Struggles of a Peace Corps Volunteer

            When I applied for Peace Corps I visualized myself and what I would be doing. I imagined several lives; my favorite ones were having a thatched hut along the beach in Fiji, or having a small house on a cliff with the ocean below me in Jamaica. I imagined sleeping under the sounds of tropical birds in Costa Rica, or in the oppressive humidity of South East Asia. Africa was on my mind but it was so foreign and mysterious. I didn’t know what to imagine or even how to imagine it. 

I believe it was the first days of May when I received Peace Corps’ acceptance letter and my assignment. At this point they had told me what day I would be departing and I was able to find out online which countries coalesced with my departure date. Togo, Zambia, and Namibia were the ones. I’ll happily admit I didn’t know a lick about any of these countries. Namibia was the only one that I knew how to find on the map and I had thought that Togo was a Pacific Island. I thought Zambia was Zimbabwe and that Namibia was a jungle like the rest of Africa.

I received my letter informing me that Namibia was to be my home for the next 28 months. By now I had researched these countries and I was happy with where I was placed. Now the engine to my imagination revved up and I began daydreaming what my life in the most misunderstood continent in the world would be like. I was also misunderstood; I imagined living in a mud house with a machete by my side on the lookout for snakes. I imagined lions roaring at night, elephants trumpeting, and witch doctors sending curses my way for not giving them money. Well turns out all those things have happened but Namibia is very different from how foreigners imagine it to be. But I digress, that’s a post for another time. 

When I visualized my life here I knew one thing. I wanted to go beyond the normal service of a volunteer; I wanted to be remembered for generations to come. I wanted to leave as a hero. A year in this country and I have been humbled. Soberingly so. I arrived swaggering believing that whatever the challenge I could just put the shoulder to the wheel and accomplish everything I wanted to. Peace Corps told me to stay away from this frame of mind but I didn’t listen, I’m the wonderful combination of young, naive, and stubborn, I was a flesh and blood Disney character, I believed anything was possible.

My humbling came in the classroom. I am teaching eighth and ninth graders in English and Geography. Like all other challenges I wanted to succeed at teaching, I wanted to improve my student’s performance; I wanted to be the teacher that my student’s would remember into their adult lives. So far I have failed miserably in improving my student’s performance. Their marks are nowhere near where I would like them to be. Up until these past two weeks I have carried all that weight of responsibility on my shoulders. In my foolish wanting to be a hero mindset I was the one responsible for my students performing poorly. I was carrying 190 students on my back. Heaviest weight I’ve ever had to bear in my life. I believed that if I worked hard enough, smart enough, I could make a tangible difference in their grades. I couldn’t and the truth of that tore me down. 

It was the middle of the second trimester when I shattered. Last Tuesday I was marking my 8^th grader’s work and I was handing out 5/35’s, 3/35’s, and even a 1/35 to a poor soul. My breath started becoming shallow, I started grinding my teeth, and my palms were becoming sweaty. I tried to slow down my breath and remain calm. I still had twenty more assignments to grade so I told myself I would go to sleep, wake up early the next morning and finish it then. I went to bed at 7 o’clock that night.

I woke up at 4:30 the next morning, I made some tea, put on my headphones and put on Bob Marley’s ‘Lively Up Yourself’. I got through one assignment and I broke down again. I just couldn’t do it, I felt the exquisite weight of all these students on top of me, counting on me to raise them up. I went to the staff meeting that day wringing my hands, I hadn’t made my mind if I was still going to try to teach that day or not. By the end of the meeting I decided to voice my frustrations to my principal. So I went into his office and told him how frustrated, disheartened, and unhappy I was with teaching. He was very supportive and gave me kind words explaining how most of these children are not going to succeed no matter what we do as teachers. Life has too many chips stacked against them. From parents that don’t care about their education, mothers drinking while they are pregnant, malnutrition, thirst, and lack of interest, these, my students, have an infinitely small chance of finishing high school. Even the numbers back it up, our school has 90 grade 8’s, 50 grade 9’s, 30 grade 10’s, 15 grade 11’s, and 6 grade 12’s. Students drop out en masse each year.

My principal told me to take the day off and go to town and stay with a volunteer friend of mine until Sunday to recompose myself. So I took the day off but told my principal I would be in the next day, I was loathe to miss school, I still felt responsibility for my students and I didn’t want to miss too much time with exams approaching. I went home messaged my mother through Facebook asking her to call me. She called me later that afternoon and we talked for an hour and she calmed me down, told me to get to town and get my mind off my problems for a while. So I did, I got on the local combi the next morning and made my way to Rundu. 

In Rundu I went to the nicest restaurant in town with two other volunteers that were on the way to run a marathon in Zambia. I ordered a large very cheesy pizza with onions, green peppers, and ground beef, two beers, and demolished them. I got back to the Peace Corps office, plopped my ass down on the couch and re entered the beautiful world of the internet. I checked my email and saw that my family had sent words of support and encouragement to me. I remember a particular email from my grandfather Vovo John. My grandfather and my grandmother were country directors for Peace Corps in Paraguay, had worked in international development in some of the toughest places in the world from Somalia to Bosnia & Herzegovina to Colombia and really knew their stuff when it came to living in the poorest and most volatile places in the world. In an email laced with great Spanish expressions (abrazos rompedistancias!) and advice from somebody who has more wisdom than I can ever imagine hoping to acquire, he led me back to the land of the sane and took me out of my dark corner.    

My grandfather, grandmother, mom and dad all taught me very important lessons. They changed my mind about being a hero to my students or at least how to quantify it. They were able to allow me to let go of these intense feelings of responsibility for my students. My students were not going to be successful in the way I wanted them to be. How they do in school is not a reflection of how I am performing as a teacher or my level of effort that I put into my job. I could be the most dedicated and hardworking teacher in the world but with how difficult life is for these students it would not matter. The majority are going to fail. The best I can do is to do my best but not push, give, and care so much that it is hurting me. I won’t make it to the finish line if I do. Paradoxically, I need to care less to succeed. Don’t misunderstand that statement, understand that this is Africa. This is a village in Namibia. Life is hard in a way that cannot even be understood or imagined in first world countries anymore. To be the teacher that these students need me to be I need to let go and accept that there will be casualties but that my mark will be left on the lucky ones whose life is a little bit more tolerable and have not been ruined by the gross weight of poverty and suffering.                               

Hunting Black Mambas

It was 6:30 Monday afternoon. The afternoon before the first day of class. As I have mentioned before, my village does not have water. I only had one 25 liter jerry can left and for the past 5 days I had been using water only for cooking and drinking. As school was starting tomorrow I needed to bathe but I wanted to get more water before I did so. I called my counterpart Mr. Mukuve and asked him to take me to the clinic where I could fill up my five jerry cans. We got in his car and on the way out my host dad, Mr. Mandevu comes up to us. He speaks no English so Mr. Mukuve translated the conversation. Mr. Mandevu said that there was a black mamba in one of his huts and that we needed to go get a gun, come back, and shoot it. So we turn around and drive to a nearby homestead. We stop, Mr. Mukuve calls out to a lady sitting by her hut. She goes inside and comes back out with an old beaten up shotgun. She hands it to me through the window and we drive back towards my host family’s homestead.

Soccer practice had ended at my school and a lot of my students were walking home. So there I was in the front seat of the pickup truck, looking smug with a shotgun on my lap with the barrel extending out of the window. All the learners looked at me with this expression of awe and surprise. I wasn’t too worried about classroom discipline after that drive. But anyway, we get to my host family’s house and there is a group of around 25 people milling about, mostly children. I step out of the car with the shotgun in tow and my principal calls out in a joking manner, ‘Andre you must shoot, you must shoot!’. Instead I give the gun to Mr. Mandevu, but before I take the mandatory camera phone picture. We then walk over to one of the corner huts where the mamba is located. Mambas are able to climb and commonly lodge themselves in the top corners of mud huts. We throw in a small burning piece of tire into the hut so the smoke will draw the mamba out. That did not work, so my host mom being an absolute badass darts inside the hut and starts throwing things outside with the idea of gaining more visibility and finding the mamba. At this point my host father had his gun aimed at the hut while my counterpart and I stood behind him with long spears in our hands ready for whatever was going to happen. The principal stood a bit to the side with his gigantic flashlight pointing inside the hut. Call us the village SWAT team.  My host mom darts back outside and the principle flashes a light in but we can’t find the mamba. She starts poking around the hut with a long stick trying to force the mamba outside where we could shoot it. The entire time my host dad was cracking jokes, making the adults laugh and scaring the little kids. I had no idea what he was saying but the laughing was quite boisterous and the kids were quickly backing away. He was treating it like this was completely normal and didn’t show any concern at all although his eyes were always trained on the door of the hut. Eventually it started to get dark and finding a mamba in a hut without any lights started to seem like a pretty bad idea. So our party broke up, we headed out to get water, my host parents kept the gun and said that in the morning they would open holes in the hut so they could get a clearer view of the snake. I wasn’t there the next morning but I was told that they went back to the hut but the mamba had disappeared into the tall grass so they let him go.