All,
I’ve been in country nearly seven months, which is just enough time to finish initial training, the first school term, and another much shorter in-service training session. We’re now in the Harmattan, the brief period of the dry season when the wind blows from the east across the Sahara Desert and cools everything slightly. The heat will come back around the beginning of January, I’m told, and will continue in earnest until April, when it will peak in excess of 100 degrees; how far in excess I don’t know or see much point in asking.
Challenges at my school are many. Some of them are better not mentioned without ample time and space to qualify them. Material resources consist of rooms, desks, chairs, chalkboards, and chalk. In the absence of textbooks, class content is limited to notes written on the board by teachers, most of whom have no training as teachers or indeed any education past senior secondary school, the Sierra Leonean equivalent of our high school. Still, some of the students try very hard and are already as close to feeling like my own children as I’m ever likely to experience.
JSS Students Working
I came back to my village immediately after In-service training in order to spend Christmas with my companions there. My elder sister, as custom and culture define her, specifically invited me back for the holiday, and I was happy to be thought of. She is the sister of the paramount chief and the town chief, as I also am by virtue of the local surname, Magona, that I adopted when I moved to Potoru in August.
Christmas morning I attended mass in the village Catholic Church which is also a primary school, hence the tiny “pews” that are school benches the rest of the week. Not being a believer, I certainly didn’t go to the service for my own edification but rather for my reputation in the village and for the reputation of the Peace Corps and everything and everyone I represent just by virtue of being here. True to form, I take the responsibility of all this very seriously. Here it is prudent to be deliberate–keeping appearances for appearances’ sake, for example–and also subtle, depending on the situation. I reserve the broad, conscious strokes for my relationship to the community as a whole; specifically, who I allow them to see when they look at “Kumba Magona,” as they know me. I’m less interested in controlling the smaller, more nuanced exchanges I have with people I “know well” in the village. Gift-giving and all its implications, for example, is a source of study in a small, isolated place where it is particularly charged and yet its meanings can be elusive. I think I’m unlikely to understand this particular phenomenon no matter how long I stay.
Gaewa and Nassi
Along these lines is a journal entry I made on December 27th. Here is an excerpt.
“Went dancing at the cote barrie from nine to twelve Christmas night and had a really nice time. The music was terrible but loud enough that when I tried hard to find a beat and move to it, it was possible. Some of my students were there; Gaewa, of course, invited me and was kind and not at all possessive, as I’d feared; I saw Lizzie briefly, just as she entered, looking my way and laughing, but not again afterward.
Many others were there, but I was mostly absorbed in the experience of being someone other than who I am. The morning mass was the same. I don’t know if before now there was ever a time when I felt the disparity between who I am perceived to be by others and who I know myself to be more acutely. That isn’t an entirely accurate description. It’s more of the difference between the person I am projecting to others and my own interior world, which is highly subjective and emotional and often conflicted. Yet what works well for me in the village is that I am “simple,” to use their words. I would define that quality as “sincere” rather than “simple,” because with that label it doesn’t contradict what I’m doing on any of the multiple levels where I find myself operating here. A big part of this job, as I perceive it, is being able to work on different mental planes at the same time; or if not to be able to balance the differences simultaneously, at least to be able to move between them as appropriate or necessary. Knowing more than people know that I know is another way of phrasing the essence of what is happening here.
I wonder, too, about this altogether separate tendency to move through circumstances untouched, or relatively untouched, and if that happens despite or because of these great mental efforts.”
In training this summer, they explained the difference between high-context cultures like Sierra Leone and low-context cultures like the US as related to movement. In places where people exist, from birth to death, on a small radius of land among others who do the same, context is rarely needed, hence speech and communication that is much less direct, much less explanatory. The only people who don’t already know what is going on in a socio-historical sense are strangers like me. I had expected the cumulative effect of this to be much greater; specifically, I expected it to feel “old,” perhaps even ancient. I hoped that my life here might resonate in a primeval, I might say mythical way, in which I could actually perceive, in my blood or my bones, the knowledge that we all originated in Africa. But it hasn’t. Life here feels lost, not older or wiser. If I’d been led to the soothsayer, hoping to be cured, and found him not only useless but also meaningless, I’d have been no less surprised. It’s also true that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of detritus and debris and wreckage to find out what may lie underneath.
Thank you all for the birthday wishes. This is likely to be my last post until late February or early March.
Happy New Year.
xoxo, Meredith
Meredith Meadows 