Today as I was on my way to class I realized I had forgotten to take a photo of a document that I had to send to the Peace Corps office. I snapped a photo, clicked the memory card directly into my computer to save a few precious seconds, and set out to the school. It was more of an afterthought than anything.
I’ve been home alone for the past week; just me and my thoughts. I only have so many hours of HBO specials on my computer and eventually, I knew one night I’d be left alone to deal with myself. That night turned out to be tonight. I came to my room and searched through my computer folders and realized that I have nothing left to enfold myself in. Half a day! I don’t know how Thorough did it, just him and that silly lake.
I climbed into bed and realized that my memory card was still in my computer. It actually scared me to look at it! My own life, the past three years of it, stored on this little piece of technology. I guess it’s just one of those days when it seems to taunt me instead of serve of remembrance of happy memories. “Look what you used to have, sucka!”
Regardless, I just spent the last half hour sitting in an apartment enjoying second Christmas, watching the Superbowl with friends, lounging in the Caribbean, going on snowy photo shoots in DC alleyways, playing fancy flipcup games on my old balcony and dressing up. I enjoyed traditions, vacations and time with friends all over again. I saw people change. I watched people I love grow up, and make choices, and move on with their lives. I saw a friend I met at a beer pong table in college grow into himself, find his sexuality and embrace his strength. I watched friends fall in love, and others get married. Some people, after a while, weren’t in the photos anymore, and sometimes new people appeared.
Sometimes it’s hard here when I realize that so many of the good things that I had won’t be the same again. I never thought at the time, “this is the last time.” I guess I had convinced myself that when I went back home parts of my life wouldn’t have changed. But I took myself out of the pictures and life carried on.
A friend of mine gave me advice that I thought would be easy to follow but has proved, somehow, to be anything but. He told me that I’m here, I’ve left things behind and I need to live here. I need to be in the moments as they come, and stop thinking about what’s behind and ahead of me. So I smiled at the three years of photos and the memories, and the wonderful things that I was able to experience, and I put them away to take a look at what I have today. This is a taste of the latest stop along the road: the memories shared with all of the other people who left their photographs behind.
Cape Verde
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Cultural sensitivity
Cultural sensitivity. Such a peaceful concept that makes perfect sense and is, in theory, always available at the forefront of a foreigner’s mind. Don’t shake hands with your left hand. Don’t take mangos from another person’s mango tree. It’s respect at a deeper form: taking the time to get to know cultural norms that are different from your own and adapting yourself to them, like them or not. So everything that I’ve hardwired myself to think and do in response to people for the past 25 years of my life is justifiably open to debate, and right and wrong have been shifted in every direction since setting foot in the country that I’ve chosen to call home for two years.
I’m going to dive right into this post because despite the title, it’s probably anything but culturally sensitive. I’d like to think the fact that the person in question lives in America dilutes the need for attempted empathy, but on top of this, I’ve never heard of a person who is so annoying that every Cape Verdean I know collectively talks negatively about her at the mention of her name. So…I’m just integrated, right? And it’s one of those things that up until a point, I wouldn’t have written about for the sole reason of trying to accept my situation for what it is and move on. But all aforementioned reasons aside, life at home has recently dipped a toe into “so ridiculous it’s hilarious” territory, and I can’t resist a good story.
For the last month and a half, our landlady has been living next door to us. She usually lives in America but comes here every few years to work on the house that she lovingly reminds me on a constant basis is hers, and thus the decisions she asks me to make with her, in those cases where I disagree, are deferred to her alone. Every morning as the sun rises in the cool, peaceful countryside, she walks outside of my window, waking us from our innocent slumber with her melodic Kwaaaackckkkkuuuughhhkkk noise, as she seems to perpetually have a limitless deposit of phlegm lodged deep, deep in her esophagus which she can never quite clear out. But she’s persistent.
The first bit of work they did on the house was putting in a new door and a new window inside. The door is located all of five feet from another door, and it leads to a room that she’s ordered us to board up and never use. So I totally understand why she wants another door there; I’m shocked there wasn’t one to begin with. Two doors that access an inaccessible space, of course! The window allows us, if we’re on tiptoe in our kitchen, to gaze into the dark hallway in the back of the house that contains both previously described doors, and remains unfinished. That was a quick piece of work and I was happy in my naïve thinking that this house project surely (one eyebrow raised in retrospect) wouldn’t take a full two months.
This construction leaves the back exit to the kintal open, so the day that Sarah and I chased our chickens around to clip feathers and clean them up a bit we had a nice peanut gallery of one telling us how to improve. Which, I assure you, is exactly what you want to hear when you’re trapped inside of a chicken coop because you shut the door behind you to keep them from escaping and didn’t think about the fact that when the mama hears her babies squawking outside of the coop, days after the father of her babies was slaughtered in front of her, she’s going to attack the big threatening thing that doesn’t belong. In this case it was me, running around a chicken coop and screaming as the biggest chicken inside dive-bombed into my shins and scratched at my kneecaps. Kwaaaackkkuugh.
Next came the interior painting. This was about a week into her happy two-month visit, and it was about the time when I threw in the towel on any attempt at productive conversation with the woman, leaving my poor (more patient) roommate to deal with her one-on-one. Which meant that it inevitably started. Every day. With about a two second Mississippi pause (that may be generous but I’m rounding) in between each shrill, smoker voice shriek. SAH-rah. SAH-rah. SAH-rah. Yes? Are you here? Oh, ok. Cue any excuse to leave the house. Any possible thing that a person would have no logical reason to say to another human being became just cause to yell Sarah’s name with barely enough response time for a proper eye roll (a half roll, yes, but it’s not nearly as satisfying, especially when considering you need to get in a good sigh and maybe a hysterical laugh as well depending on what time of day it is by now) before the next harpy shriek. After painting the rest of the house, she and I had a feisty debate over the need to paint the bedrooms, and she ultimately gave me all of one days notice that she was going ahead with it, so one lovely Sunday was spent taking down my card wall and moving things out of my room, only to hear the next morning, oh, we don’t really need to paint your rooms. Our response was a culturally sensitive insistence that they were painting the effing rooms.
After that was the tiles. There aren’t words for the tiles.
My personal favorite thing that was directed at me was when I was cooking on the opposite end of the house from my room: RaKEL? RaKEL? RaKEL? Mmmhmm? Open the window. Um, sure you can open my bedroom window. No, come open the window. I proceeded to turn off the burners, walk across the house, walk outside, walk directly in front of her (please note she was holding and doing nothing) to open the window she would have walked into had she taken one step forward, look at her for a moment with my eyebrows raised and my mouth slightly ajar, then go back to cooking. This surprised me because she has before taken the liberty to open windows (surprise!) at the ass crack of dawn to look into bedrooms to talk about her plans for the house, because asking if we want a bathtub is just that important. She has also butted in on conversations with other friends—usually to disagree with something we’ve said, has told us how we should cook our American food that she’s never seen or eaten before and has no idea how to make, interrupted my every thought on the rare occasion that I’ve had the patience to try to share one, taken our water despite numerous pleas to stop and reminders that her family literally stole all of the water from this house last year: forcing the girls who lived here to carry water on their heads up a mountain just to get by, criticized us to other people in front of me in assumption that I don’t understand the language that I speak with her on a daily basis, and has generally been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
And yet I remain as patient as I possibly can. I try to ignore our new wood paneling tiles that I think maybe sometime in the 1960s a lumberjack or a burnout somewhere would have been excited about, probably in New Jersey (sorry dad, just thinking about that timeshare back in high school), and the terrible craftsmanship of the installation, which makes sense to me now that the elderly man who was in charge of it just left my house with a bedong on his head, reeking of grog and drooling on himself (no seriously, toxic bubbles down the face when saying a word that includes F or P) as he walked into walls while he asked me how old I was. Which I find to be extraordinarily sexy.
With this exchange happening outside of my back door, another man was loading bucket after bucket of our rapidly diminishing water supply onto a donkey to walk it up to the house next door to fill up that family’s water tank. I asked him why he couldn’t go to the public water supply down the hill, since it’s free and our water is dwindling because of their work and he has a freaking donkey. I even threw in a snarky comment about how it literally wouldn’t be any more work for him, just the donkey. He said he didn’t have time. For cultural sensitivity reasons, I’m not going to delve into that one. I waved a lock around, little does he know I unsuccessfully tried to remember the combination for an hour today, and told him to let his friend know that after tomorrow she can expect the water supply cut off. She’s tapped a whole new level of sass (that’s what she said! Stealth and avoidance* = The Office reruns) and I think everyone involved is happy that this experience is almost over.
So, where am I now? She leaves on Monday. God forbid the construction on the new airport (yes, anyone considering visits, your experience will now be more streamlined and you may be able to fly directly to Fogo…details pending) takes longer than people anticipated. My roommate is freshly gone for a two-week trip to Maio, so the patience has left the building. My current project: playing with fire and recycled bottles. Focus tends to be on the fire. My current pastime: stealth and avoidance, referenced above*. Current song playing on Itunes: Y’all Been Warned. Jus sayin, Wu-Tang don’t lie. Word.
I’m going to dive right into this post because despite the title, it’s probably anything but culturally sensitive. I’d like to think the fact that the person in question lives in America dilutes the need for attempted empathy, but on top of this, I’ve never heard of a person who is so annoying that every Cape Verdean I know collectively talks negatively about her at the mention of her name. So…I’m just integrated, right? And it’s one of those things that up until a point, I wouldn’t have written about for the sole reason of trying to accept my situation for what it is and move on. But all aforementioned reasons aside, life at home has recently dipped a toe into “so ridiculous it’s hilarious” territory, and I can’t resist a good story.
For the last month and a half, our landlady has been living next door to us. She usually lives in America but comes here every few years to work on the house that she lovingly reminds me on a constant basis is hers, and thus the decisions she asks me to make with her, in those cases where I disagree, are deferred to her alone. Every morning as the sun rises in the cool, peaceful countryside, she walks outside of my window, waking us from our innocent slumber with her melodic Kwaaaackckkkkuuuughhhkkk noise, as she seems to perpetually have a limitless deposit of phlegm lodged deep, deep in her esophagus which she can never quite clear out. But she’s persistent.
The first bit of work they did on the house was putting in a new door and a new window inside. The door is located all of five feet from another door, and it leads to a room that she’s ordered us to board up and never use. So I totally understand why she wants another door there; I’m shocked there wasn’t one to begin with. Two doors that access an inaccessible space, of course! The window allows us, if we’re on tiptoe in our kitchen, to gaze into the dark hallway in the back of the house that contains both previously described doors, and remains unfinished. That was a quick piece of work and I was happy in my naïve thinking that this house project surely (one eyebrow raised in retrospect) wouldn’t take a full two months.
This construction leaves the back exit to the kintal open, so the day that Sarah and I chased our chickens around to clip feathers and clean them up a bit we had a nice peanut gallery of one telling us how to improve. Which, I assure you, is exactly what you want to hear when you’re trapped inside of a chicken coop because you shut the door behind you to keep them from escaping and didn’t think about the fact that when the mama hears her babies squawking outside of the coop, days after the father of her babies was slaughtered in front of her, she’s going to attack the big threatening thing that doesn’t belong. In this case it was me, running around a chicken coop and screaming as the biggest chicken inside dive-bombed into my shins and scratched at my kneecaps. Kwaaaackkkuugh.
Next came the interior painting. This was about a week into her happy two-month visit, and it was about the time when I threw in the towel on any attempt at productive conversation with the woman, leaving my poor (more patient) roommate to deal with her one-on-one. Which meant that it inevitably started. Every day. With about a two second Mississippi pause (that may be generous but I’m rounding) in between each shrill, smoker voice shriek. SAH-rah. SAH-rah. SAH-rah. Yes? Are you here? Oh, ok. Cue any excuse to leave the house. Any possible thing that a person would have no logical reason to say to another human being became just cause to yell Sarah’s name with barely enough response time for a proper eye roll (a half roll, yes, but it’s not nearly as satisfying, especially when considering you need to get in a good sigh and maybe a hysterical laugh as well depending on what time of day it is by now) before the next harpy shriek. After painting the rest of the house, she and I had a feisty debate over the need to paint the bedrooms, and she ultimately gave me all of one days notice that she was going ahead with it, so one lovely Sunday was spent taking down my card wall and moving things out of my room, only to hear the next morning, oh, we don’t really need to paint your rooms. Our response was a culturally sensitive insistence that they were painting the effing rooms.
After that was the tiles. There aren’t words for the tiles.
My personal favorite thing that was directed at me was when I was cooking on the opposite end of the house from my room: RaKEL? RaKEL? RaKEL? Mmmhmm? Open the window. Um, sure you can open my bedroom window. No, come open the window. I proceeded to turn off the burners, walk across the house, walk outside, walk directly in front of her (please note she was holding and doing nothing) to open the window she would have walked into had she taken one step forward, look at her for a moment with my eyebrows raised and my mouth slightly ajar, then go back to cooking. This surprised me because she has before taken the liberty to open windows (surprise!) at the ass crack of dawn to look into bedrooms to talk about her plans for the house, because asking if we want a bathtub is just that important. She has also butted in on conversations with other friends—usually to disagree with something we’ve said, has told us how we should cook our American food that she’s never seen or eaten before and has no idea how to make, interrupted my every thought on the rare occasion that I’ve had the patience to try to share one, taken our water despite numerous pleas to stop and reminders that her family literally stole all of the water from this house last year: forcing the girls who lived here to carry water on their heads up a mountain just to get by, criticized us to other people in front of me in assumption that I don’t understand the language that I speak with her on a daily basis, and has generally been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
And yet I remain as patient as I possibly can. I try to ignore our new wood paneling tiles that I think maybe sometime in the 1960s a lumberjack or a burnout somewhere would have been excited about, probably in New Jersey (sorry dad, just thinking about that timeshare back in high school), and the terrible craftsmanship of the installation, which makes sense to me now that the elderly man who was in charge of it just left my house with a bedong on his head, reeking of grog and drooling on himself (no seriously, toxic bubbles down the face when saying a word that includes F or P) as he walked into walls while he asked me how old I was. Which I find to be extraordinarily sexy.
With this exchange happening outside of my back door, another man was loading bucket after bucket of our rapidly diminishing water supply onto a donkey to walk it up to the house next door to fill up that family’s water tank. I asked him why he couldn’t go to the public water supply down the hill, since it’s free and our water is dwindling because of their work and he has a freaking donkey. I even threw in a snarky comment about how it literally wouldn’t be any more work for him, just the donkey. He said he didn’t have time. For cultural sensitivity reasons, I’m not going to delve into that one. I waved a lock around, little does he know I unsuccessfully tried to remember the combination for an hour today, and told him to let his friend know that after tomorrow she can expect the water supply cut off. She’s tapped a whole new level of sass (that’s what she said! Stealth and avoidance* = The Office reruns) and I think everyone involved is happy that this experience is almost over.
So, where am I now? She leaves on Monday. God forbid the construction on the new airport (yes, anyone considering visits, your experience will now be more streamlined and you may be able to fly directly to Fogo…details pending) takes longer than people anticipated. My roommate is freshly gone for a two-week trip to Maio, so the patience has left the building. My current project: playing with fire and recycled bottles. Focus tends to be on the fire. My current pastime: stealth and avoidance, referenced above*. Current song playing on Itunes: Y’all Been Warned. Jus sayin, Wu-Tang don’t lie. Word.
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