Rusinga Island Is a Remote, Underdeveloped, Poo-Dotted Paradise. There is a group of PCVs COSing (Close-of-Service) in two weeks, so Rob decided to have a going-away party at his site, a small island in Lake Victoria. From my site I had to take three matatus, a ferry and (theoretically) a boda boda across a causeway from a neighboring island. Fortunately one of the party-goers was an Irish NGO employee visiting from Nairobi, with his 4-wheel drive all-terrain pickup, so we nixed the boda boda for door-to-door service from the ferry
dock to Rob’s house, including a complementary in-transit beer. It was a perfect, drama-free ending to seven hours of dusty, sweaty, brain stem-jolting, jaw-clenching, I-will-not-strangle-this-rude-jerk-who-reeks-like-a-goat travel. We arrived with lobotomy grins and a small buzz growing in our heads.
Oddly enough, the island is arid and dotted with cacti even though it’s surrounded by water. Maybe that shouldn’t seem odd. There’s no electricity or running water at Rob’s house, and the beach is a ten-minute hike away. Basic vegetables and fish are available nearby, but not that nearby. There are giant cockroaches in his choo, which offered an interesting opportunity to observe the habits of Americans. ALL Americans are afraid of giant cockroaches, so all the Americans at the party decided to pee NEXT to the choo at night.
Because Rob is Rob, his house looks like an artist’s studio in San Francisco. He built an easel, tables and counter space that are all color coordinated. He designed a Zen rock garden in his back yard. His house is full of sculptures made from locally-available garbage like rusty steel wires, shells, and sticks. He made sconces for his walls out of tomato sauce tins.
His neighbors are the standard-issue dusty, snot-encrusted kids who hover at the edge of his compound staring for hours, except that because Rusinga is Luo country, they speak neither Swahili nor English, which made it interesting when he asked them to fetch water for us. “Bring pee,” he said. “Pi” is the Luo word for water.
The beach near the house has actual waves. Good news for people who don’t want schistosomiasis, those little snails that burrow into your skin and set up camp in your liver, eventually expelling tasty trails of parasitic eggs in their wake. We hiked out to the beach in the middle of the day, when the heat got so oppressive we couldn’t even sit in the shade without panting. Half the kids in the village followed us. The other half was already stripped naked and waiting for us when we arrived.
Swimming in Kenya is a culturally revealing activity. Nowhere else do boys and girls publicly expose every part of their body that is a taboo to reveal, and yet it’s all completely devoid of sexual meaning. It was just a bunch of butt-naked kids yelling and playing like they couldn’t believe their luck to be tossing a football and paddling an inner tube with six grownup mzungus. There was nothing on that beach except pure, child-like joy. There was even a mama washing clothes on the beach, wearing nothing but a half-slip around her waist, boobies wobbling to and fro. She could tie them in a knot she could tie them in a bow she could throw them over her shoulder like a Continental soldier…
How Many PCVs Does It Take to Extract A Guinea Worm? The second morning on Rusinga Island, one of the volunteers discovered a huge blackhead on another volunteer’s back.
“Oh, let me squeeze it,” she begged. Girls love to squeeze things out of people’s backs. Why is that?
Mr. Blackhead had just applied sunscreen, so she couldn’t get a good squeeze in. People with dry hands lined up. People with dry hands squeezed. Mr. Blackhead winced. Some black stuff came out. People with dry hands squeezed some more. Some yellow stuff came out. Someone started giving a running commentary.
“EEWWW,” she’d say. “EEEEEWWWW.”
Tweezers came out. More people squeezed and more people tweezed. Mr. Blackhead’s eyes glazed over.
“Wait!” said the volunteer wielding tweezers. “I think there’s a worm in there.”
“Whatever,” we said.
“No, really,” she said. “Hold these. I’m going to squeeze some more.”
“Doesn’t squeezing just spread the bacteria?”
Mr. Blackhead rolled his eyes and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. “What the hell is going on back there?” he said.
“OH MY F***ING GOD!!” said Miss Running Commentary. “OH. MY. GOD.”
“Wait! I see it,” the blackhead huntress said. “Oh, wait. It went back inside.”
People lined up. People peered into the hole where the blackhead had been. It was a worm all right.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEKK!”
“Hey guys?” Rob said. “I just found something in my med kit called The Extruder. Or The Extractor. Something like that.” It was a plastic yellow pump with a suction cup at the end. It was used. Repeatedly. Mr. Blackhead breathed through his mouth.
“I thought you were just supposed to use a matchstick and wrap the worm around it.”
“Medical is not going to be happy about this.”
An hour later Team PCV had extracted a centimeter of the worm. The rest of it went back inside. Mr. Blackhead looked exhausted.
“What now?” someone asked. After a few moments we shrugged at each other, swabbed the wound with vodka and went to the beach for a swim.
Happy Birthday To Me. On Tuesday I was still tired from my trip to Rusinga Island. I barely remembered my own birthday, until I started getting birthday SMSes. (Thanks Mom and Dad! And thanks Nick for the phone call!) Around mid-afternoon I finally got my act together enough to invite a few volunteers to go out to dinner.
It started out with a sampling of Tony’s experimental batch of mead (like apple juice with no sugar and no acid, not bad for the first try) and good gossip about American politics and misbehavin’ PCVs. It ended up being way too much bar-hopping in my town, something I will never do again. Why would I go to a place designated for drunk, idiotic men peeing all over themselves when I spend most days avoiding them everywhere I go? By midnight I was exhausted, mostly from being irritated at drunk bar patrons bursting through doors and asking us for money, but Tony and Neetha still wanted to watch a gladiator movie, so we went back to my house.
“Your chickens are fighting. Their house is too small.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Ow! That brown one just bit me.”
“It wasn’t the brown one.”
“Yes, it was.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Intelligent conversation was futile, so I put on the DVD. We munched popcorn and squinted at Russell Crowe on my laptop screen until we fell asleep. Four hours later, the sun was beaming through my curtains. I heard Tony wheeling his bike out the door, while Neetha slept like a log next to me, dead to the world.
“I’m going home to start breakfast. Come over in a bit, and bring some eggs,” he said as he passed by, inexplicably chipper and not hungover.
Thirty minutes later Neetha and I hopped on a matatu to Tony’s house. Four drunk idiots sitting in the back row harrassed us loudly in slurred mother tongue, while the rest of the passengers stared and snickered. It was too early to deal with this crap, and I still had a short fuse from the night before, so I turned to the drunk next to me and said, “Unalewa.”
You’re drunk.A simple, obvious statement but such a direct, honest and audible observation of un-Christian behavior that a sober person would have been shamed into silence. “Nani?” he said, as if he didn’t know.
Who? “Wewe,” I said, pointing at him. “Na wewe, na wewe, na wewe.” I pointed to each of his friends, who all laughed at me.
“How can you know?” he said.
“Because you all stink kabisa,” I said. “And you talk like drunks.” I started making slurred jibberish sounds to demonstrate, and the entire matatu burst into laughter, mumbling to each other about my moronic behavior, and doing nothing to improve my perception of alcohol abuse in Kenya. It was only 8:30 in the morning and I was already feeling my fingers tingle with a desire to snap someone’s neck.
Tony served up his signature breakfast hash, a lovely Mexican-themed concoction of potatoes, tomatoes, bok choy, and egg. Adrienne came by, and I had a thought as I was shoveling food into my mouth and washing it down with non-instant coffee that we were four Peace Corps volunteers doing nothing together on a Wednesday morning and if we stepped outside the house we would be in the U.S.
I have those moments occasionally, usually when I’m engrossed in a movie or a book, or a conversation with other volunteers in a place where there’s no one staring at us, when I’m convinced that the world beyond my immediate senses is the comfortable, welcoming and safe place that was all I ever knew before I came here. And the inevitable disappointment that follows when I remember that it’s not. That when I open the door, step outside, and walk as fast as I can with my head down, I’m back in a strange, infuriating place that has become my reality, a reality that everyone else around me finds to be normal, and yet there’s nothing that will ever be normal, much less acceptable, about it to me, which in turn is even more infuriating and disorienting.
So I spend a lot more time seeking cultural refuge these days, both actively and with the help of my odd subconscious, which will convince me in those moments of intense fixation that my physical environment resembles home. I’ve shut down a lot of the little pores that used to occasionally let Kenya in, the ones that I used to keep open because everytime I braved the frustration or discomfort just a few seconds longer than I wanted to, I was rewarded with a new personal connection, or a new cultural insight, or just a smile. Now I no longer have the energy to be an open-hearted cross-cultural ambassador, even for a few seconds. Now I walk head down, with long strides, and ignore everyone who doesn’t greet me by name. I spend my free time with Americans, and old Kenyan friends. I don’t try to make new friends in my community. I’m burned out by so many social and cultural gaps in understanding that I won’t even start to list them.
It goes in waves. It used to go in more extreme waves, where I could be completely shut off one week, then the next week be perfectly happy to play with kids and shrug off ignorant, well-intentioned remarks from strangers. Now it’s a flatter wave of varying degrees of closedness. It’s for sanity and for survival. I wish I were a bigger person than this. Maybe one day I will be. But not today.