Matt

Hello to all!

I spent the last two weeks of August at PC training in a southern town called Kaedi. Man, I love that town. It just felt good to me. I have a thing about being in places that feel good to me. There’s just something great about liking where you are. I really enjoyed the work. It was the Peace Corps equivalent of student teaching and it was fun to be at the back of the classroom instead of up front. Most of the trainees had never taught before and their first lessons, on the whole, were absolute train wrecks. At the end of each day, the observers and trainees would sit down and talk about what went well and what could be improved. It was neat to see the trainees take feedback into account. Most of them improved significantly throughout the two weeks, but the thing they don’t know is that their whole first year is going to be one train wreck after another! Ha!

All of us volunteer trainers had access to DSL Internet in Kaedi and oh what a time-suck it was. The computer room’s lure was a double whammy: not only did it offer computers, but also icy delicious air conditioning. The first week I only let myself use it at night when the mosquitoes were unbearable and spent my afternoons reading and sweating in a hammock. But the second week I went whole hog. My rationale was that if I got it out of my system in Kaedi, I wouldn’t be tempted to spend my precious time at home staring blankly at a screen. One of my favorite things about Peace Corps has been that when PCVs get together, there’s nothing to do but sit around and talk. We sit and talk and laugh and nap and fan ourselves all day long and it’s wonderful! Talking is so much better than staring at screens! Yet the screens won out. Every free moment, we were all in there slack jawed and glassy-eyed, our faces reflecting the monitors’ glow, the only sound the cold static hum of the computers.

But on the occasions when we pulled away from the computer room’s grasp, we did sit and talk. And at last I feel like I have good friends here. I met and knew and loved so many incredible PCVs in Chad, and leaving them has been hard. But I’m happy to report that amazing, wild, kind, wonderful people also abound in Peace Corps-Mauritania.

I moved into a new house as soon as I got back from Kaedi. It used to be the office of the water company so people keep coming by to pay their water bills. I’m making a killing! Haha…no… But I love my new house so much I don’t mind having to say, “no, the water bureau is over there now.” I don’t actually know where it is, so I just wave vaguely towards the east, which I offer as evidence of having been in Africa a bit too long. My house is right in the center of town, a stone’s throw from the animal market, the aroma of which makes me feel right at home. It’s two small rooms, a kitchen, a large “salon” (uhhh…what do you say in English? Sitting room? Front room?) and latrine. I’m not using the “grand salon” but I’m using the larger of the two rooms as a “petit salon.” I have decked it out in greens, blues, yellows, oranges, pinks, and purples – a color scheme some may call “tacky,” but I call, “kaleidoscope o’ loveliness.” I’m really happy with the house. Getting out of that far-flung, less-than-welcoming neighborhood and away from child-thumpin’ Youma really lets me breathe easier.

It seems every Peace Corps correspondence must eventually address death and how people deal with it in different cultures. I have lived a charmed life and have never really had to deal with death. I think a lot of us Americans live that way at least for a while. But truth recently gave me a good swift kick and I’ve been forced to think about realities that I’d never before faced. Earlier this week, I got a call from my Country Director saying that he had bad news from Peace Corps-Mali. My friend that I’d served with in Chad, who’d extended for a third year in Mali was dead. He and his buddies had built a boat and while docking after a trip down the Niger River, touched a power line with the mast. Matt was knocked unconscious and blown into the water by the shock. He and one other boy drowned. The other two were blown forward onto the bank and were burned, but survived.

Matt was the guy you wanted to sit by at dinner or in training sessions. He was HILLARIOUS – one of the funniest people I have ever met. He was quirky and fun and always doing stupid things like buying second-hand wool suits during the hot season. Me, him, and the others of Team North spent hours over warm beers in fly-buzzing N’djamena bars. I remember him sweaty and laughing. He was going to go to law school after Peace Corps and though it’s not my place to call it, it seems like an incredible waste to lose him so young. He did so much with his twenty-five years. Imagine what he’d have done with eighty! About 15 Chad PCVs and Peace Corps staff were able to fly in for his funeral, in addition to many of his high school and college friends. He will be missed by so many.

I was on my way to Limnaya’s when I go the call and held my tears until I got to her house. During those first tears and later ones, she has repeated this: “Don’t cry for Matt, cry for yourself. You’re going to die too. We’re all going to die. God is the creator and he knows when it’s time.” I have found this idea to be oddly comforting. Everyone before me has died and everyone after me will too. I will die, everyone I know and love will die. And surely we all don’t just stop. Right? I mean, it isn’t Matt that’s buried in Connecticut. His body is there, yes, but Matt wasn’t just his short little hairy hobbit body. Matt must be gone somewhere else. I don’t know where, but I guess I’ll see when I get there.

The night after I found out, I was sad and didn’t want to be alone, so I called home. Dad started telling me about a friend of theirs from South Africa. This man from South Africa was saying that America is a police state in which rules and regulations and fear greatly limit our lives. In Africa, you can drive as fast as you want, go into the bush whenever you want, ride an iron ore train across the desert, or build a boat and sail down the Niger River. He’s right, you can do pretty much whatever you want. But danger is close in Africa and death is everywhere. Once in Chad (stop me if I already told this story), I beamingly told my sisters, “Mom might come visit next year!” Zenabu said, “What? We’d never make plans that far in advance! We might be dead by then!” I heard someone say that even Mohamed, who was adored by thousands died. What then makes us think that we wont? Death is accepted as part of life here. It is the natural course, and life can’t exist without it. But it seems in America, we see death as something that should be cured. It’s wonderful to have medical technology that saves lives, but death in America I think is seen as a failure of these technologies – that a person should not die. But we die. It’s what we do. Opening up to this perspective has lifted a weight of death-worry from my heart. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t miss Matt like hell.