Shake It Off

A lot has been written about waiting. We wait to become the perfect version of ourselves. To find true love. To get our dream job. For something, anything to happen.

A lot of waiting happens in the Peace Corps, too. It begins with a lengthy application process and upwards of a year or more of waiting to be accepted. Then we wait for the myriad test results to come back from the doctor, giving us a clean bill of health to travel overseas. We wait for background checks and visas, passport photos and vaccination appointments. But all of this waiting is nothing compared to the waiting when the plane touches down, at last, in your country of service.

Things are great, but things are terrible (you see, all grand adventures have at least a pinch of both). Sure, you’re sharing a room with five other people and there’s no water to be found and volunteers are dropping left and right from dysentery and giardia, but just wait! It will be over soon. And yes, you haven’t slept well in days and there are cockroaches climbing all over your clothes and you’re sweating like a fat man in a sauna, but just wait! Training will end. You’ll get your own place. Things will get better.

And things do, my friend, get better. They get much, much better. Your grand adventure becomes less and less about surviving and more and more about thriving. You snuggle right into your new, happy life and find great comfort and joy in it. But still, even then, the waiting continues. This is because waiting isn’t tied to misery or contentment. Waiting just is.

Everyone experiences waiting every single day. But waiting in Uganda becomes an art form. You wait hours for a taxi to fill while your much-too-heavy backpack presses into your lap and your knees press into the metal bar in front of you. You wait for lengthy faculty meetings held in 90% local language to end. You wait for 6 hours for your first cake to bake on the sigiri. You wait 10 months for your house to be wired for electricity. You wait, anxiously, for your paycheck to FINALLY COME. You wait, and wait, and wait.

But contrary to what you’re probably thinking, all of this waiting is not a bad thing. In fact, I will argue that it’s one of the best things I’ve done in country. Let’s take a detour, shall we?

I recently came to the U.S. for a visit. On the way to the U.S. I experienced, in chronological order: 1) a 4 hour delay at the airport, 2) a 7 hour flight, 3) a 3 hour layover, 4) a two hour delay, 5) an additional two hour delay on the airplane and without air conditioning, 6) being deplaned, 7) a two hour wait in a line to get a voucher to stay overnight. This was all before I finally got on a plane that worked and had another 8 hour flight, 5 hour layover, plus another 6 hour flight. Can I get a what, what?!

Ah, but this isn’t all! On the way back from the U.S. to Uganda I experienced, in chronological order: 1) a 6 hour flight, 2) a 5 hour layover, 3) a 2 hour delay on the airplane while someone was arrested for bringing a knife on board followed by 4) another 3 hour delay due to a mechanical malfunction, 5) being deplaned, 6) a 1 hour wait in line to get a voucher to stay overnight, 7) an 8 hour wait after being kicked out of the hotel and before the flight left, 8) an 8 hour flight, 9) a 1 hour layover, 10) a 6 hour flight, 11) a 1 hour layover, 12) a 1 hour delay to get someone in a stretcher on board, 13) a 2 hour flight, and 14) luggage lost for days.

Now, if you stuck with me through those lists upon lists of tragically comic delays or maybe even tried to do the math, you discovered that waiting I did. Boy, oh boy did I wait! But here’s the thing…I DIDN’T GET ANGRY. I’m not lying to you. Unlike the Spanish woman who got hauled off by the police for angrily and repeatedly yelling at the flight attendants, unlike the hundreds of people sighing loudly and arguing with veritable steam coming out of their reddened ears, I didn’t get mad. Instead, I simply waited.

At one point, when the masses on the return flight home were their closest to grabbing pitchforks and storming the castle, I stood in the aisle, turned up my music, and danced. Literally. I smiled and danced to none other than Ms. Swift. “But the people gonna yell, yell, yell, yell, yell and the babies gonna cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, but I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, baby. Shake it off! Shake, shake it off!” I sang in my head. (Don’t judge. You know you secretly love that song.)

And that, my friends, is the beauty of knowing how to wait. The art of accepting what is, regardless of what you want. The art of acting instead of reacting. The glorious art of waiting.

I can feel this art slowly transferring to the other areas of my life too, the ones that really matter. None of us can escape the really hard kind of waiting. I know people who are waiting to finally feel at home somewhere or with someone. People who are waiting to get pregnant after years of trying. People who are waiting to heal after experiencing life-changing grief. People who are waiting for sick loved ones to get better. People who are waiting for themselves to be ready to change, to move, to grow. I’m waiting too…for lots of things. Lucky for me, I’ve got Ugandan-strength waiting power running through my veins. I have “acceptance of what is” stamped on my soul. So I’m just gonna wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, baby. (And when the frustrations and impatience creep up…) Shake them off! Shake, shake them off!

 

 

Would You Rather

You’ve all played the game “Would You Rather,” right? It typically goes something like, “Would you rather use sandpaper as toilet paper OR use hot sauce as eye drops?” and you choose between two ridiculously horrible options. It’s a stupid game, but one I played some version of a lot when I visited the states last month for my brother’s wedding. My version of the game was mostly in my head and went something like this: “Would you rather be at home with the people you love OR be alone in Uganda doing what you feel like you need to be doing?” It’s a tough question. Living here and doing this work is one of those decisions, like all really important decisions, that you don’t just make once. You make it again and again.

Everything, absolutely everything about being home was shocking at first. The quiet streets. The overwhelming number of choices of delicious things to eat. The scenery that looked so brown and broad. But most shocking of all were my encounters with family and friends. I expected to be peppered with questions. “Hold on just a minute,” I imagined myself saying to the crowd of people vying for my attention, “she asked me first, you’ll get your turn in a minute.” The reality was that I heard the question, “So, is the Ebola outbreak near you?” about 10,000 times and that’s about it. (The answer, if you’re wondering, is no.) With very few exceptions, people just didn’t really ask about my life. It was strange, my friends, strange indeed.

The whole thing got me thinking about that gulf that inevitably grows between people when miles or years separate them. You run into an old high school friend and ask each other inane things about what you do for a living and where you are living now, and, truth be told, neither of you really care about the answers. That’s not to say that you don’t care about THEM, but where do you even begin? How do you ask the questions that matter to someone you haven’t spoken to in years? The whole thing feels forced, because, well, it IS forced, so oftentimes it’s easier to say nothing, to just duck behind the grocery store display and wait for him to pass.

The trouble with doing something like serving in the Peace Corps is that you NEED to talk about it. Desperately. It’s this monumentally huge life change. And all of us, even the quiet ones, need to talk about the big stuff. The stuff that alters the way we look at the world and the way we look at ourselves. And questions about Ebola, while topical, just aren’t going to cut it.

So, what’s to be done about this? I have no idea, but for me, this blog is a good place to start. I get to feel a little bit heard, even though no one may be listening. It’s kind of like yelling into a canyon. Even if no one is there to hear you, you hear your echo and it’s kind of comforting.

In the end, I decided again (as I knew I would) to come back to Uganda. Surprisingly, it genuinely feels like home here. I mean sure, the minute I set foot on Ugandan soil I turn into Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen. But when given a choice of “Would you rather feel understood by others or better understand yourself?” I choose the latter.

Steph in Uganda

Steph in the U.S.