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.

Rotating Banner

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

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Cockroach-Gate



When I was little and living in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, my mother, with the best of intentions, rented a kids’ movie from the commissary to entertain me.  This movie, rated PG, was called Mouse Hunt, and involved two stooge-like characters in a never-ending battle against a mouse that lived in a decrepit mansion they had inherited.

You would think that beginning my blog post in such a way that I will be describing a similar farcical adventure akin to Wile Coyote’s fruitless but fearless pursuit of the roadrunner.  While it’s true that I recently discovered there is a furry brown rodent living in my house (and I think, often, under my bed), that is not what I wish to address in this blog post.

As a brief aside, however, yes, there is a mouse in my house, and I spot him frequently.  Though he terrified me the first time, I have grown accustomed to his whiskered face.  I have locked away all of my foods either in my cabinet or my fridge, but there didn’t seem to be any nibbles anyway, and see few droppings which leads me to believe he doesn’t live in my house proper, but perhaps somewhere nearby.  His name is Theodore, and there will be more about him later.

Today, I would like you to imagine the fanciest hotel in Hossana.  This is the hotel where all Peace Corps staff like to stay whenever they visit my humble town.  They have the most extensive menu of any hotel or restaurant in town.  They are the only establishment that offers pizza, and only on the occasion that they have the cheese and electricity available to make it.

I have been to this hotel restaurant four times in a row since Saturday, where I dined there with my site mate, a Group 5 health sector volunteer named Deanna.  For reference, I’m two generations after Deanna in Group 7.  Deanna is ten weeks from COSing – closing her service and moving back to the States.  She has been in this country for two years almost to the day, and since arrival has suffered through a number of medical conditions from typhoid to giardia.  She is fearless in the face of anything Ethiopia has to throw at her, being a seasoned veteran of its trenches and germ warfare.  That Saturday, she was returning from a week-long trip starting in Hawassa for a 7k marathon, then three days of hiking and horseback riding in the Bale Mountains, followed by another night in Hawassa and some time in Addis, so she was pretty exhausted.  We dined on steak sandwiches, on account of our favorite menu item, pizza, was not available that day.  I also asked for fish, but there was none.

The following day, I met another ferengi at this restaurant, Victoria.  Victoria, from Newcastle, is one of two local VSO volunteers who arrived a few months after I did in September 2012.  She tries to work up at the college with me, but finds she is more appreciated and gets more done at the university and local deaf school.  Victoria had joined Deanna on this trip through the mountains, and was equally tired.  She and I split a chicken pizza, which was delicious.  Still no fish.

Then it was back to the college on Monday, where I met up with the IFESH volunteer, Melissa, who spent a lot of time in New York City before coming here in November 2012.  When the lunch bell rang, we also headed for Lemma where we ran into Deanna and Victoria and joined them for lunch.  Victoria wasn’t eating, but Melissa ordered a fasting pizza – all veggies, no cheese, and I ordered some t’ibs, a local Ethiopian meat dish.  Deanna ordered a steak sandwich but it never showed up until way later, and the fries she ordered were undercooked.  Still no fish.

Which brings us to today, when the four of us met yet again at Lemma for lunch.  To reiterate, Deanna, who has been here for two years, is tied with my other PC site mate, Christina for being here the longest time.  I come in second, as I approach my one year mark.  Then Victoria, who’s been here nearly nine months, and lastly Melissa.  This order is important, and you will later learn why.  The four of us settled in for a hearty lunch at Lemma, all of us starving.  Victoria and Deanna decided to split a chicken pizza and Melissa got her standard fasting pizza, trying and failing to get them not to put mushrooms on it.  Me, I ordered the beef goulash and it was delicious.  For a while, we were talking and laughing and everything was fine.

And then disaster struck.

In Mouse Hunt, the two protagonists were forced to deal with this mansion when they lost their jobs running a restaurant in New York City.  How did they lose their jobs?  Well, the mayor came to dine at their restaurant, and it didn’t end well for him.  In fact, it ended in his death.  Because you see, the restaurant was not up to health codes, and as such a cockroach managed to get into the mayor’s food, which I believe was spaghetti.  He was eating away until one of his daughters commented on something gross in his food.  Taking his fork away, the mayor saw that he had bitten into a cockroach, its back half still squirming.  His eyes bulge, he has a heart attack and dies.  Being a child, I didn’t understand the nuances of this scene.  For example, I missed the fact that the mayor had a heart attack, and thought that his cause of death was ingesting a cockroach.  This one scene in an otherwise forgettable children’s comedy scarred me for life.

In case you have never visited, Tashkent, Uzbekistan is rife with all sorts of interesting insects and arachnids from aphids to scorpions.  And after going away for the summer, we came back to find our basement infested with roaches, so they weren’t an insect I was exactly unfamiliar with.  Upon seeing this film, for weeks I would dig through the food my parents lovingly prepared for me.  It came to the point when I was digging through some pasta of my own when I recall my mother saying in exasperation, “Carlin, I made that myself, there are NO bugs in that pasta!”

I don’t remember how long I went about dutifully inspective every piece of food that went into my mouth, but clearly since then I have got over my fears.  Still, the scene from Mouse Hunt remains with me to this day, and this is a child who survived Total Recall and It without any nightmares.  But Mouse Hunt got to me.

This story is important for you to understand the significance of the event that took place at Lemma International Hotel on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at approximately 1:30PM.  We were eating.  I had already finished my goulash, and the pizzas had recently come out because they take a while to cook.  My three companions were munching away when all of a sudden I noticed Deanna staring intently at the pizza.  She moved her face physically closer to it to get a better look and our conversation gradually ebbed away until I asked her, “What are you looking at?”

Deanna didn’t respond.  She simply squints at the food, then takes a knife and slowly pokes at something baked into the cheese.  We three move closer ourselves to get a better look and at pretty much the exact same time we all recoil with various cries of disbelief and disgust.

A cockroach had been baked into the pizza, and was blending in with the bits of mushroom, herbs and roast chicken.

Melissa is so put off by this that she has to stand up and walk away from the table, after loudly exclaiming “No!” like Luke Skywalker upon hearing who his father was.  By now, all I know is I am laughing and I think Deanna is laughing too, while Victoria just doesn’t look happy.

“I saw it, too,” she said later, “but I had been hoping it was some bit of hair, or maybe an odd mushroom.”  She’d seen Deanna looking at it in her head and had begged her not to expose it for what it was, hoping to live in denial just a little while longer.

Deanna reached over to take the roach out and keep eating, but Victoria called over the waiter.  Both of them pointed at the incriminating evidence and the waiter immediately whisked the pizza away.  Deanna expressed her desire to keep eating, but Victoria explained that she could.  Melissa eventually came back to the table and looked at her own pizza in dismay.  Despite all of our urgings that the roach wasn’t in HER pizza, she still insisted it must have crawled over it to get to Deanna and Victoria’s pizza.  She starts talking about how because they were in the same oven, roaches obviously must have crawled over it, and must be crawling everywhere in that oven.

“Melissa,” I said, “that doesn’t make sense.  Ovens are hot, you can’t crawl all over them like that.  No, it’s more likely it crawled on it on the prep table and then just got baked in.”  My logic did nothing to reassure her.

In the meantime, Victoria was trying hard not to think about all the diseases cockroaches carry and all the reasons they’re gross.  “Ethiopia carries diseases,” Deanna pointed out nonchalantly.

“Yes,” Victoria returned, “but I don’t put Ethiopia in my mouth!”

By this point, for my part, I just found the whole thing hilarious, and Deanna maintained her desire to have kept eating once the pest had been removed.  “Who cares?” she said. “I’m hungry!”

“That’s why you get so many bacterial infections!” said Victoria.

Deanna and Victoria eventually ordered a steak sandwich instead and began to munch on it.  I commented on how proud I was of myself that I could laugh at this situation, considering my traumatic history with cockroaches and food.  Then again, I admitted, the roach wasn’t in my food.  Victoria pointed out that it must be Ethiopia that has changed us, as Deanna confessed that two years ago, she would have reacted just as Melissa had.  Victoria says that Deanna, who has been here the longest, is the most unfazed, followed by me who found it funny and started talking about gross things roaches did as a matter of wonder while Melissa and Victoria tried not to be sick.  Then there’s Victoria, who is somewhat fazed by the incident, bothered enough by it to send the whole pizza back, and then lastly, there’s Melissa, who was so disgusted she had to physically distance herself from the table before she could calm down and was thinking of swearing off Lemma’s food entirely.

“But then,” Victoria began with a chuckle, “where are you going to eat, Melissa?”

If this experience has taught me anything is that I have learned to laugh at just about any disgusting thing that roles my way.  I’m following in Deanna’s footsteps and will probably be willing to eat anything once the offending object has been removed, whether that’s a fly in my soda, or a cockroach in my pizza.  In fact, I’m halfway there, having fished out many-a-fly from my beverages in the past.  I, too, probably would have eaten the pizza, just not the bit where the roach had been, while Deanna insisted that she would have even eaten that part, once she’d picked it out.

It does make me wonder, though.  If Deanna extended for a third year, would she reach the point where she would have found the roach… and eaten the whole thing anyway?  I mean, hey, we do need the protein.

So what’s the grossest thing you’ve ever done?  What do you think would be the grossest thing you’d be willing to do, after living in a developing country for a year?