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Peace Corps Take Two

I remember trying to bathe in the musky dankness of the African outhouse at sunset during the dry season. Naked, dripping cool water onto the hot earth, I doused myself and listened to the sounds of the village just beyond the palm-frond privacy wall preparing for night to fall. I perched thin brown toes in rubber flip flops and tried to avoid sliding into the red mud floor of the makeshift bathhouse.

I watched the cockroaches watching me. Neither of us minded the other much.

The winged, three-inch roaches were everywhere in this part of Central Africa: burrowing their hard, shiny bodies in the muck underfoot; breeding and feeding in the woven grass roofs of the village huts; flying through the humid equatorial air on brown paper wings. Because they were everywhere, they didn't bother me enough to interrupt my long-awaited bath. I continued pouring cupfuls of the murky well water from a Chinese plastic bucket, in an effort to keep the stink and sweat from conquering the last bits of Western propriety which remained after 23 months of living in the African bush as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV).

During most of my tenure as a PCV, I led a mundane existence, spending more time struggling through lesson plans than hacking my way through the tangle of jungle vines in the nearby rainforest. This bath was one of the few times during my two years in the Central African Republic (CAR) when I felt like I was having the real Peace Corps' experience. Here, on my bare haunches in the middle of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, surrounded by the singing market ladies trudging homeward with empty bundles bobbing on their heads to the rhythm of the evening drums, and the cries of the children playing, I saw myself as one of those young idealists in the public service announcements: sunburnt, sandaled on a Nepalese elephant, proudly exclaiming: "Peace Corps, it's the toughest job you'll ever love."

I did love the fact that at 23, I was so far from my Indiana home. And yet, in many ways my time in Africa wasn't quite real or at least, the reality that I lived was not completely my own. All through my two years, I was a sojourner with one eye on the calendar; a spectator in some surreal psychodrama; an observer in another world taking notes and snapshots for the folks back home. It seemed that I never quite figured out why I was there and I was always trying to figure out what I could do to better help.

Don't get me wrong, mine was a fourth world existence.

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