Blood and Milk

It’s okay to quit the Peace Corps.

I’ve gotten a couple of email lately that made me really nervous. I responded to them personally, but it made me want to say something here, on this blog. I know a lot of Peace Corps volunteers read this, so:

It’s okay to quit Peace Corps. It’s okay to ET – leave your stint early. It’s okay to leave after two weeks if you can tell the situation is wrong. It’s okay to leave after 18 months if something is making you nervous. It’s your life, and it matters, and it’s okay to get out early.

Leaving Peace Corps won’t ruin your life. 33% of all PCVs do it. It won’t ruin your career, either. I promise. Not even if you want to work in development. It will not ruin your dream of having meaningful work and an international life.

If you want to leave Peace Corps and you think you can’t because it’ll ruin your career, email me. Alanna.shaikhATgmail.com. I’ll help you figure out what to do. Not some paid careers list thing, just me, pro bono, helping another person because I like to help.

Don’t do anything drastic. It’s okay. Your life isn’t ruined and it isn’t over and you are not a failure. Sometimes things are just a bad fit and that’s all right. No one will hold it against you.

We all make mistakes. I left a job I loved because it was the wrong job for me at that point in my life. I got fired from my very first job out of college. I flaked out on an internship with a woman I respected and I think she still dislikes me as a result. I cancelled an internship with CARE Egypt because I needed to go home already and not be in Cairo any more. And I still got to go have a whole career full of stuff I love to do with brilliant colleagues surrounding me.

You thought Peace Corps was the right fit for you and it’s not. Just fix your error, get out, and find the next step in your life. I really will help you if you like. My email’s right up there.

Don’t do anything drastic. Your life is not over. Neither is your career. Don’t make any dangerous decisions because you feel bad right now. Just get home, wherever that is to you, and find your next step once you get there.

Don’t stay if you fear for your safety, and don’t stay if you’re afraid you’ll harm yourself. Nothing is worth that.

(photo credit: marysuephotoeth)

The other day, I was talking to a friend about my concept of the hourglass. Basically, when you move to a new place, your hourglass is full on top with tiny grains of optimism and rage. Over time, those grains slowly trickle away until there’s nothing left. Different places make the sand fall at different rates, but your hourglass is always active. The grains are always falling.

Once your sand is gone, you’re burned out. You have no rage to fuel a passion for change, and no optimism that you can be part of making things better. You may put in your time going through the motions of your job, but it’s minimal. You have no spark. No drive. No willingness to go beyond your job description. Your work may be good enough, and it may not.

When you move to a new location, you flip the hourglass. You start over with your energy and optimism and righteous rage. You’re on fire once again, not burned out. Self-aware people with choices in their lives recognize when their hourglass is getting low. They stay ahead of job options and plan their lives so that they move before they’re out of sand.

I have believed in the metaphor of the hourglass for a long time.

I realized today, though, that the whole hourglass idea doesn’t match my own experience, or the things I’ve argued before on this blog.

This afternoon I walked down the street by my office to get an afternoon snack. (Breastfeeding takes calories. Feed and water your nursing moms, people.) I was thinking how nice autumn in Central Asia is, with the cool nights and the way the light comes in across the horizon. Eleven years ago when I moved to Uzbekistan, I thought this region didn’t have fall. How could it be a different season when it was still 85 degrees out? But I recognize autumn now, and I love it.

Ten years ago I didn’t know why the holiday meals in this region are so similar to the everyday meals. I didn’t know which kind of canned potato chip tasted better, and I didn’t know that their availability depends on the size of the city you’re in, not the size of the store. I didn’t have Soviet transport structures memorized. I couldn’t taste the difference between regional varieties of plov.

Today, I can tell what capital I’m in by the smell of the dust. I’ve talked to farmers and teachers and doctors and factory workers from Bokhara to Bishkek to Turkmenbashi. I’ve swum in Issy-Kul and the Caspian, mountain streams near Dushanbe and the underground lake just outside Ashgabat. I’ve thrown up in every model of Soviet airplane still flying. (I’ve spent two full pregnancies here.)

That’s got to make me better at my work.

Ten months from now, my contract and my husband’s end. We don’t know where we’ll be next. It could be another stint in Central Asia – we’ve never lived in Bishkek, after all. But odds favor some other part of the world. I have no shortage of transferable skills; I’m not worried about that. I’ll find a job. (Email if you’d like to give me one.) A job I love, even.

But will I ever again stay long enough to know what the fruits of the cedar trees look like, or memorize the sunset on New Year’s eve? Will I be as good at what I do if I can’t?

(photo credit: OpenDemocracy)

Yesterday, my office had a retreat. We’re in the middle of a messy, stressful workplanning process, so we took a day to relax in the sun (and finalize some of our logframes). During lunch, after the swimming, my colleague A turned to me. I don’t know if it was the vodka or the Tajik sunshine, but he said to me, “I started doing surgery as a medical student. It was the war, and they needed every hand.”

I was pretty sun-dazed myself, and I answered, “Did you save people?”

“Some people,” he said. “Not all of them. I remember every one I lost.”

After that we took the baby swimming for the first time, and then he lay on a towel in the shade, naked and kicking his feet. About 80% of my colleagues are doctors, and an undressed human being was irresistible to them. They’d walk by, stop, and do a brief physical. I now know his eyes are good, he is properly symmetrical, and he’s big for his age. (Actually, I knew all that already, but verification is always nice.) I was quizzed about my breastfeeding practices, my plans for introducing supplementary foods, and where he sleeps.

That led naturally into long conversations about Tajik children. They tend to fall off their growth curve when supplementary food is introduced; parents give them too much bread and not enough food with caloric value. We brainstormed ways to educate mothers, and grandmothers, about feeding young children. We want every baby to be as chunky and happy as my little guy is.

It was a really good day, the kind of day that reminds you why you choose to do this.

Driving home to Dushanbe, I was suntanned and contented and full of plov. When my husband called, I answered the phone happily. He told me that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs won’t renew the baby’s visa on a technicality. The visa expires Saturday. We need to leave the country by then and reapply for the visa from outside the country.

So now we’re scrambling to find a place two American citizens can get to easily from Dushanbe, without a visa, since the baby doesn’t have any visas yet besides the Tajik. (Odds currently favor Frankfurt, though I am pulling for Dubai since I haven’t been there since I was a kid.) It’s going to be expensive, and disrupt my work, and I’ll miss seeing my older son, who comes back from Iowa on Monday. Plus I don’t know how we’ll resolve the visa technicality even from outside the country.

Up, down. That’s the life. It’s worth it, but this sucks.

******

(photo credit: Wayan Vota)

Chosen because when I did a Flickr search for “naked baby” and it gave me a picture of someone I know, it seemed like a sign.

Recently, the IPA blog and the Ghana Diary blog brought up an interesting discussion about the term “in the field.” They questioned its appropriateness. The core of the argument was that the phrase creates a sense of otherness. Specifically, if you’re a local partner in a development project, how do you feel when your own home is referred to as “the field”? What does that say about the true nature of your partnership?

I think I agree with Noompa at Ghana Diary. It’s hard to disagree with the scenario that he lays out: it is alienating in the word’s truest sense to hear your own territory referred to as the intimidating unknown.

It has always seemed silly to me when people refer to my own “field experience.” I’ve spent eight out of the last ten years of my life living in Central Asian capitals. I’ve spent more of my adult life in Tashkent than any other city. And let me stress that I have been living in capitals. I’ve been in houses and apartments, often nicer than anything I lived in as a grad student. I’ve had heat, hot water, and even air conditioning on a mostly-regular basis. DC felt a whole lot more like roughing it than Central Asia ever has.

Calling time in the developing world “field time” implies two things to me: that it is temporary, and that it is difficult. Both of those are often false.

But  is “the field” a problematic term that serves a useful purpose? Are there other, better ways to convey the idea? I think there are. I suspect it’s one of those catch-all terms that serves less purpose than we think.

I mentioned a while ago that I no longer use the word “beneficiaries” unless I am contractually obligated to do it. It has been a hard transition, as a writer. There’s no real synonym for beneficiaries.  Instead, every time I am writing, I have to stop and think about who the person or group I am referring to really is. Someone who has benefited from an intervention? Partner NGO? A physician we trained? It takes time, but I think the thought and effort has made me better at what I do.

Dumping the term “field” might work the same way. Julian Jamison’s field research in North Gulu has nothing to do with my cushy life in Dushanbe or Ashagabat. Lumping the two things together is intellectually lazy. Doing the work to think of better vocabulary wouldn’t hurt.

So, for me, it comes down to this question: is there a non-lazy use for the term “in the field”? If so, what is it?

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(photo credit: Diva Eva)

Chosen because it’s a field, and it’s in upstate New York, where I grew up.

One person can never do enough. It’s a truism, and a dull one at that, but living that inadequacy is a whole new deal. In the US, you can mostly ignore the pain and inequality in your life. You can go from home to car to office to car to home again, and only encounter other middle class people. You don’t see the sweatshop laborer that made your clothes, or the environmental impact of the pollution caused by your car.

You don’t get a bubble in poor countries. The sick, starving, and unemployed are your friends and neighbors. Kids swarm your car to beg for money in the street. The pollution hangs in the sky and makes you cough black. Your staff members need more days off to attend funerals than you could have ever imagined. There is no way to pretend you’re not living in a world of colossal needs; that everyone is as comfortable as you are.

That never stops being painful for me, and I know I am not the only one. There are a few time-honored ways of dealing with the problem. You can try to tune it out – focus only on your job and refuse to notice all the other needs. That turns pretty quickly to blocking out the entire world you live in. You can refuse to think about it at all, but that turns pretty quickly into refusing to think about everything. Or you can tell yourself a story to help you accept your tiny little place in the world. A story helps give yourself some kind of handle to hang on to when the big eyed children with malnutrition-orange hair beg you for bread and candy.

I’m a storyteller, myself. A good story about what I am doing and why it’s worth doing it can take me through a long of dark nights of the soul. I define my project, and its immediate impact. Then I try to think about the ripples it may have, spreading out into the world. It’s not that my work is necessarily the most important work, or the only work that matters. But it does matter. Insert your metaphor of choice here: starfish on beach, candle in darkness. Sisyphus and his rock, by the way, are not a good metaphor choice.

I have other types of stories for other types of projects. International development is powerfully complex. Everything is linked, often in ways you wouldn’t expect. Situating your little effort into a large whole is easy. Education projects are essential because educated people improve economic growth and are healthier. Agricultural development efforts can prevent small farmers from starving and improve GDP. Even something as technical as land reform ties into state stability, agricultural support, and individual empowerment. I tell myself a story for every project I work for. I find a reason to love my work, and I hold to that reason.

So I had an answer for my office manager – I had my own story. I told him you can’t change the world when your child is sick. You can’t start a business, run for political office, or form a community association. All you can do is try to save your child. That’s just the nature of the human heart. And by helping the children of Uzbekistan be happy and healthy, we were freeing up a lot of human energy to make the country a better place.

The office manager accepted my answer. At least, he seemed calmer after we talked. He kept going. He didn’t do anything drastic like quit his job or emigrate to Russia. But I am willing to bet he’s still haunted by the problems he can’t solve in Uzbekistan. Just like I am.

There have been an awful lot of people I haven’t been able to help. My career feels, sometimes, like a long list of things I haven’t been able to do, punctuated by the occasional success.

I know that isn’t unusual. When you live in a poor country, you are constantly assaulted by the terrible need of the people around you. Our ability to respond is limited by so many things – program scope, funding, human capacity and host country conditions – just to start. There is never enough money to do everything, or you need to branch out into some new area you know nothing about. Sometimes the problem is caused by destructive traditional practices or bad government regulations.

At times, you can’t help people because you failed. Your program just got it wrong. You trained doctors but they didn’t change their behavior afterwards. You wasted your money and their time and no patients benefited. Or the broiler chickens turned out to cost more to raise than they earned when you sold them. Or your families sold the vegetables from their kitchen gardens and used the money to buy sugars and children’s nutrition actually got worse.

You can make bad choices with the best of intentions, you can discover your every choice has unintended consequences, and you can just be flat out stupid. Luckily, we’re not houseflies. We have the capacity for learning. And if we’re willing to genuinely examine our failures, we can avoid making the same mistake twice. It’s hard, but it’s possible.

I’m not saying that failure is a good thing. No one wants to waste their limited resources – time, money, and community commitment. And most of the time failure isn’t failing well – it’s just an ugly mess. But you can learn to fail well, and over time most of us learn how to.

For me, at least, it’s not failure that devastates. It’s the sheer scope of the problems we face and the tininess of our ability to help. Even the most holistic project has its limits. You simply can’t tackle everything all at once. But as you live your life, everything all at once is what you see.

When I was living in Uzbekistan in 2005, there was an incident in a conservative city, Andijon, in the Ferghana valley. A protest got out of hand, leading to a break-in at the city jail and a massive demonstration in the main square. When the police got involved, it ended in violence. Somewhere between 169 and 700 people were killed. The Uzbek government holds that those who died were terrorists; NGOs in the country report deaths among innocent civilians, including women and children. It’s been a source of a lot of controversy.

Nobody, however, denies that it was bloody, terrible, and heartbreaking. The deaths in Andijon left the whole country stunned. My office manager came to me in tears; he was thinking of quitting his job. What is the point, he wanted to know, of running a health project when there were so many other things going wrong in his country? Training pediatricians struck him tiny and useless.

He had a point. Most of what we do is tiny and pointless in the grand scheme of things. One average-size project isn’t going to have much impact on an entire country. That is brought home to us every day, all the time, as we live and work in the developing world.

If you’re working for an HIV project, helping people access anti-retrovirals, you know you’re saving lives. If you visit a clinic that is giving out the drugs, you can actually watch people get healthier over time. But what about all the people who don’t have AIDS? What about your neighbor, whose mother has cancer and there is no treatment available in the country for it? What about your friend’s son, who has no way to pay for university? What about the woman down the street, who always has bruises and you can hear the shouting in her house? And the children begging in the street, or the local school which has no windows or books?

(photo credit: me)

This is way off my usual topic, but I have been living in Central Asia on and off since 2001. I love this region, and I love Kyrgyzstan (my mom and I had actually been planning to go to Bishkek this week for a long weekend). I don’t have a whole lot of insight to offer on the situation in Bishkek right now, but I thought some background might be useful. Your Kyrgyzstan cheat sheet:

1. Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union, and became independent in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The president of the Kyrgyz SSR, Askar Akayev, became president of independent Kyrgyzstan.
2. Initially hailed as the “Thomas Jefferson of Central Asia,” Akayez grew less committed to democracy and more corrupt over time. His family, particularly his children, began to dominate all forms of commerce in Kyrgyzstan.
3. In March 2005, Akayev’s party swept the parliamentary elections in an election that nobody thought was free and fair. It was criticized by the OSCE and led to massive protests all over the country. On March 24^th, there was a bloodless coup and Akayev fled the country. This was known as the Tulip Revolution.
4. The new president was Kurmanbek Bakiev, a former prime minister and leader of the People’s Movement of Kyrgyzstan. He expressed his commitment to a freer, more democratic Kyrgyzstan.
5. That didn’t happen. His term in office has been marred by state-sponsored violence and widespread corruption. The protests against him began in April 2007.
6. Here and now, April 2010, the protests are starting again. The media is reporting that the State TV station has been occupied by protesters, and approximately 10,000 people are gathered in the nation’s main square. At least four people have been killed. Two provincial government offices have been occupied. Twitter is reporting that the Interior Minister was killed. Friends in Kyrgyzstan tell me that more people are on the move from all over the country to Bishkek to support the protesters, and their goal is revolution.