Title Explanation

When predicting the sex of an unborn baby, the Oracle of Delphi is said to have claimed that it would be a "Boy No Girl." She thus covered both outcomes, as one could interpret the statement as "Boy. No girl," if the child was born male or "Boy, no-- girl," if the child was born female. Living in Ethiopia, it's difficult to know my role. Am I a foreigner, a "ferengi," or am I a local, like the Habesha? Sometimes, I'm a little bit of both.

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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Top Thirty Things They Don't Tell You About Being a PCV

So I am coming up on my one year anniversary here in Ethiopia.  It's not my one year of service, just my one year of being in country, but it's important nevertheless.  To celebrate, I have asked my PCV and RPCV friends to confess at least one brutally honest no-holds-barred truth about serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Most of these come from current or COSing volunteers in Ethiopia (G5-G8), but some come from a friend I met before Peace Corps, who served in Ghana.  Despite the fact that these have been contributed by mostly PCVs in Ethiopia, I feel that there is a certain universality to their confessions.

This is the challenge I gave my fellow PCVs:

"I was just thinking of writing a blog post (with your input) about all the things they don't tell you about being a PCV. You know, the nitty gritty, dirty, embarrassing, frustrating, make-you-wanna-cry moments, but also the funny stuff, things you never thought you'd get used to but have, things you never thought you'd miss but do, that stuff. So, name all the things no one told you about being a PCV that you learned the hard way. Aaaaand go."

So here they are, presented to you with some minor editing and additions on my part, so if you are a contributor to this list and weren't quoted directly, please don't take it personally.  From my comrades in arms to your monitor, here are:

Thirty Things They Don't Tell You About Being a PCV

1) You have an 85% chance of shitting your pants. How bad you have to shit versus the distance to the bathroom will become like a math problem you don't always know how to solve. Especially when you're on a bus and the distance has to factor in km/h, rain, likelihood of an accident or detour, probability of cow traffic, etc... - Nora, Debra and Dan, Ethiopia

2) It’s almost impossible to escape PST without getting bed bugs or fleas. - Ashley, Ethiopia

3) If you are a woman, integration with people your own age is nearly impossible. The men will hit on you and because of that, the women will mostly keep a good distance from you. - Ashley, Ethiopia

4) If you are a female education sector volunteer, you will have to plan your days strategically so as to handle the bathroom situation. What do I mean about bathroom situation? Well, there may be no bathroom, or there may be the most frightening bathroom you have ever seen, which explains why College and University students prefer to use the woods. I'm not joking. - Anonymous, Ethiopia 

5) You will eat dirt, rock and/or bone and you will tell yourself that it is salt. You will be so accustomed to terrible food that you will eat something, bite on something hard, spit it out, and find that you had almost ingested a bolt. (The screw, not the crossbow ammunition.) Then you will continue to eat after you return the bolt to the waiter (it probably held something important together, after all.) - Chad and Dustin, Ethiopia

6) You will have a cockroach crawl across your food and you wont care.  It's also possible that someone will be murdered the same night in the restaurant, but you'll still go back. - Carla, Ethiopia

7) You will boil rice with bugs in the grains and try to pick them out as they float to the top. - Karley, Ghana

8) Peace Corps medical staff will tell you that the best food is off-limits, but you are definitely going to eat/drink it anyway, and wind up naming your tapeworm. - Dan, Ethiopia 

9) You will be terrified to search your house for what is making that mysterious sound.  Your heart starts to pound as you search and search. You are terrified to pick anything up, so you poke everything with a stick or a shoe. As anticipation climbs, you become more and more jumpy.  Sometimes, it turns out to be a mouse or a rat (worst case scenario), sometimes, a cricket, sometimes a roach, and sometimes your stupid water filter dripping water on your plastic floor (best case scenario).  But even if it turns out to be nothing too bad, it will still keep you up at night, like the monsters under your bed you feared as a child. - Breanna, Ethiopia

10) You will get awful cravings for things you can't have, like crab dip, and this will haunt you for months at a time until you try and find away to send crab dip, or other perishables like a whole roast turkey for Thanksgiving, through the mail from America despite your friends and family telling you how impossible this is. - Jenny and Carlin, Ethiopia

11) Restaurant signs advertise everything they don't have. Don't be fooled! - AJ, Ethiopia

12) Rats can climb walls and often live in the ceiling, and some nights you'll wake up to a bump in the ceiling hoping and praying they don't fall through... Also, they can jump surprisingly high. - Lacy and Trudie, Ethiopia

13) You will become so used to days and weeks on end without power that you will find really creative ways to entertain yourself, like playing solitaire by yourself by candle light which quickly becomes more fun than any movie or video game.  Or even simply staring off into nothing for hours will become a casual pastime. - Jenny and Carlin, Ethiopia and Karley, Ghana

14) You will have no water at your site for a long stretch of time and have to resort to catching water in a rain bucket to use for cooking and bathing.  This is all well and good, until the wet season ends and you still have no water, and mosquitos start breeding in your wain bucket. - Karley, Ghana and Carlin, Ethiopia

15) Sleeping under mosquito net will be comforting and feel like a princess canopy, a fort, or a hypoallerginic bubble that nothing can penetrate - until a bug breaches your netted security. - Karley, Ghana and Carlin, Ethiopia

16) You will have a full on deep conversation with a local while they are knuckle deep in their nose and/or scratching their balls. - Sham, Ethiopia

17) Nobody in your host community will really want to work with you and they will make up a thousand and one reasons which are supposed to explain why they are so uninspired. They will hide a key from you for a year so you can't get in the room where you are supposed to work, and once they do finally give you the key, they will then start writing official letters about you accusing you of stealing a broken laminator and giving it to orphans or other such nonsense (without evidence, just because they feel like it). - Anonymous, Ethiopia

18) If you are a male volunteer, you become a secret agent in the boys' club which is both good and bad, because you will find out that local men will apparently tell you things about their sex lives that they don't tell each other. - Joel, Ethiopia

19) Most weeks, the closest you will come to showering or bathing is wiping your body down with baby wipes, and you will learn to be OK with that. - Jackie, Ethiopia

20) You will be stared at, followed and photographed, and become famous in your town, developing sudden empathy for celebrities fighting against paparazzi.  Sometimes, they will shout very rude things, sometimes they will shout things that they mean to be friendly but sound rude anyway.  You will also learn to let all of it roll off your back (most days) or imagine how you will kill them all (on bad days). - Karley, Ghana and Carlin, Ethiopia

21) You will not be be listened to. You will have an experience that wouldn't ever happen to a local, and then they're like "Aw, be strong, don't worry about it." But if the same thing happened to them as often as it happens to you, it'd be different. If that were to happen, they would probably understand that the advice "don't worry" or "ignore it" just doesn't make you feel supported. - Joel, Ethiopia

22) Something good: Your co-workers will eventually finally start to realize that you experience a lot of things that they don't. People have this cursory understanding of people being equal, but they don't factor in that our experiences are different. Sometimes, explaining that no, you can't just ignore them yelling at you because you don't feel safe, a few lights will turn on. In a nutshell, something they don't tell you about being a PCV: how much you need your alliances. - Joel, Ethiopia

23) Once you pee in a bucket, there's no going back. You break that barrier one time and it becomes a lifestyle choice. Hole-in-the-ground latrines will become obsolete for situations other than numero dos... Well unless you have a stash of plastic bags for that job. - Lesley, Ethiopia 

24) Your bus will break down.  Your bus will get a flat tire.  You will be sitting next to a vomiting person.  That vomiting person will vomit on your bag.  They will not apologize. - Jackie, Ethiopia

25) You could shake out all ants that have gotten into your things (or created full-on colonies) and reuse them still. This includes book bags, linoleum floors, bag of Fritos sent from the states. - Karley, Ghana

26) You will have worn down skin on knuckles from washing clothes, because it's a high possibility that skin is dissolved after constant contact with the detergent in your host country. - Karley, Ghana

27) You will become a fan of terrible local music, and learn all the words to all the songs in the local language. - Karley, Ghana and Carlin, Ethiopia

28) You will be forced to eat organic for two years, and when I say organic, I mean you will look your meal in the eye and say, "I am going to eat you tonight."  You will know exactly where all of your food comes from. - Karley, Ghana and Carlin, Ethiopia

29) You will come to doubt the intentions of any local who wants to be your friend, wondering if they just want a visa, or if they want to marry you, or worse.  But you will also find locals who do not have these ulterior motives.  They may be hard to find, but they are worth searching for. - Carlin, Ethiopia

30) You will become so comfortable discussing your grossest illnesses and bodily functions with fellow PCVs, you will almost forget how to talk about anything else in more polite social circles. - Carlin, Ethiopia

6 comments:

  1. This is very informative, and funny, and real. Probably cathartic, too! Love mom

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  2. This is awesome preparation. Thanks for putting this together! I look forward to meeting all of these humans!

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    1. G9 in July? We look forward to meeting you, too! I'm glad this could be of some help to you before you arrive, because it's the unshiny truth!

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  3. This is great (and terrifying!). Thank you for putting it together!

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  4. I'm heading to Rwanda in September. I nearly died of laughter having gone through similar experiences traveling in Jordan. Keep at it, and keep your spirits remain high. Robert

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