Grand Tour

Hi lovelies,

I received a care package recently and it made me wish I could show all of you how much I appreciate everything you do from me from the States. And then I realized...I can show you! So I did a video tour of my site in Ponta Verde which I've put on Youtube for you to see. It's not the best tour in the world (partially because my video cut out in the end), but you'll have to come visit to see for yourself :)

Take a look:



All of my love xoxox

Renaming and rethinking

The title of a blog is deceivingly difficult to come up with. You want to decide on something that explains what you're all about and give a concise explanation of why this forum of opinions exists to begin with. At the same time, you don't want to take yourself too seriously, it's just a blog. So up until now, this has just been "Rachel in Africa." Straightforward.

But most of what I write about here is a reflection of what this process is to me. So, after a few months of settling in and recognizing what these two years are truly going to mean to me, and realizing that they won't be what I expected, I decided that my collection of thoughts needed a change. And so, with a quotation in mind from author Mark Jenkins, I've realized that all of these moments can be summed up in the way that my art-inflicted mind has always seen them: as little splashes of color.


“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

Photo update

Just a few highlights: beautiful sunsets, experiments with the camera and new baby chicks!

Just your typical Saturday

Where to begin.

This morning I woke up bright and early to go outside and enjoy the free wifi that comes in at my friend's house since he lives so close to the Camara. He left brighter and earlier to go to a wedding at the opposite end of the island, and I was getting ready to enjoy a full day of internet, Skype dates, food and rest on my own. Unfortunately, within five minutes of coming outside at 10am (3 hours ago) the wind blew the door shut, and I've been stuck in this tiny ass space since then. However, the internet just kicked in (finally) so I can at least amuse myself for a while.

I put on The Life Aquatic to stave off the claustrophobia. Halfway through, my friend called to tell me that he would be two or three hours later than he had expected, bringing my anticipated total time outside to six hours or so. Current status: hungry and kind of have to pee. Luckily my friend lives next to a restaurant owned by a deportee, who came out for a minute. I yelled at him and asked for a cheeseburger. They're out of bread, of course. Just as it was starting to sound so good....but anyway, now he's on his way to find a small child who is used to scaling walls and can go to the roof of this three story apartment building to break in and open the door for me.

Outcome pending...

Update: as I was sitting outside waiting for my friend to get back, a kid maybe thirteen years old or so came by asking if I was the one who needed help. As soon as I said yes, he started climbing the wall. In the time that it took me to even consider that as an "adult" I should tell him to stay put and find someone with a key, he scaled a three-story apartment building like it was nothing, came downstairs and casually opened the door to let me in. My hero! And now the door to the balcony is securely held open with a copy of War and Peace. Lesson learned: Americans are pansies.

She's a good girl, loves her mama

To my astonishment, I found exactly one week ago to be the six month mark from the day that I woke up in my nearly empty condo, fanatically deconstructed and reassembled my luggage, and, bewildered, loaded 80lbs worth of my life into a taxi cab and sat silently watching the chaos of the DC metro and traffic of Port Republic fade into the distance and into memory. It is a morning and an assortment of feelings that I'll never forget. But as soon as I made it into that moment I realized I would survive it, and I knew that everything would be ok.

I've thought about those many moments that we anticipate and make ourselves sick over. They are huge moments in our development that usually involve leaving small parts of ourselves behind to grow into the new. I've wondered how often people carry through with a decision that they've lost sleep over and regret it. It certainly happens. But what if it doesn't? In elementary school I used to come down with cases of "the Thursdays and Fridays." I would call home every week right before music class and, initially, whine to my mother about how my throat hurt or how my stomach was killing me and I wanted to die. She would come pick me up and I would watch cable tv at my friend's house or go to work with her and eat pizza. Eventually she caught on.

It turned into pleading and begging because I couldn't sit through that class again. I always wanted to sing, but I never once had the courage to volunteer, so I begrudgingly sat in the back of the room with a recorder and a sorry rendition of "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" with my heart beating out of my chest, knowing that this next moment, or this one, or this next one, could be that time that I ask the teacher if I could sing in front of the class and allow my life to change. It wasn't a decision that would make one day better. It was a decision that could have turned two days of every week for at least a year of my childhood from something to dread into something to be excited about and gain confidence from. It was a decision that I never brought myself to make, which I still regret, because now I can't carry a tune in a bedong.

Alternatively, in college I took an entrepreneurial course that culminated in a very formal presentation of the business plan that we had spent the semester creating-- cross-checking demographics and budget analysis, spending nights in the computer lab until we saw two computer screens and had to call it quits. I took the class because I had stumbled into a travel boutique in Paris that made me want to gather up everything I owned and open a store, and I realized that I had no idea how to do it. During the presentation at the end of the semester, the room was packed with small business owners and investors, and I was completely out of my element. The presentation itself was terrifying. But I did it, and I was still alive. I also realized that certain aspects of entrepreneurship weren't for me at that point in my life, and it allowed me to move on to different things without getting caught up in what could have been, which I'd allowed myself to explore.

So here I am, reevaluating my boundaries and fears and detriments, and realizing that I've spent too much time imagining them. Or, at the very least, letting situations define them for me, and not realizing that with a small amount of inner reflection and the courage to try, I could break them down in a matter of seconds. It's astonishing how much of our limitations are the products of our own minds.

I suppose the physical equivalent that comes to mind is skydiving. When I was in Switzerland, watching the Alps approaching from the open door of a plane, watching the color drain from everyone's faces and realizing I was about to jump out of a freaking plane, there was a voice in my head that kept forcing its way into consciousness, saying, "you don't have to do this." But I knew that I did. The work that I'd put into making the trip happen--the emails back and forth, the phone calls on the hostel phone, the amount of time and energy spent convincing the other party involved that he had to try it--had made turning back impossible. And despite my nerves, I was still smiling inside because I knew that I was accomplishing something that I'd always wanted to do.

The initial feeling of falling out of a plane isn't like anything that I've felt in any other context. There's a draw back, like reaching the top of a rollercoaster and looking down and trying to back up in your seat as the car slowly tilts over the edge. Only there's nothing there. Nothing. There is air to every side of you, and another blunt object that you're strapped to that can do nothing to stop you mid-way. You're committed, 3,500 feet in the air, there's no turning back. There is confusion, and a desperate internal and external attempt by every conceivable sense to find something, anything, that is there to help you. And then for no reason, aside from perhaps the understanding that there is no alternative to acceptance, there is just a calm. Beauty and an appreciation for life and this new spectacular view of it. The freefall by far is the best part of skydiving. Because it contains every emotion from start to finish that life should encapsulate.

The book I'm reading has a line that keeps standing out to me. It says, "life is untidy." In a world of people strugging to control their comfort, happiness, relationships, finances, bodies, thoughts, and even other people, I feel that sometimes the best thing to do is to embrace the mess. By all means, do the research and think things through, but if after all of that your heart is still beating, why not? If you take a wrong turn and need to backtrack, congratulations, you know something that you didn't know before. You'll stop wondering now. Life is a freefall! Life is always one step ahead of control. And it all ends the same way, so fall into it, and love the unknown for what it is: a chance to experience something new.

Volcano

So I climbed the volcano last Sunday! It's the highest point in Cape Verde. We were above the cloud line before we even started climbing. Cha is beautiful; very rustic and simple but there's a lot of character there. I can't load too many photos, so here are some of the select few:

Potpourri

Happy Holidays!

I've been hearing from everyone that it's cold in the States. It's still as hot as ever in Fogo. Sao Filipe especially; something about this town attracts the sun. This is the first time I've ever wanted a bikini for Christmas.

It's December 7th, my classes are slowing down and my students are preparing to take their tests to end the trimester. Some days they're brilliant. When one of my students wrote, "Beyonce is prettier than Rihanna" on the blackboard last week, perfetly, I almost cried with happiness. But instead I told him it's bullshit, Rihanna is definitely prettier. Other days, they're not so brilliant and I bop them with their notebooks, which makes them laugh. My 8th graders took their test today. Some of them came over yesterday evening and we spread out on the kushion on my floor in the living room and had a study session. They are so outgoing and shy at the same time. The first three boys took the initiative to come over and then were almost too shy to come into my house. I had to lure them in with candy, which always works (God I'm creepy). By the end of an hour and a half, they had become comfortable enough with the material to do well today. Or so they say. I have yet to grade.

Thanksgiving is going to happen this Friday at my house. We haven't had the time to celebrate it yet, and I'm so ready to eat some epic food and then fall into a blissful state of lethargy for a good few hours. One of the volunteers somehow managed to find cranberry sauce, and Peace Corps DC sends everyone turkeys every year, so the one male on this island is excited to be manly and take care of the meat (364 days of the year, Fogo is "sorority island" and I think this is a bigger deal than it sounds). I think I'm going to make mac and cheese. Is that normal for Thanksgiving? My sister and cousins always demanded Annie's mac and cheese on Thanksgiving so it's standard, along with drinking absinthe prior to dinner (but that one proved to be more difficult on my little rock). It seems appropriate.

In other news, my incredible friend Chris and I are planning to do a penpal type program between our students. He teaches in Arlington and knows so much about teaching, and we met in Ghana so he also has an idea what teaching in Africa is like, so I couldn't ask for a better person to exchange ideas with. His students sent me a list of questions the other day about life in Cape Verde, which were really fun to answer. Because I never experienced an exchange like that in my own schooling, it got me thinking about my past education, and the things that have made a difference in my life. Being here as an outsider has occasionally made me wonder what I can do to make a difference. What can I do differently that Cape Verdean teachers can't do on their own? Half of these kids respect me solely because I'm white, and the others are hesitant to believe anything I say for the same reason.

I remember my Spanish teacher at JMU. He was new to teaching, and didn't quite have the structure of the University down yet. On top of that, he didn't speak perfect English. And being a stupid kid, used to a particular structure and armed with a preconceived definition of "competency," I didn't take him as seriously as I should have. Now I'm on the other side, in a country that no one has heard of, speaking a language that I'd be surprised if anyone I'll meet for the rest of my life will be remotely familiar with. It's a completely impractical language in the scope of my life, yet my inability to speak it fluently results in a classroom of preteens not taking me seriously enough. Hindsight is a bitch.

But after I remembered my old Spanish teacher, I thought of the man who taught my Geography course sophomore year--the same semester as the Spanish class. I remember that we sat in a large room in the ISAT building, with tiers that seated a few hundred students. I played games on my cell phone sitting next to my boyfriend at the time and listened to half of what the man said. Despite having at least two hundred students in the class, participation was part of our grades, and he never made a mistake in remembering names and who participated and who didn't. How he acquired that skill, I will never know. He gave us quizzes on every country in the world. It will never again happen, but by the end of that semester I knew every single country on this planet and where it was on a map.

I remember him because all of the things that I remember him saying were things that he told us from his own travels. He was practical, and realistic, and he looked past the gimmicks and tricks of travel and did things the right way. He told us that when he was in Asia he learned never to give money to starving children, always give them food. There are too many drug addicted family members who send these kids out to get money that never benefits the youth begging for it. He taught me about Rwanda, and I cried when I studied the genocide for the test. He taught me so much about child prostitution that when the World Cup was first set to be hosted in South Africa my first thought was by what percentage this problem would increase, given the inevitable influx of Westerners touring the country. He unwillingly taught me something that I didn't appreciate until later: that oftentimes it's easier to choose to believe what we want to believe, and ignore what we want to ignore, than it is to have the courage to see what's truly in front of us. And over time that thought expanded, and I started thinking that if we go too long tricking ourselves, our nervous skirting grows into a blind investment in a dream world, and we're left in a fog that blocks out entirely the realities that we've become too afraid to acknowledge at all. He was calm, opinionated, open-minded and immovable. I don't remember his name.

Going back to finding out what makes an effective teacher: I started thinking that sometimes, we don't know what it is that impacts our lives. Sometimes when something happens we aren't able to immediately understand its gravity. Things stay bottled up somewhere inside ready to be used when we're ready to understand. So maybe that's what I can give that Cape Verdean teachers cannot. I've seen other parts of the world that none of my kids have seen, maybe don't even know about, and maybe the simple knowledge of something existing will spark within a few of them the desire to see more than what this one island in the compass of the entire world has to offer. I suppose that my hope in being here is that I'm able to put the potential for new thoughts into these kids, even if they don't understand the weight of the meaning right now. Because I damn well guarantee you, they aren't getting it now. I suppose my point is that you never know what you say or do that will affect people, even after you've exited their lives.

I don't know. Maybe in truth I'm just maternal and have a hidden, inherent desire to teach kids what limited things I know. I still don't know wtf a gerund is (it's a noun formed from a verb, I just looked it up) but I'm teaching English. Other, experienced people could do a way better job than I am; I knew that coming in. Who knows why we do what we do? Do we need to know, truly? If what we do stems from a sincere desire to do something good, and results in the bettering of our own lives and the lives of others, do we need to attach meaning to our motives? I read something months ago that a man wrote about his father (the beginning of the quotation is a quotation from his father), saying, "'I frankly doubt I could continue [volunteer activity] if I looked too hard within.'...In his own way, he was saying so very much about his mind, his way of thinking, of being. I no longer could regard him as someone who fled from self-recognition or, more broadly, denied the rest of us the authority to do so. Rather, he was telling me that what he did in the way of service to others came to, finally, a matter of unspoken faith. This was not a faith in the imperatives of transcendent code, but, ironically...a faith in the essentially benign workings of the mind, in its capacity to turn to good account all sorts of wayward or turbulent or egoistic impulses."

Weeks later, I re-read The Razor's Edge by W Somerset Maugham, who wrote, "I have never believed very much in...intuition; it fits in too neatly with what [we] want to believe to persuade me that it is trustworthy." The following week, I read The Alchemist, which read, "People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly."

So how do those things tie together? I've been thinking a lot lately about why we do the things that we do. I've come to the conclusion that it's terrifyingly easy to trick ourselves. Into anything: into thinking that we'll be happy to continue one profession or relationship, into settling for one course of action in hopes that it will work itself out in the end. Into believing that the little voice that we all have that tells us that our lives can be better, and we can be more than this, is wrong--pass it off as childish impracticality, and sternly insist to our own passions that we are adults now and need to behave as such from now on. In my dictionary, "adult" is defined as "a fully grown life form; a fully mature person." I don't think we reach that state by abandoning our inner callings and settling for something that other people label as appropriate for our age, because when they were young someone insisted the same to them.

Why I am here: I don't know. Because I remembered the kids I taught in Ghana and thought I owed them more than two weeks of my time and a desire to "experience Africa." Because the very fact that it was a difficult decision for me, that scared me and made me wonder what I could lose, made me realize how profound and necessary a decision it was. I've been here four months now and the idea of having chosen not to be here seems absolutely absurd.

So, the Sparknotes version of my unsolicited opinions: People shouldn't try to rationalize everything. It's neither necessary nor possible. Some things run deeper in us than words or comprehension can reach. People shouldn't put much stock into feelings that stem from "intuition," which often seem to run parallel with the decisions that result in the most comfort. Concepts like "intuition" were probably invented by the same person who invented Valentine's Day; it's useless in the end and results in personal investments that are ultimately worth nothing. And no one needs more greeting cards. Finally, it's inexpressibly important in terms of both happiness and success to devote sufficient amount of time to getting to know oneself, even if that sounds too zen for modern-day, fast-paced existence. That's not a lesson that many of us are taught growing up. We live with ourselves 24 hours a day, it hardly seems possible to not know who we are. But I'm convinced that few people do to the degree that they should.

Well I was planning to write about my chickens or this guy I met today who re-named himself after Stevie Wonder (he actually called himself Stevie One, but I didn't have the heart to tell him) but this just popped out instead. In more lighthearted news: Christmas break starts in nine days! I've discovered that I make awesome sweet potato soup. I think I've partially adopted a dog, but don't tell my roommate, who hates it. She smiles when she sees me and rolls around when I blow on her nose (the dog, not the roommate...though I haven't tried so maybe). The sunsets here have been phenomenal and I have way too many pictures of the same view with different streaks of color. I have about ten million plans for art projects and am determined to start on them soon. I'm also planning to do the PC world map project at my school, which will entail painting a huge mural on a whole wall that my kiddies will be able to help with. The boys in Boavista just finished this project and it looks incredible.

That's my life, in a nutshell. Email me your plans for Christmas! I'm camping on the beach in Santiago. I have to say, I miss the snow. But I say that every year and then shortly after I realize that I hate snow...so I'm envious of you but probably not really.