Birds flyin’ high, sun in the sky, breeze driftin’ on by, etc.
(I know, I’ve posted a lot lately. It’s my turn for internet [until tomorrow], so I’m upping a backlog of stuff while I can!)
It’s funny how the most menial or otherwise-insignificant tasks (as in; tasks that, were I living in any other place and time but here and now, would be trivial) can make me feel so accomplished. Today I’ve:
- Been first Master to Assembly (granted this is true for every weekday; it’s at 6:45am I would like to add!)
- Taught class. Detoured from ICT for half an hour in the direction of World History. (It’s a great story, if a little shocking. Ask me later.)
- Gone to market (see previous entry)
- Finally done (some of) this week’s laundry (rain began to fall out of a CLEAR SKY as I hung the last piece. It was awesome.)
- Put beans to soak for tomorrow’s cooking. (I always forget and end up missing lunch and having lupper at 3pm)
- Glutted thoroughly on PB & Banana sandwiches (with powdered milk-milk on the side)
- Finished the work I started yesterday - now have a (rough) week-by-week outline of this term, along with a few skeleton lesson plans for each week. It will help me 1) stick with the syllabus, and 2) remember where, when, and how I want to deviate from syllabus (which is to say… a lot)
- Put class rosters and grading sheets into a spreadsheet. Organizing is fun!
In any case, I think I’m posting this because at the moment I am really in a good mood. For no specific reason at all, but having actual classes to teach helps. Feeling usefully accomplished (small-small) does wonders for a Type-A psyche. Also, after talking to my mom (Hi Mom!) today, I realized that my last few entries have been somehow less-than-perky. My intentions with blogging this Journey were never to give the day-by-day run down of Life As a PCV offered by so many other Peace Corps blogs (not that I’m knocking them at all, that’s just not completely why I’m doing this). Neither was it to offer sugar-coated pseudo-introspective reviews. Rather (oh heck, why am I doing this again?!), I wanted a way to track myself as I learned from and grew out of whatever I experience in the next 27 23 months, and not all of my paper-journal entries need be privatized. I’m sharing with You, dearest, as my family or friends of various stripes - all of whom I love and respect enough to want input from (be it commiserative, remonstrative, bored-ative, whatever).
Nevertheless, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m sitting around here moping day after day, so I thought I should offer relief from only posting the lower (not necessarily lesser) side of my experiences. I’m actually enjoying myself. I give myself a solid 70:30 ratio of content-warm-fuzzy vs. woeful-despondent-hopeless days. Considering the horrors I sometimes hear from my training group-mates, I think I’m doing pretty well. I know I’m “spoiled” as far as site placement goes (Beach Corps = winnar), and my school is definitely upper-echelon as PCV-schools go. There’s a lot of crap to take, but there’s a lot of good interspersed. I’m surrounded by a lot of people, and have no privacy — but a lot of the people I’m in contact with are good people, and privacy can be found in the strangest of places (I take super-long bucket baths, for instance). There are women in my market who dash me bananas before I even ask to buy some. There are security guards at the gate to my school who hit on me and ask me point-blank to “join them in bed” - but there is also a guard who strolled with his little boy to campus after dinner, just to make sure I locked the door when my housemate was out of town. There are teachers who ignore my contributions and exclude me from conversations solely because of my sex, who have no interest in my presence as a coworker at all - but there are also teachers who wake up early to get to my door by 5:30am, on the chance I want to go running with them, because they know I would go anyway and they want a non-sleazy situation in which to offer friendship outside of school. There are countless strangers who chant Obruni kokoo maa che, (etc) taunts every time I walk past - and there are toothless old ladies who offer me minerals (soda) every time I pass their house, and say they are trying to “spoil me to never leave Ghana”. Most incredibly: there are motivated teachers at this school. There are motivated students in my classrooms. Not many, but enough. There is vast potential for growth and change — not just outside of my ego’s orbit, either. I’m happy. I’m blessed. I’m still here.
Be still, and know that I am God.
That’s something I’ve been doing a lot of this month (I mentioned it a few posts back). It’s good advice, that I’ve found precious hard to follow for an indefinite amount of time. If you look it up, though (hint: Psalm 46), read the entire chapter: I really like David’s description of the Untame Lion I follow. It’s nice to remember there are countless facets of unfathomable intricacy to my God: there’s a lot more to things than a half-asleep Tame One holding a checklist, keeping score. Actually… I think there will be more on that in a future entry. Oddly, I need to be less-perky to hash out what I want to say about that topic. Stay tuned.
