Transitions: Back to America Pt. 2

 

April 2012

Then things started to look up for me. Around April my transition back to a stable life in the states started to take shape, just in time for it to be over.

It must have started with a joke with a friend. Harley, who had just finished his service in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, had recently moved back to his home New Mexico. When I had asked him earlier about his plans after Peace Corps, he told me he would probably stay in New Mexico with his parents. I told him it would not last long. Sure enough, after a few weeks in New Mexico, I talked to him online and dropped on him the Anchor Man quote “I think after this is all over, you and me should get an apartment together.” It was in jest, but I also meant it. And he was totally down for the idea.

So we moved into a shared house together. I was thrilled to move out of my terrible living situation, and to have another friend around. Plus the people we moved in with were the kind of people that we could live with.

Soon after, I managed to get out of my restaurant job in Bellevue. I replaced it with two restaurant jobs which were a big step up. I had caught wind that I had no chance of advancing from my position at my job in Bellevue, so I figured if I would be a busser, I might as well work closer to home and make more money. One job was at a popular seafood restaurant that was something of a Seattle icon. It attracted tourists, elderly regulars, and boat people. It wasn’t the best group of customers or co-workers, but it was a huge restaurant that provided a steady and reliable income. The other was something of a dream restaurant job. It was as close to an enjoyable service industry job as I could have imagined. It had a mature and friendly staff, a respectable clientele, and a chef that was recently named one of the best in the country. It was by far the best restaurant job as I could have asked for. It was the rare service industry job I could take a bit of pride in.

With things in order, I could enjoy my last summer in Seattle for a while. I had a Peace Corps application in the works, but I had no idea when I would be leaving. It could be anywhere from August to the following winter. I felt like I was finally getting things in order. Plus I was lucky enough to have Lise come and stay with me for the summer. My previous living situation had made her last visit complicated. Now we were free to enjoy each other’s company and have some truly memorable times together. We spent time canoeing Lake Washington, going to Capitol Hill Block Party and camping. It really made the summer perfect.

So now I was waiting to hear from the Peace Corps. I had been jumping through their hoops for months. I don’t feel like going through the details of that, but it was a long process of doctor appointments, dentist appointments, endless paperwork, visits to various government offices and going to copy shops. I even had to go back to Idaho once to get a dental exam because the corrupt dentist in Seattle (recommended by the Peace Corps) said he would need to do over $700 worth of (unnecessary) work to sign off on my paperwork.

After constant waiting, I received a phone call saying that my Peace Corps invitation had been sent. They said that I would probably be going to sub-Saharan Africa. This was a good thing. My dream was to be going to a French-speaking country to go to West Africa. I had done everything possible to set myself up for a French-speaking placement. I didn’t have the formal education in French that was required, but I had studied French on my own for three years, especially in the last few months. I had taken a Clep exam and passed with a high score, which qualified me for a French-speaking placement. I will be honest that my ambitions for joining the Peace Corps were not entirely altruistic, and I wanted to be able to greatly advance my abilities to speak French for many reasons. I had put a lot of personal effort into learning the language and wanted to be place where I could hone these skills.

I figured that the invitation letter from the Peace Corps, which would include my country of placement, would arrive within a few days. Unfortunately the Peace Corps seemed to send it at through the slowest possible means. It got there after about eight days.

Mama called me, saying the letter had come. My heart pounded, yeah yeah yeah, dramatic lead up to my announcement. I was incredibly nervous of course. She told me I was being sent to Rwanda on September 11.

My reaction was tempered by many factors. I was excited to finally know. I was shocked by how soon I would be leaving. It was a tight squeeze. Peace Corps is required to notify you at least 8 weeks in advance, and mine was exactly that much. I can move quickly, but this was still overwhelming. Lise would be staying until two weeks before I left, and I was doing all I could to not be distracted during her visit. I knew that two weeks between her visit and leaving for Rwanda would be nuts.

As far as Rwanda, my reaction was mixed. Yes, it is a Francophone country, but it didn’t mean much. For many reasons, the country has recently switched to English, especially as a language of instruction. This was very important, since I was going to be in the education sector. Also, because of how homogenous Rwanda is, I would not be trained in French, but rather Kinyarwanda, which is spoken throughout the entire country. On the other hand, I was excited about being placed in a country that I completely did not expect. It was a curveball that I welcomed. I had many dream placements, such as Guinea, Togo or Cameroon, but I also kind of wanted to be put in a country that I knew nothing about. Rwanda fit the bill. Of course I had read a lot about the genocide over the years, but I knew that there was still so much to learn. Plus it was in a region of Africa that I was very unfamiliar with. It was East Africa and Central Africa at the same time. It had close historical ties to the Congo, but was also geographically close to East African countries of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. This was a region that I had always overlooked when it came to traveling, but again, my ignorance of it was a big plus.

My job assignment as well gave me pause. I was placed in the teaching sector, most specifically English teaching. This was definitely not my top choice. Over time I had developed a somewhat cynical view of the idea that teaching English to people in developing countries was going to help the country’s situation. For example, teaching children English in a place like Mali or Cambodia seemed like it would only provide opportunities for a few people in the tourism sector or maybe the lucky few that got into international business. It did not seem to be the kind of thing would have a significant impact in alleviating poverty. Plus, tourism in developing countries is very volatile. Take Mali, for example. A year ago tour guides most definitely benefited from their ability to speak English. Now that it is unstable and tourism has dried up, it is no longer putting food on tables or supporting industries.

However, Rwanda was unique. The whole country, which spoke French as its international language, has decided to switch to English. One of the major reasons for this (among many) was the fact that many of the neighboring countries are Anglophone. Rwanda is trying to promote valuable economic ties with countries like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, rather than the troubled Francophone countries Burundi and Congo, which are far more troubled. The country officially changed the language of instruction in schools from French to English just a few years ago. It has obviously been a difficult change for the country, but it is a change that I feel I can support. It is not because I think that one language is better than the other, but it seems that English will be a more valuable language for Rwandans than French. This is why I feel good about my efforts to help Rwanda in their transition from French to English. Still it is ironic, as I was really hoping to use the Peace Corps to improve my skills in French.

I was also conflicted in a more selfish way. As far as my job with the Peace Corps was concerned, I was hoping for a role that would set me up to learn more about development. I did not feel that English teaching was very different than other posts where volunteers were able operate more like NGO or development workers. It is something I really had a desire to get involved in for the sake of my post-Peace Corps life. At the same time, I know that teaching English as a second language would give me the skills to teach English anywhere in the world, if I so wanted. In the future, if I am ever in need of a decent job abroad, my experience with the Peace Corps will give me a huge advantage if I need some work teaching English.

Once it all sank in, I felt overwhelmed with how soon I was leaving. Eight weeks is not a lot of notice. I had to continue working the two jobs I was about to quit, move out of my house, continue the never-ending barrage of Peace Corps paperwork, make visits to friends in Phoenix and my sister in Indianapolis, and squeeze the most time out of the time I still had with Lise in Seattle. It was an intense last month. Every time someone asked me if I was excited or nervous, I had a difficult time mustering any emotion. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was too busy to contemplate the fact that I was about to spend the next 27 months in an African country I knew relatively little about. Perhaps it was because I had left the country blindly for various reasons in the past and now I was getting used to it. Maybe it was the fact that the Peace Corps was not my first choice of options, but rather the next logical move in my life. Maybe it was all of those and more. It is impossible to say.

When it finally came time to leave home on Sept. 10, I can say that I still felt very little. Of course I was sad to say goodbye to my family, and I knew I would miss them. On the other hand, I had done this before, and knew what to expect. My best guess to explain my calm and tempered mood was that my excitement and my nervousness were counteracting each other, leaving me to appear bored and boring. I wanted to muster up strong emotions, but then again, I knew those would really come flooding in the moment I stepped off the plane. Just like usual.

Transitions: Back to America pt. 1

 

2012

Returning to America this time was the hardest. Before when I had been away for a few months, I was coming back to school, which gave me some stability. This time, I was returning to Seattle with no job, no place to live, and less money than I had ever had before. One time I had been able to live in  my car during the transition, but this time I wouldn’t even have that. I felt lucky to have a bicycle so I could get from place to place faster than on the bus. One difficult aspect of my transition, though, was not knowing what friends were still around, and who I could count on for a place to crash. In college I had tons of places to stay, and I would try not to wear out my welcome. Three years after college, people had left Seattle, moved to the suburbs or had living situations that were not conducive to guests.

The worst part, though, was the feeling that maybe I really needed to grow up. I had my college education, but what had I done with it? Worked a couple of internships, turned down a small newspaper job in favor of traveling for 15 months? Now I was almost 26, and applying for restaurant jobs. I could never say that I regretted it though. People always say, “Joey, you are so lucky that you are getting to travel when you are young. I wish I would have done that!” Everyone wants to drop everything, and go see the world, but steady jobs, marriages, mortgages, kids, etc. all seem to get in the way. This is something that drives me to not give in yet. As much as I feel I am not progressing in my life, I also know this is the time to go out and live life like I want to. College loans are breathing down my neck, and I can only postpone the real world so long. It feels like now or never, because once I commit to anything close to a 9-to-5 it will feel like its over. I guess these were the things I had to keep in my mind as I faced my dire situation. I had a lot of things to get in place.

The friends that were still around for me when I got back were angels. I could not have survived without John Borges letting me crash on his studio floor regularly, and he never made me feel like I was staying too long. After the hospitality I received from strangers in places like Morocco, Mali and the Philippines, I had forgotten about the generosity that can exist back home. With several of my friends, it was alive and well.

The transition was filled with ups and downs. It was obviously great to catch up with so many people I had missed. Trying to find a place to rent without a job, or to find a job without a home are big challenges. Which should come first? I couldn’t really afford much on the housing front. However, getting a job when you didn’t know what to put down as an address, and you don’t have any experience in the last year and a half was tricky. Being a terrible liar does not help with any of this either.

After about three weeks, I finally started to make some progress. I rented a room in a shared apartment in a house in Chinatown/International District. It was a sketchy part of town, but also a neighborhood I had always wanted to live in. It seemed promising at first, however, it ended up being a seemingly endless terrible situation. I should taken a hint from certain parts of the lease agreement that this place would be screwy. For example, the fact that the landlord specified that the use of profanity was forbidden on the premises. Every day seemed to present a new reason why this had been a terrible idea. For example, I learned on my first night that the house had no heat. Incidentally this was also the night of Seattle’s annual blizzard. I had very few possessions at this point. I was sleeping in my warm weather sleeping bag on the floor, and was wearing almost every scrap of warm clothing I had. The next morning, I walked to the nearest restaurant, a Chinese noodle shop. It was not heated either and provided little comfort from the blizzard outside. However, the hot noodle soup for $4 still felt like a blessing. That day John hooked me up with a warmer sleeping bag, and a small space heater. Blake lent me a warm hat and some gloves. Everything was slowly coming together, although my living situation would only get weirder.

One of the two guys that lived in my unit was almost never around. Sometimes I would hear him coming home at 2 or 3 in the morning, but I almost never saw him. The other man, Patrick, who was probably in his late 40’s or early 50’s had some psychological issues that I would become exposed to on one of my first mornings. The entire time I lived there I only heard him speak two words to me. Both of them were “hi”. Both happened the first time I met him. On my second morning, I woke up to him screaming profanity at nobody. He was in his room, cursing at somebody that seemed to be in his space. At first I thought it was a threat to me, but as it persisted, I realized he was screaming at the voices in his head. When I was around him, though he never spoke. Sometimes I would hear the profanity-laced diatribes through his door, but I never saw him speak in person.

When I moved in, there was nothing in the pantries. No food, no pans, no plates, no pots. Nothing, except one paper bowl, which I was always too afraid to touch. The refrigerator had one package of hot dogs, one gallon of milk with a plastic bag on the mouth in place of the lid, and one Styrofoam to-go container from the roommate I would never see, that stayed there for weeks until I threw it out. I would eventually learn that Patrick kept all of his belongings inside his room. When he cooked rice or hot dogs (which seemed to be his two staples) he would bring the pot or pan necessary to the stove outside his door. He would shuffle with his head down between the stove and his room. Like him, I got used to eating in my room, as the common areas were too awkward to linger in. He also didn’t seem to use the bathroom. That was fine with me. The strange part, though was that during his morning routine (which appeared to be quite rigid) I would see him dumping buckets into the toilet. He had a lot of cleaning supplies and seemed to be something of a germophobe. He used plastic bags to touch things like doors and knobs. I found his behaviors fascinating, however, I always felt sympathy for him. He seemed to have a difficult and lonely life. I always felt like I should try to engage him, maybe be something of a friend to him. However, he seemed so distant that I felt I could not talk to him.

And then there was my bizarre illness. Soon after coming back to America, I was diagnosed with schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzia. It is a parasite that is endemic in Africa and can be contracted from swimming in certain bodies of water. It is spread through snail feces and lives in water. It enters through the skin and makes its home in a variety of organs. I had not expected to get it, since the parasite cannot usually live in moving waters and we had only been swimming in the Niger River in Mali. It was a complete fluke that I had even been diagnosed. During a blood test at a doctor in Seattle, they noticed something strange. My doctor, after hearing where I had been traveling, took a stab at the thought that I might have schistosomiasis. He had taken a class in tropical parasites when he was in med school back in the 70’s and had a vague memory of what schisto looked like. Most American doctors would never encounter this in their lives, so it was a complete fluke that he figured it out. I had had suspicions that I had something wrong with me because my body had been doing some strange things since I had left Mali nine months earlier. Most of it, however, I just equated to my traveling lifestyle. The symptoms of schisto are so varied and not that intense for a while, that it is easy to overlook them. I had had a few bouts of fever, one of which led me to a hospital in the Philippines, where they diagnosed me with a urinary tract infection. This was a misdiagnosis, as it was actually a couple months after that episode was over that I noticed pinkish hue in my urine, signaling a bit of bleeding somewhere along the way. In Cambodia I got a couple of unexplained abscesses on my leg that exploded into black and bloody infected mess. A fellow traveler and nurse prescribed me some antibiotics that seemed to do the trick. In India I had developed a rash on my legs, but hey, that’s India right? In addition, since I had left Mali, my bowel movements had been completely out of whack. But then again, I seemed to be in a completely different country with a new diet every month or two; so chronic diarrhea barely raised an eyebrow.

The doctor prescribed me a round of de-worming medication that is also regularly used on dogs. I immediately informed the other three guys I had been traveling with on the Niger River. Jordan, the Australian, had also known something was wrong with him, and had been going to different doctors for months, without solving his problems. It is a lot easier to know when something is wrong when you are back in your home country, however, much harder to diagnose. Since Jordan is a vet, he simply prescribed himself the same dog de-wormer. Blai had also gotten really sick when I visited him in Spain, and the doctors at the hospital could not tell him what was wrong. He quickly got the medication he needed. Jonathan, however, who doesn’t seem to believe he is capable of getting sick (except maybe those TWO times with malaria) didn’t bother getting the medication. His excuse was that he was in New Zealand, where he could not afford the health care. I am still not sure if he has been treated.

The medicine was a single giant dose, and it made me feel terrible. It was like all the symptoms I had been feeling occasionally and mildly for months came back with a vengeance for a last hurrah in my body. I had a terrible fever, blood in my urine, etc. But then it was gone. The rash eventually went away, but it was replaced by some other itchy bites all over my legs. It looked like I had brought back a second parasite from India. Just like my first time there, I had brought back some stowaways. Scabies. It was not a surprise, considering that I was volunteering with a bunch of men who were rife with scabies, plus my guesthouse was filthy. It was an easy fix once I figured it out, though I realize it is pretty disgusting. All things considered, though, for 15 months of travel, mostly in developing countries, those illnesses were a small price to pay. Especially since I had thrown an incredible amount of caution to the wind, and had drank whatever came out of the taps or water pumps, and sometimes wells everywhere from Morocco to Mali to Cambodia to India. That is also not to mention whatever street foods, barbecued organ meats and fertilized eggs I had eaten along the way.

In the meantime, I had been doing a lot of job searching. It was the worst season to be looking for restaurant work in Seattle. I wasn’t about to start applying for journalis jobs, since I was still applying for the Peace Corps. I wasn’t qualified for much more than restaurants and newspapers, which caused me constant stress and mild depression. I finally landed a job bussing tables at a casual restaurant a short bike ride away from home. After accepting the job, though, they informed me that there had been a mistake, and that I had been hired for their new location in Bellevue, a 45-minute bus ride away. I had been back in Seattle for a month, and it was my first offer. I had to choose whether I would start working in Bellevue, officially selling my soul, or hold out for something better. I chose to take the job. I was grateful for the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of the restaurant, as well as the easygoing management, but that was where the positives ended. I should have been hired as a server, but I was too desperate for work, and was willing to take anything. Moving up was never an option either, since the management liked my work ethic as a busser, and didn’t mind the sub par customer service of several of the servers. It was a depressing job that complemented my depressing living situation. I just had to keep reminding myself that I had put myself in this situation and that it is one of the consequences of the traveling lifestyle I had chosen for the last few years. I reminded myself to tell people about these parts of my life when they act jealous of my ability to travel so much. I feel like I pay my dues in a strange way.

It wasn’t all bad, though. One of the highlights of my return to Seattle was the photo exhibit I had I had open at a gallery in Pioneer Square for First Thursday. It felt amazing to have a series of photos on display. It was from the series of portraits I had done in Kolkata. It was the first time I had had my work on display in a gallery and it felt strange. I also had to learn a lot about the process of displaying work. Previously, my work has only appeared in newsprint and online. I had to learn how to print my photos in a digital lab, how to cut my own mats, and how to place the photos in the mats. I can thank my friend Ish who taught me everything I know now about that process. It was a big investment too. I had not anticipated how much the high quality paper and mats would cost. I figured, though that it would be an investment, and it would probably pay off after I had sold enough prints through the gallery.

Unfortunately I over-estimated how many people would be interested in buying these large portraits. I didn’t sell a single print in the two months they were up at the gallery. This was a huge blow to my ego and wallet. I was really only hoping to break even. Now I was left wondering if the $700 and dozens of hours I spent printing and matting were all a waste. Seeing my work on display in  Seattle’s most famous arts district did feel great. Surprisingly it also gave me a great chance to see a lot of the people I hadn’t seen since coming back. I couldn’t believe how many of my friends had come to support me on the night of the opening, including the McKernans, who had come all the way from Portland. That was worth more than I had imagined. Plus, Mama and Papa came all the way from Idaho for both receptions. That also meant a lot. In the end it was easy to ignore the major loss on my investment. Now I don’t have to wonder too much if I should be trying to get my work on display in galleries. It doesn’t seem like it’s for me.