"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.