If my tomorrow isn't where I thought it'd be,
I'll keep on searchin' till it's right in front of me.
With my head held high, and my mind at ease
I'll step right on through - knowin' what to do.
“On Time” - Mingo Fishtrap
“Alexi…”
I know what’s coming next.
Is it still considered Deja Vu if you’ve actually lived the exact same moment over and over, rather than just having that famously phantom feeling? How many times have I been sitting right here, in our little nutrition office, staring at the dull glow of our outdated Windows computer and seen that the amount of milk in our stock room doesn’t match the amount that we should have, based on the amount that we gave to malnourished families?
And when we realize they don’t match, Cecile always says the same thing I would think at this point that this repetitious situation would speak for itself - leading, as it always does, to this fait accompli. But mindless drudgery wouldn’t carry its extra flick on the ear without an official sanctioning - so here comes Cecile’s declaration, which, given my familiarity with, I can essentially complete for her, in her own accent and in her own cadence.
“We must go [slight pause for effect], child for child”
I was staring at the white concrete wall ahead of me instead of Cecile, thinking that it would be enough to contain myself, but now, to stifle the wave of frustration, I snap my eyes shut. It proves no matter. A slight groan slips from somewhere deep within me - steam escaping from a boiling pot. Report week is always the same. And we always go “child for child”.
Reports are necessary. And they always start innocently enough, under the auspice of perfectly reasonable policy. The government gives thousands of liters of milk to our health center every few months, and we distribute that milk to the mothers and children who need it. They want us to add up the milk, and send a report back to them, monthly, that ensures that we distributed the milk appropriately.
I completely understand this - government accountability and all that. Although with this rigorous reporting, I wonder what they suspect health center staff, who by all accounts are dedicated public servants, to be capable of doing with the milk. Back in the U.S there is a robust black market for very different types of baggies - I suppose here in Rwanda the demand is for the baggies of milk that we give out, and must therefore be scrupulously monitored. But, of course, my respect for differences in culture protects me from such sarcastic thoughts.
This exercise shouldn’t be too difficult, in theory. But the devil, as they say, lies in the details. When the milk comes in, we write it down on one piece of paper. Then when we gather the milk on distribution day, we write it in another notebook. Then the amount given to each person is written down by hand in two additional notebooks. Calculations for how much milk is needed for any given day are “back of the envelope” calculations, which would be nice considering that real envelopes would be upgrades to the random scrap papers that we actually do them on. There’s breakage and subsequent spoilage. Sometimes everyone shows up to receive, sometimes some people come later in the week.
This is all to say that there are many accounting points of contact, none of which are consolidated or uniform, and all of which are fertile fields for human error, that foul weed that never dies. But when the problems arise, and the numbers don’t add up correctly - which is where Cecile and I stand, at the very tail end of the entire process - we are the ones left holding the (milk!) bag, as it were. Cecile’s solution, which works sometimes, but usually is futile, is to go “child for child”. Which is to say that we again look through the notebooks - flipping page by page - to check our work to make sure that we have correctly accounted for each program beneficiary.
Dealing with the exact same problem over and over is the wearisome. What’s the saying about doing the same thing over and over being insanity? I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to solve this problem, but its easy solution, and more importantly, the means to communicate it in Kinyarwanda, eludes me. So as I corral the book, and flip open its pages to appease Cecile - seeing that I can’t convey the enormity of the problem and the fact that it likely won’t be solved this way - I have that sinking, frustrating feeling:
“I’m not Helping”.
—
On the equator, the sun rises at the same time every day. And in Rwandan dry season, the sun blares with the same heat, making every day feel the same. But today, it happens to be a Tuesday - and when I get into the Health Center, I find Cecile, harried as usual, trying to manage the 5 different jobs that she has accumulated in her tenure here. She tells me that she has to distribute fortified foods to people with HIV this morning, because tomorrow there’s a meeting that will occupy the normal distribution room. But this morning is also when we give out milk, so it seems that something will have to give. The solution, as she sees it, is to deputize me to run the program for the morning, allowing me to utilize the helping hands of the four Nutrition Nurse Trainees that we have on loan from the local university. My eyes light up. I readily agree.
I’ve had some ideas that I’ve wanted to implement but haven’t been able to, because of the inertia of old habits. But today it seems, I’ll have finally have the opportunity to fulfill my wildest dreams - giving out milk bags in a more efficient manner. Such are the dreams of a converted villager.
With the appropriate sets of keys, and my team in tow, I set off to go behind one of the buildings under an overpass where we’re safe from the sun. With the registers that contain the mothers’ information, along with the report forms with the remaining amounts of milk, we set out on our job.
Everything is set: One trainee for each of the two registers, both sitting at a table with pens in hand. There’s a long wooden table, covered with discrete piles of seven half-liter bags, ready for distribution, my pen in hand to provide the signature for each beneficiary, a steady supply of new boxes being brought up for quick distribution, and the empty boxes being quickly discarded from the area.
I am the conductor, and this is my symphony - Alexi’s Dairy Distribution of the Divine, Opus no.4 - yes, more milk bring it up, no no tone down the box opening at the moment, and yes bring the women forward so they may see, bring them forward so that they may see the genius of my masterpiece! Ha Ha!
Sorry. What I meant to say is that we gave things out quickly, efficiently, and cleanly. Over the past nine months I have become well acquainted with the mothers and their kids. They were respectful and orderly, their kids were mostly in a good mood that day, and no one tried to take advantage of the situation or give us a hard time. It all went off without a hitch. And I ran the whole thing. I’ve learned enough here, grown to understand the processes well enough, and earned enough respect from the beneficiaries and staff that I was trusted with the responsibility a task and executed it well. As we cleaned up and I head home for lunch, I think to myself:
“I’m helping!”
—
Life at my health center includes days like these, and everything in between. When you come into Peace Corps, they advise you that its a Cardinal Sin to compare your life and work to the life and work of your friends at other sites. After all, everything about their community, the people within it, the leadership at the health center along with its catchment area, is entirely different from yours. But damned if we don’t voraciously compare ourselves anyway. One of the main things we are always trying to determine is how “good” of a volunteer others are being - a question that serves no other purpose than to establish a benchmark against which to compare one’s self. In this endeavor I have in many instances, and unsurprisingly, deemed myself to be a “bad” volunteer. (The scale obviously runs on a binary scale with no room for nuance in between. Like CNN asking their panel guests of incredibly complex domestic policy questions - “Is the Affordable Care Act Good or Bad?”).
My health center suffers from a lot of the same problems that everyone’s health center does: understaffing, ambitious and numerous projects, and constant employment shake ups that leave future operations uncertain. And as such, I have grown to view my role as a volunteer to be a day to day amelioration of these problems. So I am very well engaged in my health center activities everyday, but as a function of my role, along with personal projects, I haven’t yet been able to do that big, sexy, wonderful “Peace Corps” project. I once wrote in an earlier blog, jokingly, that I wanted to build a water pipe out to the rural villages with my bare hands so that I could look at something and say, “I did that”. What I have found so far hasn’t been the case. That’s not to say my time here has been a waste. Right? Let’s look at the question in greater detail:
Have I Helped?
I won’t cop-out on you and tell you it depends. (Don’t you hate when you click on articles that offer an answer to something and say it depends? I know it depends John Smith, but I want to hear your actual take on it so I can weigh it against others and figure out what’s going on here). Instead I will analyze the question under three different lenses. The Rwandan, the American and the Peace Corps.
Rwandan
In order to feel that I bring any value to anyone whatsoever in my work, I have to operate under a basic supposition - that no one likes to have their time deliberately wasted by others. To be sure, many people like to have their time wasted. I enjoy watching trash television and looking at Instagram for example. But when it comes to engaging with goods and services, I think everyone likes to have things run as quickly as possible. Now, this supposition is challenged in the Rwandan context because people just like to hang out with each other and talk above all things, which is difficult for the American mind to grasp. But nonetheless, if you show up to get seven little baggies of milk, there is no reason why you should arrive around 8am and not actually receive it until the early afternoon.
In this regard, I can confidently say that I have been helping. Since the nutrition program at my health center is woefully understaffed, just by virtue of being an additional two hands with which to help, I am helping both speed up the process and relieve the burden on the other employees, namely my counterpart Cecile.
With some tweaks to the process, and the general pushing forth that my Americanness demands, the whole program has been running more smoothly. And those reports that I was complaining about earlier? Which some technological know-how and my vast repertoire of 4 excel tricks (as my finance friends roll their eyes), I have saved the middle aged Rwandan woman that is my counterpart and unspeakable amount of time (which I’ve seen first hand) and energy in producing accurate reports. To be sure I teach her as best I can, and we work together on the reports in the name of sustainability - but my own mother, an OB/GYN, does complex surgeries on female reproductive systems everyday, but still barely knows how to operate her own TV that she bought herself. It’s hard to expect Silicon Valley coding level from Cecile, but we’re working on it.
Additionally, since Rwandans love people and I do my best to be friendly and pleasant at work, the mothers have seen to take a liking to me. A recent trainee told me recently that the mothers “love” me which I’m sure was an exaggeration but still stirred gratitude and warmth in me. It’s difficult to explain to Americans how warm the Rwandan people can be, and indeed for some time I viewed it with a cynical skepticism that I now regret. But when they tell you they miss you, even when you’ve never said much more than “Good morning” and “thank you” over the course of your relationship - they really do mean it. In that case, I find myself doing quite well.
American
Ah, the American mind. Is there any other culture that is more ruthless and competitive when it comes to work than America? I miss that competitiveness often. It always pushes you to do more, work harder, and complain less. An idle moment is a wasted moment in the American context, so its no wonder that so many of us volunteers are so hard on ourselves as some days in Rwanda inevitably pass us by.
So I’ll pose the question to you, my (likely) American friend - have I been helping? To help you answer, I’ll offer you one fact that will compel you to say no, and to do so resoundingly and unequivocally.
I take naps.
Yes, its true. I take naps and I actually do so quite often. Is there any other biological function that is more reviled in America than napping? Sleeping, we have begrudgingly admitted, is necessary for human living (to say nothing of its necessity for doing more work) but to do so outside of the prescribed times of acceptability incurs a vicious and righteous moral approbation. Did Steve Jobs nap, does Elon Musk nap, did John F Kennedy nap, does Joe Rogan nap? I can’t say for sure, but I would willing to say that there is no chance on earth any of these great Americans would be willing to bear the opportunity cost that entering a day time REM cycle would incur on their highly productive and successful lives.
In America, napping is for bums and toddlers, and no one else. I know that, and I accept that. I am a 27 year old large man so count me in the former category (although one of my self-deprecating joke of being a “Man-Toddler” was a big hit in a former blog, so maybe I’m both). I am not afraid to say it though. Since I don’t work many hours at the health center, I often have a lot of time in my afternoons and before I get to studying and writing and doing any other things that I have to do, I sometimes take a quick trip into dreamworld to refresh my mind. I nap, therefore I am (a Peace Corps volunteer). Uncle Sam have mercy on me.
But hey, its not all Welfare Queening and woeful languishing. Have I been helping? Well, have I helped you understand what Rwanda is like? If the answer is just a little bit, I’ll accept that as a win. Have I made you crack just the tiniest bit of smile over the course of the blog? Well then I’ve kept you entertained! And what in America is more important than entertainment? Netflix gobbles up something like 30% of the entire world’s internet bandwidth, so I would say that we value it pretty highly. People have been watching and talking about Game of Thrones for what, 8 years now? And they’ve done nothing but torture their fans with abject violence against every decent character. So there ya go, we love our entertainment.
Here’s something to take with you: When your buddies don’t text you back in a timely manner, tell them they have “Umuco Mubi (bad culture)” and you will have insulted them in an obscure tonal language - and you will have picked it up from this very blog. Education and entertainment for my beloved American readers. Pretty cool stuff, eh?
Peace Corps
When it comes to job satisfaction and site happiness for each volunteer, Peace Corps makes sure that you set your bar low. Very low. This isn’t because the experience isn’t profound or fulfilling, but because there is inherently a chance that it might not be for everyone. And since as a volunteer you’ve committed to being in a place for two years among a different culture, its not wise to expect that everything will go smoothly all the time.
But their message sometimes translates into comically defeatist messaging. The one example I remember well was a powerpoint slide of a volunteer planting the seed of a tree, as she sat outside in the hot sun. The next slide was years later in the timeline, and showed many people enjoying the shade of the now robust tree. The slide said something like “Being a Peace Corps volunteer means not enjoying the shade of the trees you plant”, or something along those lines. So you work for two years and don’t enjoy the product of your work. Lovely! Indeed, what I gathered from our training period was that, if your heart continues to beat and electrical signals pass through your brain at a high enough frequency that you can be considered legally alive, then you have successfully become a Hall of Fame volunteer.
I joke of course. They tell you that you may not enjoy the fruits of your labors, because in many cases that is true. Who is to say what impact we have on the kids that we interact with every day? Who is to say what little things people may remember from you, and implement, and the effect that it may have in the long run? It may be a monumental change for the better in a young Rwandan’s life.
So aside from that, what actually passes for a successful Peace Corps volunteer? Integration into ones community, developing language skills and making friends. Have I done all those things? I have! To a degree that is. Kinyarwanda still bedevils me at times, and I still likely spend too much time inside my house - but my neighbors know me and are friendly, I workout with the kids who are now part of my little “team”, and I am perfectly comfortable living here, on the other side of the world.
And so there you have it. Is it a mixed bag? For sure. Has it been fun and cool? Totally. Have I been helping? I’m pretty sure. But don’t quote me on that.