My life here is a combination of the TV show drama, Orange is the New Black, and Wild, a book about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. It sounds awful to say, but hear me out. I just read the book version of OITNB and there are some quotes that serve to explain what I mean. Peace Corps is not jail, I can always leave. I wasn't forced to be here and I am not trapped in prison with thousands of convict women. But many of the sentiments expressed in Piper Kerman's novel have struck a chord with me. And for a synopsis on why Wild rings true with me, check here.
"I had only the most tenuous idea of what might happen next, but I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn't terrified - really genuinely brave, constantly reminding myself that yes I can."From taking that first step and joining Peace Corps despite all the what ifs, to boarding that plane in DC, to pushing through the hardest days of training, to making my site and projects work for me, to coping with all the hardships, bullshit, loss, drama, etc, I've been brave.
"I nodded, not understanding a thing."This was every single day for the first six months.
"By now conflicting things were churning around in my brain and my guts. Had I ever been so completely out of my element as I was here in Danbury? In a situation where I simply didn't know what to say or what the real consequences of a wrong move might be?"Cultural competence takes time!
"There are a dizzying number of official and unofficial rules, schedules and rituals. Learn them quickly or suffer the consequences, such as: being thought an idiot, being called an idiot, getting on another prisoner's bad side, getting on a guard's bad side, being forced to clean the bathrooms, eating last in line when everything edible is gone...Everything else - the unofficial rules - you learn by observation, inference, or very cautious questioning of people you hope you can trust."Peace Corps rules, cultural rules, DR guidelines, rules for friendships, rules for enjoying yourself, rules for work, rules of engagement. So so much riding on a simple understanding of the way society works...complex!
"It was easy to tell the difference between women who were lonely and wanted comfort, attention and romance and a real, live lesbian: there were a few of them. There were other big barriers for long-term lovers, like having sentences of dramatically different lengths, living in different dorms, or becoming infatuated with someone who wasn't actually a lesbian."Except in this quote, change lesbian for Dominican, or HCN, host-country national. Life is boring in the campo.
"I settled into rituals, which improved the quality of my existence immeasurably. The ritual of coffee-making and drinking was one of the first."Exactly.
"Larry came to see me every week, and I lived for those visits - they were the highlight of my life in Danbury, a chest-filling affirmation of how much I loved him. Some women never got visits because they had effectively said goodbye to the outside world. No children, no parents, no friends, nobody. Some of them were halfway around the world from home, and some of them didn't have a home."I cannot express how much texts, emails, phone calls, Skype dates and best of all, visits, mean to me. These are the things that keep me going, push me forward, make me sane. Thank you!
"Any story you heard from another prisoner had to be taken with about a pound of salt. Think about it: put this many women in a confined space, give them little to do and a lot of time - what else can you expect? Still, true or not, gossip helped to pass the time. I had no way of verifying whether it was gospel truth or not, like most things I heard in prison, but I understood that these stories held their own accuracy. They described our world as it was and as we experienced it. Their lessons always proved invaluable and inviolable."Gossip runs this town, currency of sorts. There are always those "in the know" and those telling you what not to do to not get talked about. It's exhausting!
"I had learned a lot since arriving in prison five months ago: how to clean house using maxipads, how to write a light fixture, how to discern whether a duo were best friends or girlfriends, when to curse someone in Spanish, knowing the difference between "feelin' it" (good) and "feelin' some kind of way" (bad), the fastest way to calculate someone's good time, how to spot a commissary ho a mile away, and how to tell which guards were players and which guards were nothin' nice. I even mastered a recipe from the prison's culinary canon: cheesecake."These are mostly all true to my case, but I have instead learned how to bake a mean banana bread!
"I was too engrossed in prison life, that the "real world" was fading too much into the background, and I probably needed to read the paper more religiously and write more letters. Focusing on the positive was hard, but I knew that I had found the right women at Danbury to help me do it. A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always."How will I re-integrate? How weird will I be when I get home? What will I not know? Will there bye reserve culture shock? Will I remember how to work, use a computer, drive a car?
"Certain things brought my absence from the outside world into sharp relief, like once-in-a-lifetime events that would happen without me. The world kept going despite the fact that I had been moved to an alternate universe."Weddings, birthdays, deaths, events, graduations...PCVs miss many of these.
"The more friends I had, the more people wanted to feed me; it was like having a half-dozen Jewish mothers. I was not one to turn down a second dinner, as you could never be quite sure when the next good one would be served. But despite my high-calorie diet, I was getting pretty competent at yoga, I was lifting eighty-pound bags of cement at work, and running at least thirty miles a week, so I wasn't getting fat."Amen sister.
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