A Dry Spell

*Surgeon General’s Warning* Extreme anger, especially in the form of long blogger rants, might be bad for your health, whether or not you’re pregnant.

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I was feeling really optimistic and motivated for about a month. Now I'm having a relapse of sorts. It's like this...

When I look around at the piles of fly carcasses that my arachnid housemates leave for me, I don't at all appreciate their help against our common enemy. Nor do I have the strength to do more than wish they'd all die, because even if I’m successful in knocking the offenders to the floor and smashing them under my dirty flip-flops, their nasty little pus-sack bodies glue their nasty twitchy hair-like legs to the floor, followed by several large drops of my sweat splashing down, and it's all just mess upon mess. Better to sweep the gray pellets out the door and let them gather again.

When I’m forced out of my hard-won slumber by the gut-wrenching wails and glass-shattering screams of my toddler neighbor for a three-hour duration every morning, every side of bed is the wrong side. They should throw him in the river. It's dry season, though, and throwing little Kiptoo "into the river" would just mean throwing him on the dirt. He would just wail some more, but at least he’d be out of hearing range.

When one community/church group after another approaches me for help in obtaining livestock, clean water, or money, then feigns enthusiasm when I clarify that I’m an HIV/AIDS teacher, then never wants to see me again, I wonder why I even pretend that knowledge is worth a shilling.

When the corrupt, jobless man I've dubbed "The Orphan Profiteer" complains about working "so hard, so so hard" and not being able to obtain food for the 20 kids at his home, but I know through my own sources that it’s because he's already spent almost a million shillings (approx. $14,000) of unmonitored aid money and lost the support of the community because he wrested control completely out of their hands and they know it's not safe to give him their money anymore... When this man repeatedly seeks me out to ask my friends in the US to donate money or buy him a 3 million shilling tractor, then smiles condescendingly as I explain why those are unviable ideas... When he denies the validity of every kind of advice that I try to give him and then I find out he’s also ignored the advice of wise and experienced community leaders that are surely more convincing than I... When I read about corruption in the government leading to the loss of tens of billions of shillings and the big circus show that the government puts on as if all the "investigators" themselves (just some hand-picked Members of Parliament) aren't corrupt, and meanwhile 10% of the country's population is currently dependent on aid food... When you hear villagers that you know and trust say that they would do it too if they had the chance... When I'm given the argument over and over from Kenyans that this dog-eat-dog culture is a justifiable result of poverty, something that I couldn't possibly understand, I allow myself to believe a lot of very awful things that I'm too ashamed to say to anyone but other Peace Corps Volunteers. Even then I say it with a heavy regret, that I could let anyone see my so ugly.

When I make a mandatory vehicle transfer in Kericho on my way to the "Ching Chong Ching Chong!" gauntlet of a city called Kisumu, and the perfectly sober man, two feet from my face, who has just bellowed his fifteenth “CHIIIIIIIINAAAAAAAA” at me with as much gusto as his first one a minute ago, doesn’t seem to be ready to quit, and my fellow waiting passengers giggle, [take a deep breath,] my thoughts of this country fly to hatred and react with my shame to create a pressure buildup behind my tongue that threatens to erupt in a grand display of Mother Nature’s Most Destructive Glory*, swallowing everything in its path. It took me seven months to be strong enough not to explode at the plethora of men like him, or the plethora of passengers like those passengers, but somehow when I’ve been able to contain my inner volcano and not let it ruin the rest of my day, I still feel like I've failed. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t bear to make eye contact with any of them. Maybe it’s because I know I’m doing nothing to narrow the racial and cultural chasm between us.

I’ve gotten over crying and yelling and pounding my fist on my coffee table. But I feel like I’m regressing as a human being, because I've lost a lot of compassion.

The droplets of comfort I eek out for my mental health are only bitter lozenges that leave me thirsty. “It’s okay,” I think, “I guess it makes sense that a slow-killing disease isn’t on the top of their priorities list when they need to worry about how they’re going to get water for the next three months.” “It’s okay,” I say, as I head out for the first time each day, “maybe I’ll get lucky, and never have kids.” It’s ok. NYC is inhospitable to spiders. It’s ok. I’ll find a local donor to provide food and blankets for those kids, because at the end of the day, at least they have a home. It’s ok, because even though I’ve gotten a fair share of ching-chongs and go-back-to-chinas and you-damned-chinks living in Phoenix most of my life, and I sincerely fear that if it ever happens again I won’t do my usual hanging-my-head-in-silent-shame-and-continuing-on-my-way but will instead black out and wake up in prison and have this conversation with my state-appointed lawyer:

“I’m afraid that you don’t have much of a case. It doesn’t look good.”
“But I don’t understand what happened. I remember a car full of teenagers chanting, ‘Ching chong chang chong cho,' and then... nothing!”
“Well, there were twenty witnesses in that parking lot. By the time they pulled you off the young man, it was too late.”
“I... I killed him?”
“You pulled him out of the window...”
“How..."
“You knocked him to the ground...”
“No...”
“And with your bare hands... you pulled his esophagus clear out of his throat.”
“No! No no no, it can’t be true!”
“It took six people to hold you down until you stopped thrashing and screaming.”
“I was screaming?”
“You kept screaming, 'You of all people should know better!'”

...even though racial hatred is still very real in the US and I'm afraid that I've become capable of breaking out a lecture of rage at anyone I think should know better, it won't ever happen, because I hope never to live anywhere but New York City ever again, and there I can trust that only the clinically insane will harass me for being Chinese. Surely they deserve my pity and not my anger.

Oh, my beloved New York! I am on my knees, washing your feet with my tears. My heart will always swell with the languages and cultures that beat in your veins!!

In those moments when I’m about to dive headlong into The Land of Giving Up, I turn around and see the cast of people (Kenyan and American) working so hard to lift up this community, and I am ashamed of myself. Was I really about to give up that easily? They inspire me to believe that people are good, that there’s hope for the sensitive human race, for our abused planet. I ponder my feeling of impotence, the way it comes from my inexperience, my impatience, my fears, my selfishness, and also from understanding that I'll forever be an outsider in this place. But I can’t yet indulge the thought of quitting, because that tired little grain of hope is still there, digging into my side, sharp and desperate, urging me to get back up and try harder.

I'm tired, though. Can't I stay in bed just a little bit longer...

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* I was thinking for a minute that they should rename HIV to MNMDG, and that it would help people take it more seriously, but then I remembered that I’m the biggest and stupidest jerk that ever lived, and that more negative press would be only work against us. So instead, I propose we pass a law in the US that “Mother Nature’s Most Destructive Glory!” be plastered on all ads for tobacco products, with the provision that this slogan must fill at least 60% of billboards and magazine ads, 40% of packaging space, and be yelled emphatically at 110% of the volume of the loudest other part of any TV commercial. Aw heck, just rename all the brands to “Mother Nature’s Most Destructive Glory!” It might not be all that truthful, but who could resist something so catchy?