alas there were also some less than good times that kind of fucked with my already delicate headspace. I’m not going to attempt to go to into all the interpersonal bullshit that came out of the wood work at IST cause really it shouldn’t be of that much importance but there were some highly uncalled for, ignorant and bigoted things that were said by volunteers. Some of these comments were just idiot comments, some were directed at staff but some of this idiocy was directed at yours truly. Never in my life did I think I would hear this phrase used, let alone as applied to me, but a member of my group on behalf of four other group members who were apparently having some deep discomfort with my being an out lesbian, told me that and I quote……. “You’ve come out of the closet already shut the door behind you”. Theres a damn long and detailed story about how it got to this point which I don’t think I have the energy to go into, I think its sufficient to say that there are some morons in my group and I just wasn’t up for dealing with their ignorance as I was trying to sort out my own previously mentioned shit about finding my way forward through my service.

I realize that this may be my most disjointed bit of writing yet and for that I apologize. Although I am doing much better I am still taking a bit of pain medication which I offer as my excuse for what you are reading now. I beginning to think I’m sounding a bit inarticulate and melodramatic about all things that transpired during the great IST pilgrimage, I guess this past month has just been me feeling out of sorts, which really is pretty fair and reasonable given that I’ve only been in country for six months and I’m trying to figure out what is it that I want to and can do in terms of work. It’s the sort of thing I suspect we all ask ourselves from time to time, I don’t know its just kind of felt like a clusterfuck. And ode to joy my power cable to the computer just exploded Damn you South African electricity for frying my shit. One of the perks of being here is the wireless internet in the room but this untimely explosion of my power source puts a real damper on that. Anyhoo no need to dwell, I’ll deal with it later, I will take what battery power I have left to tell you more about the intrigue that is my life.

So I did manage to get back to site for a bit before heading down to Lilongwe for Thanksgiving which for the record was supposed to be a short trip, I wasn’t even going to go but we had a meeting for Camp GLOW, Girls Lead Our World, a girls empowerment camp that’s put on annually by the health group and I’m the program coordinator so I had to go down but my goal was to get back to site ASAP and get some work going. As much as IST left something to be desired it did provide some direction and after Women 2 Women three of the girls who attended from Dwambazi came to me to ask if we can start a young womens club where we teach girls the information they learned at W2W. These girls are exceptional and I am amped to work with them. The moral of this story was that I did get back to site for a bit and damn it felt good. Being out for that long was no good. Even I’ve been having this small scale crisis of faith in my capacity to be an efficient development worker its reassuring to know that going back to my community feels good. I think worst case scenario would be getting back to site and being like, damn I am uncomfortable, and that’s never how I feel when I go back.

By the time I got back to site I was just done, I was done with other volunteers, I was done with over analyzing myself, I just needed to be in my space. In fact I had just left a group of other volunteers that I’m friends with, we were celebrating the end of Women 2 Women at Kande Beach, a nice damn place, beautiful beach, good folks, nice chalet, and I just couldn’t hack it anymore. I got a teary eyed and was like I have to leave, I need to be alone, I’ll see you all later. Yes very dramatic sounding but that’s where I was at, just fucking done. When I got off the minibus by the back road that leads to my house and started walking down the path I was a wreck and all I wanted was to get into my house and be home and then I saw Peter see me coming, and he looked so happy. He ran to me with the biggest smile on his face just radiating enthusiasm and god knows I still felt pretty used up but to have that moment to take Peters hand and walk to my house with him, to tell him I missed him and to truly mean it, it was coming home and it made all that other bullshit in my life small and manageable and I felt so good to be back. I really do love my community, they’re great folks, which is part of the reason I carry so much weight about not doing more at site I feel like my community gives me a lot and I can’t quite tell you what I am giving to them. And I know its early in my service and to beat oneself up for things taking time is illogical and perhaps narcissistic but I do worry that maybe its not that I need more time its that I need to be more on the ball and just be doing shit.

Before I completely devolve into a tangent riddled with self doubt…. I feel as if I haven’t mentioned Peter which I don’t know how that could of happened but in the event that I have not here’s the Peter rundown. Peter is Freddy’s little cousin and since Freddy has been gone Peter is around all the time. We’ve had our come to jesus moments about boundaries, i.e. you cannot just walk into my house, but we’ve come to a good place Peter and I. He’s my little buddy, he’s around all the time, just hanging out, he’s a good little guy, hes about 11 but looks around 9. He helps me do little things around the house or I do things like send him to the market on my bike thus making it a treat for him and a non walk for me. As much as he’s around a lot I’ve really come to enjoy Peters company and I know he really likes being around, we all know how permissive I am I wouldn’t say Peter takes advantage of that but he definitely benefits from it, I let him cook himself food in the kitchen or take showers when the waters on but why the hell not, as long as he’s been respectful, if he wants to cook himself an egg, feel free he needs all the protein he can get and if when I really need my alone time I send him on his way and he gets it. At first I was trying to get him to go to school but that’s a complicated issue and so at this point my goal, if I do nothing else with my Peace Corps service is to teach Peter to read and write its pretty much priority number one when I return. So that’s the essential info with Peter

Now that Peter is in context……..It was awesome being back at site. I worried my Tonga would be in a state of complete disrepair from not using it for nearly a month but sweet miracle of miracles I had myself a Tonga explosion when I got back. Maybe I was just super happy to be able to speak Tonga so I was pushing myself more, I don’t know, but there was a lot of beautiful Tonga happening. I also had a major break through with my water carrying technique, I can now do a whole twenty liter bucket reasonably gracefully. I named a baby and this time I knew for sure that I was being asked to name the little fellow. I named him John, I first asked if they liked the name John and then told them it was my fathers name, and they liked that and said they would call him Johni. When Malawians use anglo names which is highly common given the christian missionary presence they normally add an “i” sound to the end. For example for those who do call me Megan which is really just Illeni and Queeni they call me Megani, hence how baby John is Johni. I spent lots of quality time with Sauda, she smiled so big when she saw me, it warmed my heart. And of course my girls from Women 2 Women, Maudalitso, Mevis, and Enalla. My friend Vanessa came to hang out with me before we had to go back into Lilongwe for Thanksgiving, Vanessa had also been working W2W, thus she knew the girls, so we had them over for tea and just hung out, chatted it was great, I can’t describe how happy I am to start working with these girls. We are approaching a battery crisis situation so know that I’ll say more about the girls later. The point of all this is I love my site and its most unfortunate that I am out for so long. The whole thing with the broken clavicle is a shit show but manageable that having been said I will just be irate if it damages my standing in my community being gone so long or if it in anyway compromises my work that I believe I am getting going there.