Little Tappers of Doom

Whenever I talked about getting a dog, my mom always told me that I would lose interest in it once it got old, because old dogs aren’t nearly as cute as puppies. I always argued that dogs were cute no matter how old they were, hoping that that flew in the face of her baby-things-are-always-cuter-than-grown-things theory. 

However, one absolute non exception to her theory is goats. Grown goats are terrifying and mean and baby goats are the cutest things in the entire world. I think that it’s the most precious thing ever that their hooves are called little tappers. Apparently I relay this fact often. A friend of mine told me that I tell him that every time we see a baby goat. I didn’t believe him until he started pointing it out every time. That was also when I realized we were spending far too much time together. 

Anyway, the point is baby goats with their little tappers are the most adorable things ever.

So I was fine with the fact that my village was overrun with goats. I live toward the end of town, right before the main road, and there are not many people around me. I have 2 neighbors, but aside from them, it’s just me. I also have the biggest veranda. So naturally when it rains, my veranda is the spot that the neighborhood animals congregate on. As soon as the rain comes, my veranda is overrun with chickens, sheep and of course, goats. 

On the first real massive rain of my time here, I was sitting in a chair, trying to force myself to walk the quarter mile to the well and pull some water for a bath because it had been about 5 days and it was really time. Before I could move though, the rain came and my phone rang simultaneously. I grabbed my phone and talked to my friend for a few minutes before I realized that I could solve my laziness problem by just catching the rainwater. So I opened my front door, and my back door, and was going to run into my latrine, which is just out the back door and around the corner, attached, but outside. 

I was trying to hurry before the rain relented while also trying to make plans for the next day on the phone. Just as I was reaching back door, I heard angry bleat from behind me. I turned and saw the most precious tiny goat ever, which, for some reason, was pissed. He had chased me through my house and then proceeded to chase me out my back door and into my latrine. I was cornered in my latrine, with this 15 pound runt of a goat yelling at me, while my friend is still jabbering on the phone, unaware that my life was in mortal peril. 

Unsure of what to do and unwilling to have my tombstone read “here lies Kylee Reynolds, she was trampled to death by little tappers” I yell into the phone, 

“Banjor! A baby goat is attacking me!”

He stops talking asks me to repeat myself, and then proceeded to absolutely crack up which was no help whatsoever. While he was pissing himself from 7 miles away, I did the only logical thing, which was wave a bucket at it, stomp my feet and yell at it in Temne. He finally got scared and ran back into my house, where he promptly got stuck under my desk. While I was trying to get him the hell out of my house, his scared yelps attracted the attention of his very formidable mother, who stuck her head in my house, scaring the ever living crap out of me. Before things got primordial though, the baby goat unearthed himself, and ran off my veranda, his mom following suit.

I collapsed in my chair, bucket in hand trying to process what had just happened. Banjor was still on the phone, laughing but trying to pull himself together. After assuring him the goat was gone, confirming our plans and hanging up, I looked out at the road. Almost as though it was scripted, the offending baby goat walks by, looks at me, bleats, and moves on. 

I never did catch that rainwater.

The Bat Cave

So, some stories just have to be told over and over again. My best friend from home had a really embarrassing brain fart while we were watching the movie Zoolander sometime during our freshman year of high school and that has to be one of the most told stories in the history of the world. She hates it. But it really was hilarious.

But in Africa, the stories are all crazy, and everyday life is ridiculously outlandish. As well as trying to convey the actual real things that we have to deal with here (grinding poverty, caffeine withdrawal, blinding chauvinism and insane amounts of flogging at school) there are some stories that are just hysterical. I promise to try and tell these too.

Let us begin with the bat in the latrine.

So, at my house, I have what’s called a VIP latrine. It’s an actual toilet in an actual room attached to my house. I have to pour water in it to make things go away, but compared to many other people’s sites, it’s pretty posh. Steph, my absolute best friend here whom you’ve all heard about in excess, does not have such lavish accommodations. She has a pit latrine, which is exactly what it sounds like, a hole in the ground that you squat over. It’s really an art trying to learn how to master that stance. Your calves hurt after a while and the hole isn’t overly large, so aiming is a skill one must acquire.

While we were at site visit in July, I went to stay with Steph. Her principal had just come to visit and I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I went into her latrine and moved aside the cover to the hole and began moving over it. I saw a flutter of movement and shrieked as a bat flew out of the latrine and into my face, escaping out the small window at the back. I turned and ran out of the latrine, slipping in the spot that she uses as a shower just before the door. I burst out into the yard, yelling, with my knees all scratched from falling, while Steph and her principal looked at me, startled.

At the same time, they both started asking frantic questions as to what brought on my sudden manic episode.

Steph’s principal, a typical superstitious Sierra Leonean, asks “A snake?! Was it a snake??”

And Steph, who has intense arachnophobia, turned pale and goes, “Spider?! Was it a spider??”               

Panting, I gasp “Bat! There was a bat!”

Still shaken at this, I looked up at the two of them, who were trying their hardest not to laugh and failing miserably as snorts of mirth escaped out of their every orifice until they were literally guffawing at my apparent terror. I eventually joined them and realized that I still hadn’t successfully used the latrine. So, I left them talking home improvements and picked up a rock and walked back into the latrine.

I tossed the rock down into the hole, and steeled myself for the sudden onslaught of flapping wings and flurries of motion, but there was nothing. Assuming that maybe my bat was a lone gunman, I pulled my shorts down and assumed the position. As soon as I started going, my bat’s friend who had chosen to ignore my rock warning made an appearance, and got to about third base, as he hit my butt in his haste to escape my stream.

I started yelling and fell forward as the bat tried to figure out what he had hit, get his bearings and find the window, which took approximately 3 seconds as scraped my knees further, trying to get the hell away from this bat cave. I reached the door, spewing profanities as I remembered that my shorts were still down. I yanked them up as I ran out to Steph, her and her principal not even trying to hold their laughter in now.

When we got back to training a few days later, our director, Tondi, asked about our visits. Steph instantly rocketed out of her seat and proceeded to tell everyone this story. She began extremely seriously, phrasing it as a cautionary tale of the dangers of latrines, and ended in a voice several octaves higher because she needed to make herself heard over the roars of laughter from the other volunteers. Even Tondi, who is a seven-foot bear of a man from Niger with the manliest voice I’ve ever heard, didn’t try and muffle his booming James Earl Jones laugh.

 I’ve not yet lived this story down.

Whenever I visit Steph now, I always eye her latrine with trepidation and a modicum of fear as well. Her principal still remembers me fondly and greets me by name whenever I see him, a twinkle in his eye that I'm going to assume is his recollection of the incident.

I’ve not met a bat in the cave again, but I whenever I go to Steph’s now, I have to mentally prepare myself for a sudden furry colonoscopy.

 

I Will Learn to Love the Skies I'm Under

I’m sorry that I haven’t written in a long time.

I’ve been struggling with what I wanted to tell the general public about how I’m feeling.

I have been waiting to go into the Peace Corps for years, so when I finally got in, I didn’t think twice about saying yes. There could be no problem. This was part of the plan. Things don’t go wrong when there are plans made.

So imagine my surprise when I got to my site, and instantly didn’t love it. Not even liked it, not at all. I wasn’t sure what the issue was, but I knew that I wasn’t happy. Everything made me upset. I would go for a run and every 5 seconds I’d hear “Opato! Opato!” (Opato is ‘white person’ in Temne). Or I would slow down when I was going up a hill and I’d hear “Oh, are you tired?” with a smile that seemed to imply that the Opato couldn’t run. Opatos couldn’t do anything that you needed to in Africa. We can’t carry water without spilling it, we can’t carry shit on our heads and we can’t just sit for hours on end and stare at each other.

Nothing is easy here. Nothing.  There were days when I just wanted to hide in my house and I totally did. I would read for hours on end, sometimes ten hours a day. I just wanted to be in any world but the one that I was in. I can’t remember now what I thought life in the Peace Corps was going to be like, but this wasn’t it. I was at site for a week, and it felt like an eternity. The thought of two years made me not able to breathe. I would burst into tears spontaneously over the smallest things. I had zero appetite and whenever I would eat, it always came right back up again. Whatever my mind was doing, my body knew how it felt about Africa.

I came to Freetown because I had a cough and because I needed to not be at my site. Getting here should have taken me 4 hours and around 10 hours later was when I actually stumbled into the hostel. Like I said, NOTHING is easy in this country. I was instantly comforted by a bunch of the Salone 3s, the group that has been here for a year. Well, they tried anyway. They all assured me that things got much better when school started, and that a routine makes the days go by faster. You get through it, they told me. But I wasn’t sure that the only thing you should hope for was to get through your life. I wondered if you ever began to like it, or if it was just a constant battle of wills against this country that you didn’t want to lose.

I was raised not to give up on things just because they were difficult. That life wasn’t always easy and sometimes you just had to deal with things. But I was also raised extremely comfortably. I was beyond loved by my family, who supported me so much. All they wanted was for me to be happy and all I wanted was to make them proud. So there was no way for me to look at coming home as anything other than giving up. But the more I battled with the idea of being here for two years, the more anxious I got. I’ve never been an anxious person before.  So this was a foreign and completely unwelcome feeling.

I finally had to let myself think about going home. About how I could cope with a sense of failure. I had to decide if the sense of failure I would feel at home would be worse than the feelings of apprehension, depression and dread I felt about staying in this country. Then I remembered that I had only spent a week at site, and the sense of shame burned a little deeper. I had been out of my comfort zone for one week and I was already ready to give up.

I have decided to give it another month. I would go back to site and speak Temne, be laughed at by every person I ran by and try teaching 60 kids at one time how to solve a simultaneous linear equation. My hopes aren’t high though. I hate dishonesty, especially with myself, and the truth was that I was thinking this month as just a courtesy to myself, so I could go home and feel like I tried. So I wouldn’t have to be on a date in a year and have to say that I was in the Peace Corps, but couldn’t handle it. At least if I gave it more time I could say that the country just wasn’t a good fit for me. But then I thought about what I would be leaving behind in this country.

When I think I have no reason to stay, I remember that I have 39.

The amazing people I came here with. Strong, smart and fiercely loyal to one another, I know that they’d be fine if I left. I’m not delusional enough to think that I’m holding this program together or anything, but I do know what it does to our group when someone leaves. We’ve lost 3 of our own so far, and whenever they go home, there’s a hole left in the group. The circumstances under which we all met bind us differently than they would if we had met in the states. We have no one in this country but each other. At least not that understands us like we understand each other. No matter what personal shit anyone is dealing with with another person, they’re going to be there, no questions asked. We’re family first, everything else second.

They love me enough to assure me that no matter what, they’ll be here for me and they want me to make the decision that is going to make me the happiest. But I love them enough to try again.

I can’t make any promises. I have no idea what the next few months will hold. I have no idea if the Peace Corps was actually the right decision for me to make. I have no idea if this country is right for me, or if my mental health can handle being here. But my friends pulled me out of a funk about the PC when I was in the states before I had even met them. Maybe they’re all I need a second time.

 

“I will learn to love the skies I’m under”

 ~’Hopeless Wanderer’, Mumford and Sons