Look at you sittin’ there
All by yourself
Listening to everybody
Everybody say, “be everybody else”
Can’t you see?
You gotta be…thee
Ain’t nobody
Just like you
You gotta be you,
Baby hit or miss
“Hit or Miss” - Odetta
‘Welcome back folks we are here with a special televised edition of Rwandan village baseball! This is Game 7 of The Umudugudu Divisional series, between the Nyabitare Motaris and the Gafurwe Umugabos. I’m Tom Newsome and joining me here in the booth is Chris Jennings.’
‘Happy to be here, Tom.’
‘We want to welcome all our viewers joining us who just finished the village soccer regular season game down in the village of Nyagapfizi - unfortunately that game was cut short of its normal programming after Mama Gilbert stormed the field and threatened to “beat” all the participants with a stick. Real unfortunate situation there, Chris.’
‘Very unfortunate indeed, Tom, but the rulebook does stipulate that Mama Gilbert’s jerrycans are part of the regulation field and the players there have to know to stay away from them. The village gossip may say otherwise, but I believe the threat was justified. Mama Gilbert is a tough cookie.’
‘That she is Chris. Well here we have a very interesting situation on our hands here as the sun is setting quickly and the pitcher for the Nyabitare Motaris, Alexi Jones, finds himself in a 9th inning pickle.’
‘That’s right - over the commercial break it seems as though his catcher, local home grown talent Divine, was called off the field, though we aren’t sure why… Oh, here’s the word - yeah - we’re being told here in studio that her mother has called her home to fetch water, which leaves Jones with few options off the bench here at the bottom of the ninth.’
‘Yes it seems that the final position player available to the Motaris is local primary schooler Igihozo Jean Bosco. I’m seeing here on his player info sheet shows he is 4 feet 1 inch tall and is… 6 days shy of his 7th birthday.’
‘A rookie indeed Tom, and a pure rookie at that, as Jean Bosco has in fact never even seen a baseball in his life and speaks not a word of english.’
‘Yeah this is a tough scenario for Jones. But, with the sun setting, he knows that if he can deliver just one last accurate strike to end the day, the setting sun will give everyone a reason to go home, and the Motaris can head back home with a win.’
‘Now, Jones did allow a baserunner before the break, when a nannie goat wandered on to the field to graze grass on first base. Jones tried to hold him at first but when he looked to make the throw he realized his first baseman was an actual baby, Chris.’
‘Heads up play by the goat, gotta give him credit there - he looked right at that baby, read the situation and quickly stole second base to continue grazing there. That’s the kind of play you expect to see from the Gafurwe baserunners and Jones just hasn’t been able to adjust throughout this ballgame.’
‘Oh, I’m gonna have to cut you off Chris - it looks like he’s looking to deliver that final pitch, right now.’
‘Jones looks in to his catcher for the pitch call. Waves off the first sign, which may have just been a hand spasm. Waves off the second. Agrees to the third. Looks like its gonna be a ball down the middle.’
‘Yeah what the hell else could it b-‘
‘Here’s the piiiiitch…the ball looks good out of the hand…its on tarrrrgeeettt…aaand… OH! The ball hits the ground! Its rolling to the backstop… but the cow just watches it go by! It’s down the hill, its in the valley! Jean Bosco jumped away from the pitch, he was afraid of the baseball! The goat gets excited and scampers home! This ball game is over! Nyabitare loses the Divisional!’
‘Wow.’
‘It’s charged as a wild pitch and Jones is devastated! Head in his hands, he can not believe what just happened.’
‘This is a night that will haunt him for a looooong time. You hate to see it, Tom…’
—
I’ve been playing baseball…in Rwanda. Seriously. Its been a lot of fun. And when I head out there, with my two gloves, ball, and village kids in tow - this silly little scenario often plays through my mind, like the cut scene of a bad sitcom. I know it sounds ridiculous, because it is.
But of all the grandeur of Peace Corps service - the cultural exchange, the friendships, the profundity of living on the other side of the world - it’s these types of things, these stupid little things that make you laugh to yourself, that often keep you going day-to-day. These are the things you have to have to do to make it through service - especially to make it over the dreaded Mid Service Slump. The bane of all Peace Corps Volunteers.
Where is the Line?
Peace Corps, as everyone knows, is a challenging experience both physically, but particularly emotionally. In order to try to prepare you for what’s ahead, the administrators at Peace Corps have created a resource to help project the emotional ups and downs of service - this is called the “Adjustment Graph” All volunteers are familiar with the “Adjustment Graph”. It is a line-graph representation of the common stages of emotion as you progress through service - your feelings as a function of time. As I paraphrase from memory, the the first half of the chronological stages are as such:
A volunteer first arrives in country and is ecstatic at the novelty of it all; they start to figure out that this novelty is not always fun, but they are still generally having fun; they start to realize that they can’t speak the language and have thereby been stripped of basic agency at which point stress starts to take over; they get to their respective villages and are left alone at which point they get really stressed out; they start to figure some things out and fend for themselves which inspires deep confidence and good feelings….
It is at this point, which is about a year into service, that a curious thing happens. The line-graph takes an unexpected dive, right at the time when things seem to be going really well. This dip, right in the middle of things, is colloquially known at the Mid Service Slump.
Having consulted the graph at the beginning of service, I didn’t understand why this nadir would happen at such an arbitrary time. After all, if you’re doing well at site, isn’t that cause for celebration? Wouldn’t you revel in those successes - becoming the master of your tiny little domain - right up until the end of your time in Rwanda? But having experienced it, and come out on the other side of it, I feel that I understand the psychology well.
Ironically, it is the combination of time, security, and cultural acumen that cause the Mid Service Slump. You start to feel down precisely because things are going well for you, not in spite of it. Allow me to explain. As soon as you get off the plane in Kigali, your brain is under relentless pressure to observe, learn and adapt. This doesn’t really end for a substantial period of time - until you start to settle in to your life at site many months later. Even on the bad days, you’re working hard to learn how to cope and overcome.
Eventually though, you start to sort things out: you figure out how much Kinyarwanda you need to survive day-to-day, you get the phone number for the guy who brings you water, you find your lady at the market who doesn’t rip you off, you figure out how to establish boundaries with the local kids, you find the right ratio between food purchased and food cooked. The mental pressure starts to subside. And when it does, those newly alleviated cognitive resources go to work examining a different problem - Why the hell you’ve been away from Your Home for so damn long.
They say the human brain is the most complicated system in the universe. But is it? Sure there are billions of neural connections firing every minute that make compound tasks possible, but as I see it your brain really just wants one thing - The Home Place. The Home Place is good, your brain tells you, and you know it so well. All your favorite things are in the Home Place. Your family is in the Home Place. And your friends are there too, even that one friend you don’t like all that much but your other friends like so you’re stuck with him because you just want to keep the peace. Is work in Rwanda not going well? That’s because you’re not in the Home Place! People still staring at you and asking for money? They don’t do that in the Home Place!
But alas, you are not there. In fact, you couldn’t be farther from there. And so, the dissonance occurs, and you start to feel down. You, my friend, are going through a good old fashioned Mid Service Slump.
“My Name is Jonas”
How does one grapple with such a thing, you may ask? If you’re not in the Home Place, and that’s what your brain wants, it seems like you are in a unsolvable situation. The answer lies in the mechanisms of the problem itself. When things start to go well for you and your newfound brainpower turns inward, you have to fight to turn in back outward. The daily tasks of survival are not enough to keep you occupied, so you have to look for new ways. You have to start doing things. This, of course, means different things to different people. Most will make an effort to make more connections in their villages. Some people look to the future and start studying for grad school tests to get through. Some people start devouring books to pass the time, some people take up new hobbies or work on old ones - drawing comics, writing stories, doing crafts, composing portraits. And almost everyone starts to dive deeper into their work - trying to figure out what projects the community wants, and through what people they will complete them. As for me? I started throwing the baseball.
At staging in Philadelphia, when all the volunteers of the Health 9 cohort met for the very first time, we played an icebreaker game. We went around in a circle telling everyone what the dumbest thing we packed was. At the time, I told everyone that my shameful packing item was my electric guitar. My reasoning was that I would never be able to plug it in, and that since I already brought an acoustic guitar with me, the electric was rendered superfluous. While it’s true that I haven’t yet been able to plug in my electric guitar and play (and likely never will), it has proven to be one of my most used, and therefore least regrettable, items I brought with me to Rwanda.
No actually, the dumbest things I packed were two baseball gloves and six baseballs, all brought brand new from the Annapolis branch of Modell’s Sport Shop. In a country thoroughly obsessed with soccer, no one in Rwanda is clamoring for the sport of baseball. Almost no one has ever even heard of it. It’s not recognizable to most of the rest of the world. But the thing is that I love baseball for some reason, even though I’ve never played at a competitive level, and I convinced myself that I could recruit (or coerce) some kids to have a toss with me from time to time.
Unsurprisingly, the gloves sat in my storage room for months, untouched and collecting Rwandan dust. Having walked around my village and seen nothing but hills and dirt, with no flat areas on which to play, I came to view my baseball aspirations as pipe dreams. Besides, the local kids are so desperate to play one single sport, soccer, that they fashion balls out of discarded plastic bound in twine and kick it back and forth in makeshift games. To play America’s most distinctive and obscure game, here in Rwanda was the height of absurdity. Or so I thought.
In the throes of the Mid Service Slump, after some time of heavy boredom and lamentation, I decided I could be bored and lament no longer. I had to do something, I had to go somewhere. Go outside, breathe some fresh air. The kids, annoying as they can often be, when in the right mood can really cheer me up - and to see them all riled up with something new is always a funny treat. And so it was that I resolved to bring out the gloves and find a place to throw.
Donning my conspicuous USA World cup soccer jersey - lest anyone forget that I’m an Amurrrcan - I emerged into the small village square wielding the foreign objects and the reaction was immediate. A frenzy ensued, but through experience, I was able to harness the energy to get the kids to follow me as I explored for flatter terrain. Eventually I found it - a wide clearing with a single Acacia tree, replete with hilly vista views and grazing cows. This was the place where I would create my new franchise. Alexi’s Field of Dreams.
Pitch and Catch
The first session was a disaster. The first problem was trying to convince the kids that, yes you may be right handed, but the glove goes on your left hand. I don’t have the language to explain that, but for most kids the conundrum revealed itself almost instantly. If I’m a right handed thrower and I want to catch with my right hand - then I’ll throw with my…yeah this doesn’t make any sense. After that, the kids just went to battle with each other for Glove Rights. Any one kid couldn’t get more than two throws in before he or she was swarmed and wrestled down and forced to give it up - another two throws then a new swarm gathered. While I usually let the Law of the Playground run its course, I had to introduce some order after I saw one kid doing his best Bruce Lee impression, trying to head kick another to get the glove back. Madness.
Most kids, I was pleased to find, could throw. Surprisingly, I could count on many of the girls to be better at throwing than the boys. Village girls like to play an amusing game that is a mixture of dodgeball and monkey in the middle, usually played with a small makeshift ball, that hones their throwing skills. Most balls they threw were on target and right into my glove.
Catching, on the other hand is uniformly difficult, bordering on impossible for most. For the majority, their hands aren’t big enough to fill the glove fully, so they can barely even open it enough to receive the ball - they often just kind of swat at it while simultaneously jumping away in abject fear. I remembered that not only is baseball entirely foreign to them, but there aren’t even any sports in Rwanda that require hand-eye coordination, other than volleyball, which doesn’t translate very well in this context.
It hadn’t occurred to me before I saw it for myself, but the idea of strapping a glove onto your weak hand while a large American throws a strange object at you would be a scary prospect for any small kid. One kid misjudged my throw, getting hit on the arm, and in a incredulous tone with a hint of fear in his eyes he asked me “uyu ni amabuye?” Which means, is this a rock? And, with a look that said ‘I’m not having this giant lunatic fire rocks at my small body’, he gave the glove to the next participant and walked home. Fair enough, I thought.
Since then though, I have been finding my groove with them. I know the right age range to recruit so that they are eager to try something new, while also having the requisite amount of white matter in their brains to coordinate their motor functions. I’ve found that younger boys are fascinated with me, while teenage boys are skeptical and too cool for me. I’ve been in their shoes, so I know their mindset. But when I show them the joys of throwing pop fly as high as you possibly can, they always get on board. “Alexi!” they scream at me, “Tumbagiza!”. I don’t know what verb that is or how it conjugates, but I know they are saying “Throw it as high as you can you huge ogre person!”. I oblige them gladly. The ball goes up, everyone screams, everyone laughs. This is baseball night in Rwanda - who would have ever thought?
With my infrastructure in place, I resolved to go out and have a throw anytime I was bored or restless. I can say with total truth that it has never failed to cheer me up. What I realized though is that, my enjoyment and the enjoyment of the kids, had nothing to do with baseball itself. It could have been soccer or cricket or curling (a version could be possible with the right rocks and a Rwandan broom) - what I was really enjoying was getting out of my house and into the community, having fun with my neighbors and enjoying being outdoors.
The Mid Service Slump is an odd phenomenon, but being odd makes it no less real or burdensome for many volunteers. Everyone experiences it in a different way although for everyone, it derives from the same core problem. You need to stop focusing solely on yourself, and start focusing on other people, or other things. The most surefire way to get over it is to engage in any form of integration you can.
One thing that I have found about Peace Corps is that it is not a experience that imparts personal growth by way of magic, or osmosis. The problems you face, the intractable, deep issues, like not being in The Home Place, are dealt with through necessity and it often isn’t fun or glamorous. With no where to go and no one to turn to but yourself, eventually you find solutions and come to find that all the things you think are problems, are not real problems at all. And most things can be solved by reaching out to other people, and having the resolve not to give up. Then you find the Mid Service Slump goes away just as quickly as it comes.
In my case, I found solace in the sweet simplicity of just throwing a ball - back…and forth…and back…and forth…and back………