Field Birthday

In the heart of Africa, 50 miles from the nearest road and 4 hours from the nearest city, we're left to our own devices to mark special occasions.  The team here threw together a variety of means and modalities to make my golden birthday (27 on the 27th) memorable.

We decided to pack up early (it being a Wednesday, which is like any other workday during the week, we usually work until 7 or 8pm--well after dark) and head to a newly-opened watering hole (I'm using that phrase euphemistically--I realize that I could be speaking about an actual watering hole that you'd think of on the Serengeti.  I'm not near the Serengeti).  A large group of us assembled there, arriving from the market, the hospital, the office, and the house.  We split a few beers, then headed back for our security curfew.  I stopped at the office only to shut down my computer and grab my keys.  The luxury of an early night!

We headed back to the base and settled in to our usual spot, on plastic chairs clustered around a folding table.  C'est la classe.

As I was duped into retrieving my entire laptop and external hard drive to provide music for the evening, a stealth group decked out our outdoor hangout and installed a home-made banner and balloons made of rubber gloves.  I returned to an ambush and a rousing rendition of "Joyeux Anniversaire" sung in English (also known as "Happy Birthday").

A little while later, an expat arrived with crepes!  Real crepes, made with love by a real French person!  Nutella, sugar, lime, honey, and jam were passed around, and tears fairly flowed.  What an amazing change from the norm.  We scarfed them down, and shared where everyone was for their 27th birthdays.

Then it was off to bed, to get some sleep before the 6am wakeup for another work day the next day.

Life goes on.  But we paused for a beat to make me feel special.  Thanks team.

Would you like to speak to me in English?

 You’re welcome into my domain, where I am master of words.  My vocabulary is a full shelf, a stock, a selection, a menu, a warehouse of options for me to choose from.  I can select, analyse, and target each and every word, with consideration for sentiment, significance, tone, texture, connotation and context.  I can say exactly what I would like to say; I can mean exactly what I intend to mean.

Step into my house—come speak English with me.

Early Morning Traverse

At 5am light is already finding its way into my window.  Even though it’s a Saturday, and I just worked a full week of 14+ hour days, my alarm pulls me up out of a restless sleep.  It seems that all sleep is restless, when it’s 90 degrees outside, the mattress has a comfy hole in the middle of its foam, and you might wake up to a lovely praying mantis corpse attached somewhere on your mosquito net.  But the day has started.

I grab breakfast (yesterday’s bread with Nutella), shove a soda and a cookie or two into my backpack, and walk across the street to the store compound.  The logistics supervisor there is already in full swing, munching his serving of bread as he watches drivers complete their daily checks of the landcruiser fleet.  We exchange pleasantries that mostly take the form of grunts, establish that all drivers are either already at the office waiting to depart, doing their checks as we speak, or on their way.  Except one.  I hand him my phone with all of our departments’ numbers, and wander over to the generator to say good morning.  She’s an old beast, with nearly twice the hours of the recommended cutoff for end-of-life.  All good here.  The log sup hands me back my phone, and I climb into the next departing vehicle.

At the office, I greet the team of 7 chipper nurse supervisors.  This is day 5 of this round of distribution, and day 2 of the early wake-up, so they are well-settled.  After some last-minute consultations, supplies, mapping, photocopying, and equipment checking, we climb into our respective cars and head off into the bush.

I’ve chosen to ride along with a car going to the East Axis, which means a trip across the river.  We load up, climb in, radio into the control room that we’re on route, and take off after the other car going East.  We settle in and get rolling, and 500 meters later we pull up to the ferry.

We stop, get out, stand around, say hi to the ferry operators, and generally go back to what we were doing at the office.  False start.  After a couple minutes, the ferry operators get the huge engine going, and we make the quick trip across the 60-meter wide river.

The sun is coming up as we start the journey, and mid-river, it breaks through the clouds.

Cool.  Not a bad way to start the morning.

We land, get back in the car, and head on our way.

We’re off to supervise the activities at the distribution sites for our prophylaxis campaign, where we’re giving free malaria-prevention medication to children under 5.  We’ve also taken this opportunity when every family in the district will search out this medicine to increase the vaccination coverage of children less than 2 years of age.  It’s a huge undertaking with many staff, resources, and numbers going to make it a success, and it is very popular with the population.  People will travel from great distances in neighboring districts to receive the prophylaxis.  This is our second of four distribution this rainy season.

"Yeah, it was hard."

I wrote this in April.  With a little perspective, I'm ready to share.

The ceiling that I’m staring up at blurs with tears.  That is the first time that I’ve admitted to anyone that I cry.  Feels a little late at the tender age of 26, but I guess we all grow up in little bits and pieces.  I keep telling myself, “This is the definition of hard.”  This is what it means when people say it wasn’t easy.  This is me living through a story that will start with the introduction “Yeah, it was hard.”  Four small words that will encompass the tears dripping down my face and the sob wracking my body.

I’m a dripping mess because of a number of factors, none being a particularly good reason for my current pastime of watering the sheets.  I’m tired, overworked, hot, lonely, and frankly, fucking sick of French.  Each of those adjectives has a long story and an elaborate explanation behind it.  I begin to go over them to calm myself down.  Analyzing the reason behind my emotions always helps me stabilize.

-I’m tired because I worked a 13-hour day today.  I can’t remember if I worked a 12-hour day or a 13-hour day yesterday.  The day before that, Sunday, I installed a submersible pump in our well, got sunburned, finished my monthly report, and solved some other minor problems before playing a rousing game of Frisbee.  I think it ended up being a 6-hour workday.  The day before that was a half-day of 6-ish hours, but I was woken up at 6am, 7am, and 8am for various problems.  The week before that, I worked 5 consecutive 12-hour days.  The week before that was the same, except I started it with an excursion to the neighboring district, with a night in a too-hot-to-tolerate hotel, with a grand total of 3 hours’ sleep.  I’ve been here for over 2 months, and the story is the same back to my arrival.

-I realized yesterday, after my coordinator asked me about any extra support that I needed, that I have too much to do.  As mentioned above, I work 12 hours every day during the week, and a good 12 hours each weekend.  I’m not particularly skimping on working hours, in case math isn’t your strong suit.  There’s no break in sight.  I usually never complain that I’m overworked, and I hardly ever mention it.  The only reason I’ll let on that I have too much to do is to get those extra tasks allocated to someone else so they’ll actually get done.  I have no one to allocate these tasks to.  I’m two months deep into a 9-month mission, and I’m still team building.  I’m building up my staff around me and developing their capacity to handle situations.  I’m training them in dealing with situations, and building their confidence.  I’m delegating, but it takes time to get used to each other.  And I have new things to do every day.  The list never gets shorter.  Coordination is here, and the thoroughly depressing realization hits me that the list they came here to shorten has in fact doubled.  I have a moment where I realize the enormity of what I’m trying to accomplish in two months.  I have to build a couple houses and repair a dysfunctional base of operations before the monsoon-like rains hit.  Shit.

-I’m hot.  It’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit in my bedroom.  That’s 35 degrees, for all the metric folk out there.  It’s night.  It’s 10 degrees cooler than it was during the day.  10 degrees Celsius.  It will be this hot for the next month and a half, until those monsoon-like rains (that will destroy infrastructure and dreams of construction alike) arrive in June.  It is remarkably taxing to be sweating all the time.  Sleep is an almost-forgotten dream to all of us here.  We rarely talk about it, but the circles under our eyes and shuffling gait betray us to each other each morning.  There’s no need to confirm that no one has slept.  We all know it.

-I’m in a French-speaking mission, speaking a second language for the first time in my life.  Just like the admitting to crying thing: again, a bit late.  I studied abroad in college, but I was in an arts program, not a language program.  Despite living in Italy and learning Italian, I didn’t ever have to use it, or reveal myself to be capable of only idiot-level discourse.  Here, I am allowed no such luxury.  I am the only American in a compound of mostly French people, with a Malian and a Colombian thrown in for some diversity.  Everyone’s level of French is expert or above, while my level is 3-years-of-high-school-French.  My major form of communication is pointing.  Studying abroad in Italy helped me with learning to gesticulate, at least.

            This manner of communicating is at odds with my self-image.  I am an articulate and verbose person.  I elaborate, and I have a large vocabulary.  I pride myself on using the correct words for concepts, and I am a proverbial grammar-stickler.  I am highly-educated and pedantic, and it shows.  In French, I am none of these things.  My identity is taken away from me, and I am missing who I used to be.  I am isolated from everyone else by culture, language, and comfort.  Everyone else is themselves, and I’m a pale imitation, pointing my way through a conversation.  No one knows who I am.

My tears have long since dried as I distract myself from my sorrows by enumerating them.  None of them have diminished, but I’ve made it through another evening.  I fall asleep translating my tirade into French—practicing, improving, growing.

A week in Istanbul

I'll let the photos say it all.  I recommend the city for a visit, a vacation, a conference, a layover, an excursion.

The Blue Mosque

A Wednesday in a park, with tons of locals out and about.

The Grand Bazaar

The New Mosque

Mosques and palaces line the Bosporus

The Hagia Sophia

The library in Hagia Sophia

The altar and mihrab in Hagia Sophia

The Basilica Cistern

A red moon over the Old City

The Bosporus Bridge and Asian Side

Cars are not allowed on Prince's Islands