Life in a Picture

10/19/10
Sometimes I have the sneaking suspicion that I am actually living inside a child's drawing. You all know the kind I mean. The drawing with the straight line through the middle of it, with nothing below it, and bright blue skies above it. Puffy white marshmallow clouds often make an appearance. Green bushes and trees and maybe a large pink flower populate the horizon, and perhaps there is a small house with two windows and a triangular roof. And of course, the yellow sun smiles down from a corner, its rays reaching straight down to earth. Sometimes I walk out my door and it is all there before me, in bright Crayola colors. The rocky red-brown dirt stretches out before my feet like a carpet until it meets with a green line of acacia trees and bushes and perhaps a small hut with a cone shaped roof. From the roofs and tops of trees, the sky expands out, a blanket of impossible blueness above me, with the sun beating down its greetings overhead, daring me to be unhappy for even a moment. Really, sometimes the blue of the sky is so bold as to be impertinent, especially when one is trying to enjoy a bad mood. Sometimes the sky tries so hard to be blue that it actually reaches into purple, and then the lavender blossoms of the October trees fade into the sky at the horizon.
Other times, I find myself walking home in quite a different child's picture, this time dampened with the sprinklings of a little black rain cloud following high above me. Blue skies can be seen on all sides as I walk under its shadow, and the sun peeks in from a corner, smiling in amusement at the efforts of the small renegade cloud before quickly reasserting its dominance over the skies.
And now my little black rain cloud has followed me home, and I don't care if my neighbors all think I'm slightly deranged for standing under its showers, determined to get at wet as possible before it goes away. This is my first rain since May.
It's remarkably difficult to take things seriously when you suspect that you live in a child's drawing, but as a Peace Corps volunteer, I am obligated to serve where ever I am placed, imaginary or not, and to be serious on occasion, or I'd never get anything done. It is with great pride then, that I announce that I have managed to be serious long enough to get my first Peace Corps project off the ground and running. Yes, our first baby care class at Madiba Health Post was held this morning. The head nurse and I taught three pregnant women and one breastfeeding mother about the ins and outs of having a healthy pregnancy, from fetal development to nutrition to infection prevention. Our small class didn't have a lot to say, but they answered questions when asked, laughed in all the right places, and even showed special interest in exercise during pregnancy. I'm hoping to figure out a way to incorporate some appropriate stretches and exercises into one of the future classes, so if anyone has any expertise, be sure to let me know. Our turnout wasn't exactly what we'd expected, but it's a good starting place. As people keep telling me, there's a lot to be said for the education of even one person.
When I am not busy being serious, I am often living in dreamland, reading books upon books, which may account for the flights of fancy my imagination has been taking lately. The Peace Corps office has a small library, and volunteers are constantly exchanging books, but even that is not enough to keep up my appetite. I am forced to break my principles and read electronic books on my laptop, downloaded for free through Project Gutenberg, a wonderful site devoted to making all the old classics whose copyrights have expired available to the public at no cost. It has allowed me to read books like Jane Eyre, Peter Pan, and A Tale of Two Cities, and to reread favorites such as the Anne of Green Gables series and Romeo and Juliet. I never will like reading on a screen, though. There's something so satisfying about curling up with an actual book and turning real pages that a computer could never replace it.
And now it is time to be serious again- only this time I am serious about making dinner, since I have brought home boneless chicken breasts, a rare treat in these parts. Living in this culture that can't live without its precious meat, I am somehow becoming more and more of a vegetarian every day, and can't figure out why. I'm in no danger of becoming a real vegetarian though- my current excitement at the idea chicken cutlets is too great for that!