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This is an entry I have posted on the Peace Corps website, but I am publishing here because I want to add pictures. The pictures with this entry actually have no relation with the writing. Following entries might or might not have the same pictures/writing relationship.

I have kept a journal for along time; since third grade, with only a few months missing here and there. Usually writing, especially journal writing, flows easily from my brain to my pen-controlling hand, as easily as one foot follows the other while running. Lately I have had many false starts- the 18th of March, again the 25th, and the 26th- attempts to interest a larger audience in my only occasionally interesting life. Was I stressed, trying too hard? Maybe. But this evening, sitting on the front porch steps sharing “Smile” cookies with my dogs, genuine thoughts and words finally are coming together to form sensible paragraphs, and I can release the ink.

I am stressed though. Not stressed in the same way as in my college years during finals, no no, I sleep eight healthy hours most nights, and can usually squeeze in a nap the afternoons. My stress is from trying to accomplish work as a volunteer in a foreign land. Not so much that I have a lot of work, nor is it working in a new language since I have learned French fairly well and can even understand much of the local language. What is challenging is knowing how to address people, knowing where to find resources, especially where they not as common as libraries and internet, knowing when to push as well as how to not push, and the million dollar know-how: learning a way of life that I am not born into, but accepting it because this life, this culture, cradles so many people I have come I love. Knowing how to love and accept, period. Idiocy occurs often, and I forget that I know things, but that’s why it’s a challenge.

Along with all of that, I also have two projects in the works, one with the schools involving planning, and another with the tree nursery that is time-sensitive and becoming more so as more time passes. I also have two months to decide what I will do in September, the month I am scheduled to return to the United States of America.

And that, my friends, is the question of the hour, day, week, and month: what to do what to do what to do and how to do it? I am amused because in May 2005, when I accepted to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, I had September 2007 planned, and worried about how I would bear the two years apart from my American family. Now I wish I could go back to 2005 so that I wouldn’t start my two small years as a Peace Corps Volunteer with a planned 2007. In other words, now I worry how I will bear the departure from this once so-foreign home of mine, and how I will communicate with and when I will return to my friends and family in my host country.

And I worry about who will take care of my dogs.

So my “stressful” PCV life, in general, is different in particulars, but still very similar to my American life. Such as, I like to cook, but here I always have the same ingredients: onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes (in season), hot pepper, and rice rice rice and noodles. If I don’t want to cook, I go out to eat and buy rice and/or noodles or the local sustenance called pate. I listen to the radio, but don’t understand most of it because it’s not in French or my simple level of Mina (the local language). If I feel cold and drink coffee or tea, the temperature is nothing less that 60F. When I am working, I dream of playing, and if I play too much, I wonder what work I should be doing. I tease unceasingly my friends, just in a different language. A life only slightly tilted from the original. In any case, I have found a niche and am content. On with life.

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