America Faso

The life cycle of a Peace Corps Volunteer is one of my favorite things. It's a chart of volunteers' freak outs and good days over their twenty-seven months of service and it has more loops and turns than a roller coaster. When they arrive in their host country, some people are skeptical that it will accurately reflect their experience. Not me. I'm not one of those there's-always-an-exception people. I like to shove square-shaped people into round holes and look at the overall pattern of behavior. So I wasn't surprised when my service followed the chart almost exactly.

Training was a zig-zag of “Aww, Peace Corps. I'm an amazing person because I'm doing an amazing thing for the world. This is all so amazing” and “Holy crap, we have another French class?! And it's all the way across town at a crappy bar with almost as many kids trying to sell you phone cards as there are flies. Booooo!” After moving to Titao, I rode the roller coaster up as I got more and more comfortable with teaching, then plummeted down when I hit the one year mark and realized I'd have to do it all over again. I climbed up again during my second year teaching, enjoying being more confident in everything I did. Drawing giant amoebas on the board, explaining complicated things like photosynthesis and the difference between asexual and sexual reproduction, keeping the class from rioting when I handed back tests, grading intimidating stacks of tests in record time—I could do it all.

Now I'm supposed to be on a down slope as I freak out about leaving. But thanks to the weirdly-timed vacation, I'm not. Instead, the psychology lobe in my brain has been lit up while I've compared the two countries and how I react to them. Americans use all their money, creativity, and hedonism to make their world as insanely colorful, comfortable, and interesting as they can. There's so much to look at—fancy shoes, hybrid cars, colorful billboards (not to mention the goat-sized house cats). When I came back to Burkina, I looked down at people's cracked feet stuffed into broken, paper-thin flip flops; I got into a gross old Mercedes taxi with sagging seats and no seatbelts or door handles; and I looked at all the hilariously bad drawings advertising telecenters and barber shops. But then I realized I was wearing the Burkinabé flip flops I'd felt so self-conscious wearing in America. I no longer had to remind myself to reach for the seatbelt and door handle. And the crappy pictures of dudes with misshapen heads sitting in barber chairs were familiar and comforting. Even though I probably looked like I knew what I was doing in America, I didn't feel like it. At times I felt as self-conscious as I had in junior high. But back in Burkina, despite everyone staring at the white woman—what's she going to do next?!—I felt completely at ease.

It's very strange to feel more comfortable in a foreign country than in your own country. But I think it means I've become well integrated into Burkinabé culture without even realizing it. And I had such a nice time in America I'm looking forward to going back after I've had time to say goodbye to Burkina. So I guess I'm a little more square-shaped than I'd thought.