Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes, and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And walked off to look for America
Cathy, I said as we boarded the Greyhound in Pittsburg,
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America
“America” - Simon & Garfunkel
Pelton and Crane. Pelton and Crane. Pelton and Crane.
I'm helplessly focusing on the the insignia on the light that dangles over my prone body, but a voice continues to address me .
“Rwanda! That is just crazy! So you’re out there in the…savannah? The bush? Oh dear I don’t want to say the wrong thing, I just don’t know!”
“Hah riv hin a hillage”
She doesn’t miss a beat. She’s used to this. It’s her job after all. Without breaking focus on her task at hand, she continues on.
“What’s that? Oh a village! Oh that is so exciting - ”
The tiny mirror tink tink tinks. The tiny tube whirrs with the suction of stale office air. The tiny hook scrapes and probes and scrapes again. The polisher spins at a disturbingly high rate, emitting that singularly cringe-inducing high frequency squeal that never fails to give me goosebumps.
Pelton and Crane. Pelton and Crane. Whatever you do, don’t stop thinking about Pelton and Crane and you’ll make it through this alive, Alex. If only this lady would stop asking me so many questions, isn’t it clear to her that I’m indisposed at the present moment?
“So what’s your house like? Oh my is it like a hut, like one of those mud huts?”
“Eh eh, hits a houchh. Hiss a hhhrriiick houchh”
Why would she ask me questions when I’m like this? Mouth agape, teeth and tongue woefully exposed. She knows I can’t connect my tongue to the roof of my mouth to make consonants. How limited I am at the moment! If I had my full faculties of speech I would have leaned into that last line, I’m sure she would have gotten a kick out it. No I don’t live in a mud hut, Sally Scrapes a Lot, I live in a house . Ow, it’s a brick…house! I would have made The Commodores proud with that one. And of course demonstrated my deep knowledge of 70’s funk hits. What a interesting young man I would show myself to be, if I could speak normally! Such anachronistic trivia would prove quite charming indeed.
“And do you, like, have to go down to a river or something to get water? Does it make you sick?”
“Eh eh, house has hunning hatah”
“Running water, wow!”
The nerve of this woman! Four instruments in my mouth, she’s scraping at my teeth with a hook, and she’s still asking me questions. Who sanctioned this method of cleaning teeth? You brush your teeth with soft bristles for a whole year then you go to your local dentist, they pull out an iron scythe and they get to work poking around in your mouth. Doesn’t she know my routine? The plan is that I come in here, lay back, and stare at the Pelton and Crane words on the swinging dental light and try to get lost in my mind in silence until the horror show ends.
Were they buddies from birth, I wonder? Timmy Pelton and Fred Crane, who all their lives shared a love for dull light fixtures? Or did a single man, imbued with an unwavering and clear vision, combine the Pelton plastic casing company with the Crane lightbulb firm to create the ultimate product in the dental office lighting aperture racket? Are there spoiled rich kids running around somewhere out there, heir to the respective Pelton and Crane dental light fortunes?
“What’s the weather like over there in…Rwanda?” I can tell she’s lightly relishing the exoticism of the country’s name. Considering I’ve seen, heard, or uttered the word every day for the last 10 months, it’s funny to hear. It’s amazing what you can eventually come to regard as entirely normal. I’m reminded that being an American living in one of the smallest countries in all of Africa is certainly not normal. My sharp mood dulls a bit. And this time, luckily, she has asked me a question that I can comfortably answer with my currently severely diminished lexicon.
“Uhhh…Hot”
Not an entirely true answer, but I don’t see myself being able to explain the Rainy/Dry season dichotomy with subtle nuance in my present condition. With that, however, the teeth cleaning session comes to a merciful conclusion. With a final rinse, I close my mouth around the suction tube and let the water clear through it with a certain amusement that hasn’t seemed to fade since I was a young kid. The automatic chair buzzes its way to an upright position and I can feel a wave of relief that my mouth belongs to me again.
“Well I just think what you’re doing is so great. I just can’t imagine! I couldn’t do it, but good for you!”
I smile and laugh.
I’ve been back in the U.S on vacation for about a week now, and while I’ve had no problem sliding back into my old routines in Annapolis, the biggest difference I have found in returning home is almost everyone I run into has questions, comments, and even concerns about Peace Corps service. The questions are the most prevalent. What’s it like there? It’s fascinating. So you speak Rwandan? Working on it. Do you use a satellite phone? Nope my cell phone works fine. What do you actually do there? Work in a local health center. Have you gone on safari? No but I’d like to. Do you get paid? Not as much as whatever you’re getting paid. Do you think I could do it? Anyone can.
Even here in my town’s dental office, where my mom has insisted I come for a cleaning (“Just to be safe!”) and with two hands, a hook, a mirror, and a suction tube in my mouth, the questions continued to cascade down on me. I’m happy to answer them of course. What did I know firsthand about any African country, let alone one of the smallest, before I received the Peace Corps email that I was heading to Rwanda? Not a drop of anything. There’s no such thing as a dumb question, I can say honestly. Even the ones that border on unsavory territory. I’ve been there, so I feel that I can set the record straight. But I just would have liked for her to perhaps wait until the cleaning was done with to proceed with her curiosities. My teeth are very sensitive, you know.
With a probe of my newly cleaned pearly whites, and a wrinkle of my mouth, I say my first unobstructed words. “Thank you,” I say, annunciating as clearly as I can. “It’s been great so far”. With that, I’m off.
Holiday
I was home in the good old United States of America for a little over three weeks, in my first break away from the country of Rwanda since I stepped off the plane in Kigali on June 6. From what I understand about other volunteers, some people leave to go back to America for vacations, but few take as extended a vacation as I did. The time I spent was not all lounging couch time, though. I had a lot on the agenda. The youngest Jones brother, David, had four games over this time span, in his Senior season of lacrosse at the Naval Academy. This season represents the final chapter in the legacy of Jones Lacrosse - beginning with William’s campaign at Penn State between 2001-2005, continuing with my career at Brown from 2009-2013, and finally concluding with our home town team Naval Academy Midshipmen from 2014-2018.
The Mids, after struggling in the first half of their season, rattled off wins in all four games I was able to attend, surging their way to a top 20 ranking. Dave combined stellar defensive play with transitional effectiveness, and some electrifying offense outbursts. In the final game of the season, which I was unable to attend as I had already gone back to Rwanda, he scored a big goal against college lacrosse perennial powerhouse Syracuse, and helped the Mids secure an improbable one goal victory. The following week I was astonished to see a full write up in the Annapolis paper, “The Capitol” featuring well deserved praise for him and our whole family. Great careers though William and I had, we certainly never got write ups in the local paper. Good on ya, bruv.
My older brother got home a week after I did from a six month deployment with his Navy SEAL Team. I met my little niece Beatrice, who is a future Gold Medal Olympian and President of the United States, but is a current 3 month old milk-drinking blob. I got to spend some significant time with her when I undertook a high stakes two hour babysitting operation, which I took full advantage of. When I received a text from my sister in law as to how everything was going, I assiduously spent the next 15 minutes trying to get her to cooperate for camera while I set up a selfie photo of me reading her “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, a picture that, through self satisfied chortles, I captioned “Everything is going great, we’re reading children’s stories!”. I’m the Cool Uncle, naturally.
Over the holiday, I went all in on America. I ate and drank heartily from all of our most premier chain conglomerates, Starbucks, Chipotle, etc - true paragons of the joys of the modern market economy. In every opportunity that arose, I drove in my little brother’s stick shift two door Jeep Wrangler - windows down, shades on, blaring all the classic rock I have on my iPod. (I realize the irony of this, given that our best classic rock are actually imports from Britain or their former colonies - Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Cream, The Who - but I suppose since they were all formed around the inspiration of American Blues, I can still count this as an American commodity and I will enjoy it no less). I dedicated myself to gaining weight back and ate all the red meat I could get my hands on, from nice home-cooked dinners to dive-y burger joints. Many likely viewed my eating habits as gluttonous, I simply viewed them as regaining what I had so dearly lost.
On Opening Day for baseball, which landed in the middle of the work day for all of my well-employed friends, I sat entirely alone on my couch and watched Ian Happ for the Chicago Cubs take the first pitch of the first game of the 2018 MLB season all the way to deep right field. Cries of “no way, he did it!” and “baseball is back!” were said to be heard echoing throughout my house, but it is impossible to say who uttered them. I made a point from then on to watch every one of my beloved Orioles’ games that I could, though watching their slow slide to becoming what is proving to be the worst record in the entire league was quite painful. It could prove to be a long season for O’s fans, so I can’t say that I am too aggrieved to be back in Rwanda missing the majority of it.
“You’ll Be Home for How Long?”
When I told my fellow volunteers that I was heading home for an extended vacation, almost all of them asked me the same question: Are you going to come back? Its one thing to leave America for the fun and adventure of a brand new Peace Corps service, but an entirely different thing altogether to take a break from Rwanda to return to the U.S and indulge in all the modern luxuries you’ve been acutely missing, knowing that its only temporary. At first I dismissed the question - of course I would be coming back I said with total confidence. But I received the question so many times and with such seriousness that I began to consider it myself.
Then one day, in the week preceding my vacation departure, I went to innocently take a shower in the mid afternoon. Unbeknownst to me, a wasps nest had sprung up directly above the inside of the door to the outdoor shower. As I got mentally and physically prepared for the always-cold blast of water, the horrible creatures had decided that my head had come too close to their new residence and stung me right above the top of my left ear.
If there’s anything a bald man has to do to retain his good looks, maintaining cranial symmetry certainly has to be a basic prerequisite. As I walked around my town for the next two days, with a inconspicuous red lump on the side of my head, a price paid for the simple act of trying to take a shower, I began to really think: America sure seems nice right now…
Then I found myself visiting my old job in DC, chatting with the old coworkers there that still remain, retelling the wasp story to considerable laughter. An awesome day in Africa, I told them, is when a wasp stings you on the head and then you take your shield and saber in hand, which of course in this case was a bucket lid and a can of bug spray, and team up with the local village kids in clearing out the intruders of your shower. No we don’t have TV or much internet, but if your night of reading is supplemented by a successful bug hunt by the lizards that live on your wall, then you’ve seen a premier display of village entertainment. As we all laughed and talked, I remembered vividly the days when I sat at my desk day after day in this very office, dreaming of going somewhere new, doing something difficult and challenging myself so that I could better appreciate all the things that I knew I was taking for granted. I supposed that the lump on my head was an example of getting what I asked for.
And while I expected to be fully overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of things that you can eat and drink, I found myself not indulging too often in treats, at least not as often as my peers would expect. It was as if, rather than going into a hedonistic tail spin of salt, sugar and fat, part of me was just happy to know those things were there to be enjoyed when the mood struck me. Although I do have to admit I ate a fair amount of cookie dough ice cream. And, well I guess I was also happy to drink a variety of nice beers in frosty mugs. And I was happy to have ice in my water. And I was happy to have to many things to do, and to be able to drive around to all kinds of different places. Wait, what poignant message was I trying to convey again?
Ah yes, I remember. The bottom line is that when it comes to having all these things, taking a break from them just doesn’t altogether matter. When I finally landed at the airport at Dulles and spoke with the customs agent, who represented the final hurdle in my race to return to America, he simply took a short look at my passport, said “Welcome Home”, and ushered me through. Home, I thought, an odd thing to consider for someone who had never been away this long. In that moment I was full of pride to be back in America. For all of us volunteers, who are lucky enough to be citizens, its there waiting for us. Whether I stayed in Rwanda for 10 months, 2 years or longer - America is still home, all the stuff that we like is still there, and we’ll all be back before we know it. Why waste too much time pining over it?
Looking Ahead
Being back in village is going to take some readjustment time. It wasn’t jarring to getting back into the fast pace of America, but slowing things back down has proven taking some getting used to. It was significantly harder to say goodbye to my family this time around, seeing as the time slipped so quickly through my fingers. I would have liked to have more days hanging out with them. But alas, I’ll see them soon enough.
Now with an unmistakably long stretch here at in my village in Rwanda, I feel the need to start really pushing to make a difference in my health center. Problems like data collection, service administration, understaffing and habit change continue to be persistent issues in the health center and with the people we serve. Continuing to help improve the functions of the health center, and working with my counterpart and colleagues will be of high importance. Indeed, how I handle the next year here will likely define how I remember my service and how my community remembers me. So here’s to getting things up and running.
To my family and friends who I saw or made an effort to see me during vacation, thank you. I had a great time. There were many more of you I would have liked to see, or see more of. Until that time comes, I can only offer you greetings from here in the Umudugudu. Wish me luck, clear skies and no wasps nests in Act II of my Rwandan expedition.