Doing fine again...

“::::: and it is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon :::::” –Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
I just read that passage today, and it immediately struck home. It affected me especially because doing what I’m doing, doing what every other Peace Corps volunteer the world over is doing is hard. Every single one of us has the choice to pretend to do what we’re here to do, i.e. go through the motions and act the part, instead of actually accomplishing what we only vaguely knew we wanted, no, needed to do before we came. I know a couple of volunteers, and I am guilty of being one myself at times, that do their job and leave. They let their local language lag, or stay holed up in their room locked into their computer or iPod because they’re the only things in the entire country, other than the other Americans, that make any sense. I can either make this ‘thing’, this ‘idea’ or ‘goal’ real inside of me or I can wake up every single day and go to work pretending that I’m doing exactly what I came here to do; conning myself into believing that I’m doing great, when in reality that greatness is just over the horizon, mocking my ignorance. But what we’re here to do is more than a job, it’s more than a life…it’s…
Melancholic introspective ramblings aside, I never want to hear the words “svet jok” as an excuse for something not working ever, ever, EVER again. It happened when my marshutka broke down on a snowy mountain pass at night on my way back from Bishkek, and it happened again today. I understand if “no electricity” is an excuse for something not working that requires electricity. But just because the electricity is out is no reason to not get my package from behind the fucking door! Sorry. I’m still a little wound up. I’ve tried to get a package from the local Post Office that my friend sent me three times now. The first time it was “no, come back tomorrow.” Well, I have a job that doesn’t exactly work around the three hour lunch breaks that seem to be government norms so my next option was the weekend. But, like Post Offices at home, their weekend hours are beyond decipherable so that didn’t quite work out either. Today I lucked out and my Apa informed me that I couldn’t go to my English Club because our neighbor was joining the army so we had to go to a party at their house. Luckily I managed to weasel my way out of there before too late and walked to the Post Office two hours before they were supposed to close. Remember, there just so happens to be no electricity. No matter (I think), retrieving my package shouldn’t require such modern luxuries. I’m fairly certain that packages have been sent around the world without such a cloud-created-convenience for at least the past, oh I don’t know, thousand-plus Goddamn years so why should today be any different? Well, when I get there that lady says “no, come back tomorrow.” She’s helping other people, why not me? I get a little flustered and enquire further. To which I’m met with an abrupt “svet jok.” Yes, it indeed appears that Post Offices the world over consist of rude people who genuinely don’t give a shit because they make government benefits and you and your package can kindly fuck off! It wouldn’t be so bad if this was the first time this had happened, but I had a little liquid courage (I was just at a party) and decided to press the issue. Was I getting obnoxious? No. Should I have let it go? Yes, maybe. But I was on a roll and my diatribe climaxed precisely at the moment that I saw an old lady leave the back-room smiling because she had just received her package! Well, now they had no excuse. I proceeded to brilliantly argue that if the lack of electricity has temporarily disabled their arms and legs from retrieving my package how had they been able to recover from their temporary paralysis in time to give the nice old lady her precious parcel? To this my friends, they had no excuse. Instead, they took it one step further and informed me that it wasn’t so much the lack of electricity per se, as much as it was that they were out of the bloody forms for me to sign! “Well,” I asked “how’d that nice old lady waltzing out of here with her arms snuggly wrapped around her new present manage to defeat this red-taped behemoth of bullshit bureaucracy?” (not in so many words, of course). “Oh,” the electricless woman informed me “she just wrote down her information here.” At which point they handed me a piece of paper. I left five minutes later with my battle-won spoils and never looked back.
If it weren’t for the generous helping of candy inside (really, it’s amazing what you miss when you live abroad for an extended period of time) I’d probably have been writing this with slightly more venom. As it stands, my belly is full and I’m as ever amazed at what in the hell I’m doing here. It’s easy, no, it’s extremely easy to get disenfranchised with this whole endeavor. I’m in fact only writing about today’s lovely incident because the aforementioned quote made me take some stock of my situation and view it a little bit more…abstractly. I could have just as easily written about the countless other little cultural idiosyncrasies that I encounter every hour of every day with just as much detail, and quite possibly a bit more sarcasm, though I wouldn’t want my loyal readers to think that I’m just having fun here:) I was mad. I was mad at the disrespect that I received in such a cold manner, I was mad at the cultural red-tape I had to cut through just to sign my name and get the hell out of there, but more than that I was mad because I have absolutely nowhere to go for any sympathy. Other volunteers help, sure. But there’s a point when the bitching gets too negative and instead of the cathartic experience one craves it actually just brings you down more. I’ve decided to leave all of that alone for a bit. Instead, after opening my package and devouring the contents, I holed up in my room with my American books, my American computer, my American iPod and every other American device from home that I fully understand and am completely comfortable with in order to make precisely the same mistake so many who’ve come before me have made. Today I willingly climbed the ‘conning tower’. Sure, I had some encouragement from my frustration and I gladly leapt up the final two steps in time to reach my personally projected plateau of defeat, but I certainly went blindly. I didn’t realize what I was doing until I was three more chapters deep in Mr. Wolfe’s masterpiece. After I read that quote I realized that I wasn’t feeling any ‘better’. I was still just as frustrated. Only instead of dealing with my frustration head-on, like I would in America, I hid in my room, shut the door and escaped. I conned myself into believing that what I was doing was right when in reality I was even further from making ‘that thing permanent inside’ of me than I was before this whole debacle.
I thought about it, then closed my book and went outside to socialize with my host-family. I didn’t bitch about the Post Office lady, though I did make a quip or two about Kyrgyzstan’s president who “assured” the country we’d have power all winter…they quickly added their own carefully worded comments in agreement with that as well. But for the most part, I integrated. Not completely, mind you. Today, like every other day, is a work in progress. I’ll actually never be that far gone because such a commitment would involve copious amounts of Bishbarmark consumption that my gastrointestinal tract will never be able to handle. I did however accept where I am, what I’m doing, and am as ever getting closer to answering why…or in the words of Mr. Wolfe, now I’m “back on the bus.”