My fellow volunteer friend, Jenny, came up with the phrase I then stole to use for the title of this article because it has been something I've been stuck with since she first said it.
If you know me, you know I won't stay silent for long about something that's bothering me, much to the contrast of the passive, patient village in which I reside. So, I decided to open up and stretch my fingers and embrace the vastness of the keyboard.
The keyboard's vastness is of particular interest now especially that my beloved iphone has been whisked away to someone probably poorer than me with much less opportunity than I can even fathom being a very privileged citizen of the United States. It still pangs me to think that the bubble of my community that I've been carefully huffing and puffing into, admiring its sheen and beauty, could be popped so easily, filling me with doubt and fear amidst the static rice fields and monotonous cow moans.
I never expected to be robbed in my own school, even after regular school hours, and especially not when teaching almost 40 village children, screaming, laughing, crying, peeing their pants.... I thought my reputation preceded me and the value that I give to my community is worth more than the risk of stealing my valuables. I'm naive, I know, but that was my vision of my village: a warped mythology I've been feeding for 15 months now.
I've been in and out of the village for various reasons over the past year and change, and every time I come back it's this uncanny feeling between home and not-home, this gap I seem to bridge, but when I turn around, the bridge has disappeared or was never there to begin with. I'm left with a strange feeling of whether I actually crossed the bridge, or not--this purgatory between where am I, how did I get here and yes, I would love to go to your wedding and yes, I am interested in your whole life story, how did you know?
It's hard crossing these gaps when the bridges you use are infinite and invisible, but somehow you find your way across and you prove it, damn it, with your awkward language, tattered clothes and young scars. I made it across and you must accept me.
Although my phone is gone, the world moves on. The rice harvesting season is in full tow now and the sun still sets and the weather is cooling down as customary around the ending of my year and the middle of theirs.
There's nothing much to say but things are things and people are people and maybe this was a blessing in disguise. A chance to get away from the ease of wifi and the endless scrolls through social media feeds that simultaneously laud me with and drain from me information. The vacuum it created for me peaked during the election where I watched ignorance take control of what I thought was my country (selfishly) and became something else altogether.
I want to use this "opportunity" (see: euphemism) to get a break from the bad news and selfies and delve into films, books, crafts, art, the analog and step away from the digital. I don't want to think of it as something valuable, because it's really not. Not right now, not for me.
I don't want to remember my Peace Corps service as being surrounded by children opening their bags for me to look in and check before they go home.
"I trust my students," I told them, because I don't want to live in a world let alone a community where I have to even fathom the possibility of one of them stealing from me. I can't and I won't.
I know I'm still materialistic and this isn't my rejection of material wealth and vow to wear one pair of linen pants the rest of my life. But it is a recommitment to myself first and foremost as an active, independent, and vulnerable agent in a dynamically static enviroment and I will still cross those bridges and still look for clues to how I did it, but, I refuse to let this escape me. I answered my calling and I have chosen to endure.
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