Whee!

This entry was written on Thursday, 18 June 2009, but posted today.

The Peace Corps experience (and probably any experience living abroad) is definitely an emotional rollercoaster. Yesterday was an amazing day – so ordinary – yet amazing.  I taught several great classes, classes that I actually could see progress, see something click in the kids, I could see the gears working as they try to complete tasks or answer questions. After school, I talked with some students about an essay contest that the kids were participating in, mainly class 7 and 8 students (7^th and 8^th grade kids), and it was a great conversation, talking about the various oceans and using the world map that was painted by previous volunteers, and I could feel connections being made.  Last night, I replied to a mass email planning an awesome weekend that we have been planning for the previous month and wrote an email to my brother, at the same time chatting with one of my good friends on IM. Last night, I went to sleep at peace, on the top of the world, or rather the crest of one of the hills of a rollercoaster.

Today I went down the hill screaming with my hands half heartedly up in the air. I knew what was coming, I knew the feeling, the scary-but-fun bit, the heart-dropping-in-the-stomach bit, I knew it would be all right, that I just needed to sit back and enjoy the ride.  I knew how it would all feel being that I have been on a rollercoaster more times than I can count both literally and figuratively, but knowing and experiencing the actual ride are two completely different things.

So, yeah, it was not too bad of a day with the kids, they all more or less behaved pretty well, but it was a bad day for me as a foreigner.  Every cultural different made itself all the more stark to me today.  Every interaction I had with my fellow teachers and my headmaster left me grinding my teeth and my blood boiling.  Everything grates on me, even the adorable kids who stare at the mzungu walking through the town, the stares driving me batty as I stroll into town to pick up a couple of necessities. 

I know the rollercoaster will come back up and I will be on the top of the world again.  I guess this is why we live, why we experience new things, why Peace Corps Volunteers are Peace Corps Volunteers.  It is the something new, something crazy, something exciting that makes a person want to go onto a rollercoaster again and again.  It is the aliveness that you feel when you hop on for the crazy ass ride.  The blood rushing and your out-of-breathness confirm that you are indeed still alive.  Even today, at some of my bad moments, I realized that I would not trade this experience for anything. 

Like my brother said in one of his recent emails, “it’s good to hear that time is flying, it means that life is just hard enough, but not too hard.”

Couldn’t have said it better.