Sanity

On certain days of inactivity, when the omnipresent ennui of life seems to have reached a highpoint, I've wondered how long I can stay at my site for any given amount of time. How long can I stay here at any given time, deprived of contact from the outside world? If the goal of the Peace Corps has to do with building capacity through integrating into another culture, how far does this integration go? The answer for me is surprisingly, and disappointingly, simple: three weeks.

I can stay at my site for about three weeks before I start to break down. About a week and a half into the experience, I am generally okay because there are usually enough things to keep me busy. Past this point, I can begin to feel a change in attitude start to wash over me. I'm quietly angry, I feel less and less interested in my work or studies, and start wishing that I were anywhere but here. Little things start to annoy me in ways that they ordinarily should not. By the end of the third week, I am a distraught and miserable wreck of a man. And yet the cure all for this is simply leaving for a night or two, and being able to speak English fluently with someone who understands what kind of situation you are in. When I go back to site, I feel refreshed and ready to do battle with whatever challenge is in front of me.

I can give you an example. I recently spent three weeks at site. I endured the silent meals with the host family, the monotony of always having to eat bowl after bowl of fish soup, frustrations with obstinate students, being overheated all the time and having to treat the symptoms of this all the time, and constantly having to listen to Khmer popular music that the monks blast from huge speakers at the Wat (The purpose of the last one is to let everyone know that the monks are there and ready to collect alms). When it came to the Friday of the third week, I had to leave. I went to Svwai Sisophon, a town north of mine some 40km from the Thai border, with some of the other Peace Corps volunteers. We joined a St. Patrick's Day party that some of the resident British VSO volunteers were putting on. I can't tell you how much fun I had. We cooked and ate a big dinner, made an attempt to learn some Irish dancing steps, and stayed up until three in the morning talking and playing parlor games. It was terrific. All the anxiety of the past weeks simply vanished from my head by the time I went to sleep that night, and I couldn't remember a time when that last happened. The rest of the weekend we hung out together, used the Internet, and absorbed all the news we could get from the TV news stations about the outside world. It was a great weekend, and I came back to site refreshed and ready to teach.

What is interesting about these little trips I take every so often is that while nothing very exciting happens, I cannot imagine getting through two years without them. In the Peace Corps, it seems that there is always this sort of a dichotomy between being at site and doing much work as you possibly can, and leaving site for reasons of mental health or physical. You feel obligated to be at site for the longest possible time, but you know that if you are really upset you won't be able to do much good. A volunteer in a rotten state can do no good for anyone. A lot of us leave and come back on weekend trips because we have to. The longer I stay at site, the more feel like Kurtz, the madman at the end of the river in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

In a very strange way, I’m rather disappointed with myself. Going off into the jungle to do some impossible task appealed to me from the beginning as a way of proving how tough I was. It was a way of proving how I could handle pretty much anything while being devoid of contact from the outside world. On the contrast, being out there has only proven to me how much I need to be with people of my own kind in order to stay sane. After a significant amount of time, it is impossible not to want the most basic of English conversations with another volunteer.

I probably would not have this problem if I had somehow been able to integrate into Khmer culture. Lord knows I have tried, but the harder I try the more difficult it becomes. In watching the Chinese or Korean soap operas that my host family watches for hours on end, I’ve found them boring and tasteless. I dislike going to weddings or parties of any kind because every single man there will give me orders to drain glass after glass of alcohol. From the constant volley’s of hellos, questions about my marital status, and simply being stared and laughed at through most of the day, it is actually kind of a relief that my host family are the coldest, most unfriendly Cambodians I know. The most frustrating thing is that I have a very good understanding as to why Cambodians behave this way. However, it still does not help me get through the day sometimes.

I have a few friends in the town, and I am incredibly grateful for their company and conversation. Most of them seem to realize now though our talks that I come from a very different place than this, which is a big accomplishment (In ordinary conversation, I have a hard time convincing people that France, America, England, and Australia are actually found at different corners of the earth!) The ones who really understand that I think are the ones who are my closest friends because they don’t see me as a barang as maybe others do.

I think I’ll make it through this year, and maybe next year will be better. Perhaps I will need to take little trips less and less, but for now at least I do not know how I could live without them.