Secrets

Nothing in Peace Corps is a secret. We enter in classes, 30 or 40 at a time and spend two months as a group before splitting up for site. These friendships interweave with others we meet later: volunteers in our area and those we meet at cross sector meetings. The result is a strong and flexible net of relationships that serves to share information far more effectively than any calling tree or email list. Each of us possesses one or two friends in every sector of work and region of the country that could be privy to information ahead of another and so the prospect of keeping information quarantined or isolated is more than challenging, it’s almost impossible.
In this case, we know we are being sent back to the States a half hour before the director in Dar Es Salaam calls to tell us that we need to have an ‘emergency meeting.’ As it happens in this case, the link that puts us one step ahead of the administration is mine. Rachel, having been shipped back to her site from Dar last week, texts me from Voi. Our director, Timothy Kibet, has just called her to let her know that the folks in Dar are being sent back to the states on Saturday. Why volunteers in-country merit this information before the actual individuals being shipped home is yet another mysterious facet of foreign federal bureaucracy. As we head towards a visit with a youth group in Dar, her text elicits a yelp of alarm; an exclamation of significance sufficient to immediately elicit probing by the others in the car. There are few people I trust here as much as Rachel, but such is the tremendous impact of this information that I feel compelled to call to confirm.
I miss Rachel. Phone calls are expensive here and I miss the sound of her voice, but the expressions on the faces of the others in the car cut the call short. Within a bureaucracy decisions are often opaque and sudden; in the effort to predict what is likely, we cling to even the most minor scraps of information, building vast chains of inferences out of tiny bits of data. In such an environment, the expression on my face is enough to quiet the car, to create such a tangible desire to know that the air seems pregnant with anticipation.
Talking to Rachel later in the day, she asked me how everyone took it.
“Like themselves,” I answered.
Each of us has our own manner of thinking these things through, of finding some mental ground to pace or dig or pile as we process any fact that carries so many others in its wake. Fact: I am going home. Fact: I will not be getting my stuff from site. Fact: I will not see my neighbors or friends in Kenya again. Fact: I will have spent a year preparing to come here and only 8 months in country. Fact: It is January in Chicago and the warmest clothing I have is a collared long sleeve shirt.
It’s only been three weeks of uncertainty. Not even a month since we had to begin adjusting our assumptions of the following day. (Strangely, the shift from circumstances dictated by the mob, to circumstances dictated by my government, made little difference in my own experience of personal impotence.) In such a short time, we have adjusted; we have begun to sit comfortably in a total vacuum of known facts, watching the possible futures fork out and over one another in an endless cluttered knot.
And so we each cope however we normally do as this fact forces us to adjust yet again. There’s unbridled optimism. Sarcasm and frustration. James and Marcus take the front seats, put on their headphones and go to sleep. I make to do lists in my head. I keep thinking of bank-robber movies, of tumblers in a lock falling into place with a sudden and unexpected click-clack, this massive and impenetrable vault sliding open with a slow, smooth, mechanical motion of inevitable finality. Suddenly things are tremendously clear, at least in comparison to an hour before.
Our visit to the youth center is perhaps the most awkward half hour of my life. It starts with each of us saying our names and where we are from. For the first time, in the past tense.
“My name is Nate and I used to work in Kabarnet.”
After that comes a question and answer session where our natural sense of conversational equilibrium kicks in only intermittently. In between staring vacantly into space, wondering about how much snow there is on the ground right now at our home of record, we stammer out a series of pointless and vague questions. We do not listen to the answers. We are rude. We do not care.
They ask us about language. Does anyone speak Kiswahili? Almost every day for the past 5 months, I have done flash cards twice a day. I have almost 1000 of them sitting in a tin box on my desk in Talai. I have filled two notebooks with exercises from Simplified Kiswahili. I spent the first two months in my village refusing to speak in English, training my neighbors and co-workers to speak to me only in Kiswahili. I was very lonely during that time. I wasn’t capable of having a satisfying conversation. But I stuck with it because I wanted to learn the language. I caused trouble for friends I visited at their sites.
“They keep asking about you. They want to know why I don’t speak Kiswahili. You’re a pain in the ass and you were only there for half a day.”
Answering questions in Kiswahili, it occurs to me that this will be one of the my last chances to use this thing I have worked so hard to acquire. In the grey, dark cold of a Chicago winter it won’t take long for verb conjugation, adjective ordering, and possessive prefixes to decompose in my recollection. I imagine a day far in the future returning here and stumbling over the phrases and accent that flow so easily through me now, like an runner gasping their way to the top of a hill, remembering their younger self and the easy strides that carried them.
Our meeting ends unceremoniously and we pile back into the vehicle to return to the Peace Corps Tanzania office for our ‘emergency meeting.’ We all move through cycles of silence and action. Speaking aloud to ourselves as much as to others.
The difference between potentiality and actual reality is astonishing. I had decided a month ago that I would likely be going home by summer. Before the election and the consolidation, the evacuation, I knew I was going home. So I have an easy time of it compared to my friends and colleagues in the car next to me. They weren’t prepared to make this decision, much less have it made for them. All the same, I am astonished at the endless set of options that have collapsed into one irreducible set of facts and the tremendous and wide reaching consequences of cementing even one thing. I’m already thinking through job options and unpacking my clothes from the basement. Eating stuffed pizza and walking the dog. Organizing my photos. Reacquainting myself with my music. Getting a new cell phone. Can I get my old number back?
When leaving for Kericho before New Year’s, I specifically chose to lighten my bag as much as possible. Stuffed into rusted out Nissan Mini-buses, knees jammed into seat backs, head brushing the ceiling, the equatorial sun glaring through the window: the comfort a second bag affords you when you arrive isn’t worth the cost of getting there. I neglected to even bring the charger for my phone or camera batteries. I will arrive home with one standard sized backpack. And only three quarters full. I won’t have to check any baggage. So there’s that.
I imagine walking thru O’Hare. I already know what outfit I will be wearing (since there aren’t many options). My shoes coated with dust from another continent. My hair lightened by the sun. It’s funny, but I am starting to realize that I imagined coming home much more clearly than I imagined my time here. Though I never imagined anything like this.