The life of a Peace Corps Volunteer is an emotional rollercoaster. The highs are high and the lows are devastatingly low. Unlike normal life these ups and downs are much more frequent. Instead of having a good month or week or day, my mood can noticeably change 4 or 5 times over the course of the day. And these changes can be triggered by the most insignificant of occurrences. You know the saying wearing your heart on your sleeve? Well I wear all my emotions there. This country, this job, this life are just too tiring to wear the masks first world societies prize so highly and as a result everything is slightly realer, slightly rawer, and a whole lot more emotional. Let me give you an example breakdown of a typical day:
- My host family wakes up at 5am and starts blaring Christian radio and I can’t get back to sleep (-)
- I take a freezing cold bucket bath in a dirty mud room full of spiders (-)
- I make coffee at the hub that someone sent me in a care package and feel caffeinated and loved (+)
- I check my blog and see that I have 3,000 page views! (+)
- I spend 20 minutes and 5 dollars to check my facebook and email and realize that no one has sent me anything (-)
- The little kids we pass everyday give us flowers (+)
- An old woman in the street follows me for 5 minutes screaming Muzungu, or a small child runs after me demanding money (-)
- I run into some of my little boys in the street who know who call me Michele and dance with me (+)
- My host mother laughs mercilously at all of my attempts to speak Kinyarwanda. I mean honestly its been three months it can’t be that funny anymore (-)
- We have tech training which is a miserable incessant pool of idiocracy. (-)
- Some of the other volunteers and I go to the bar after class and grab a beer. (+)
- The bar owner tries to charge us extra on our beer even though we have been coming there for months and she knows us. (-)
- I curl up in my bed and read a good book until dinner. I’m currently working my way through War and Peace (+)
- Dinner isn’t served until 10 o’clock at which point I am exhausted, not hungry, and grumpy because I already fell asleep and woke up. Dinner is also awful. (-)
Not all of these things happen everyday obviously, but enough of them do to make a day sufficiently frustrating and to alter my mood several dozen times. Honestly, there are days where I imagine that this is exactly what an emotionally unbalanced person feels like. Luckily I know that these feelings are not unique to me and that if I am going crazy, it is all in pursuit of a just cause.
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