October 11, 2002

These past few weeks since my last project have been tumultuous. One of my cats came down with some mysterious illness, he lost his appetite, and I had to force feed him for a week. Without a real animal carrier, I stuffed him in a pillowcase in order to transport him to the capital city to see the vet. Those of you who remember my previous email about euthanizing my neighbor’s cat will remember that going to the vet was a very traumatic experience.

This time, I knew that my cat was on its deathbed, and yet they had no subcutaneous fluids to give, no viable medications, and no ability to even find a vein. You can’t imagine my horror in seeing the worst possible vet in action after working in the best cat hospital in the USA for three years. I left the vet with the hope that my previous experience would help me save my own cat because all he was able to give it was ten lesions on the legs from needle pricks. Within a week, my cat started eating on his own, and I was back in business worrying about my everyday projects.

I have become very disillusioned with my work here though. The drip irrigation garden is the center of my frustrations. It’s a symbol of my inability to get community support for even the nutrition of their children. I establish a community need, I locate the financing, I muster community support, I publicize its benefit, and yet there is no lasting community support. I step back and identify it as the classic volunteer dilemma of the project not originating from the community, hence its lack of importance for them. But nothing originates from them, I think, except their desire to sell more of their moonshine liquor. I refuse to help in that area because it’s just not on my list of priorities to create more abusive, alcoholic men and perpetuate their swooning of multiple girlfriends outside their marriages. A friend suggests that I help them sell their liquor as leverage for getting them to commit support to my projects (ultimately, ‘their’ projects). But I guess I feel tired of convincing people of what is good for them. It takes so much energy to educate others all day every day.

Right after my cat’s condition improved, I started visiting neighbors again in my free time at night. I took ‘Candyland’ to one house last Thursday night, and the kids were delighted to be playing it with the hurricane lamp nearby to illuminate their moves past the Lollypop Princess and the Gum Drop Man. When the teenage siblings came back from their search for weeds to feed the livestock around dusk, one of them plopped a live barn owl in front of me. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. In a country where people carry their chickens by the wings and shoot monkeys in the hills, respect for nature is inconceivable. I couldn’t focus on the game once I saw the brother picking up the owl by his head feathers and broken wing, laughing as it tried to hop away. I quickly packed up the game, grabbed the bird in my hands, and yelled at the neighbor who had broken its wing with a stone. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” I said, “Maybe you should study harder and actually pass this year in school (with sarcasm) rather than kill innocent animals. Oh, you laugh, do you? Well, in America we say you are very weak if all you can do is gain strength by killing things that are smaller than you.” “Elektra,” he responded, “you hate owls because they screech at night and keep you up.” “Whatever, you are such an idiot, “ I say, “Why don’t you go kill your dog then because it barks all night, too!” He immediately shut up and went inside, and I stormed off to my house with owl and board game in hand.

Back in the serenity of my house, I wrapped its broken wing and stared into its beautiful sable eyes by candlelight. The head gracefully swiveled from side to side, monitoring every movement of my cats, smitten with curiosity. As it became weaker, closing its eyes, I wondered when they had caught it, and if it was dehydrated. I forced some water and aspirin down its throat with a syringe, and it seemed to gain strength. I schemed up taking it to the capital city to the Peace Corps physician who knows a lot about birds. Her husband carves them and wins competitions. They pride themselves in caring for injured animals. When I awoke at 3 a.m. to check on it in the box with its towels, it had just died. The eyes still clear, I buried it in the large compost pile in my patio, clipping a few feathers beforehand to hang on my wind chime along with the others.

I had to escape from the river valley for a few days, and caught the morning hiace (i.e. minivan) to Praia. As the neighboring kids passed me on their way to primary school, they whispered, “No owl. It must have died.” I decided to take off the rest of the week to re-evaluate where my life was going and what I was really accomplishing here. Yes, I know, I am that same volunteer that responded ‘Count me out, I’m here to stay’ a few weeks ago, but things change and f-a-s-t in ‘developing’ countries. I am not the kind of person who quickly forgives and forgets. That is one of my biggest weaknesses. I find it hard to move onto more complicated projects, like solar energy or a town store, when nobody even cares enough about their child’s nutrition to be accountable for the small drip irrigation school garden.

What am I doing here that is really sustainable? Every project that I have done that has been successful was one that I created, organized, financed, and implemented 70% on my own. Sure, girls showed up and community members came, but, in the end, none of them helped plan or implement the projects. In general, people here like handouts, anything they can attend or get for free. I didn’t mind that last year because I saw my role as that of a facilitator and trainer. I would do whatever it took to get people to attend educational events because I knew they would increase their understanding of important issues and access to learning opportunities. But ever since the second Girls’ Life Skills Camp where I was overwhelmed with 36 teenage girls and lack of community support from women leaders, I drew the line. Sure it’s been great to give girls opportunities for growth and personal enrichment over the past year, but how much of what I am doing is sustainable? For the trainings I organize, they are really one-time deals, and it’s only the long-term projects that I worry about, like the drip irrigation garden and the care of the village community center the US Embassy financed last year.

But right now, the ill-fated school garden is merely symbolic of the turmoil in my life. Liz, a new volunteer arrived in Calheta, the local beach town, 2 weeks ago to replace Dawn, and I have officially lost my office at the town hall. When I tried to explain that I used the office a lot before she came and would like to arrange a day each week when I could use it, she responded, “How about Wednesdays from 8 until 10 a.m.?” I thought to myself, that’s really not feasible for someone who commutes thirty minutes from a distant village to get only two hours, but I agreed. The main phone switchboard has also been down at the town hall for two weeks, and only 3 direct lines work, the president’s, the president’s secretary’s, and a delegate. The delegate is a friend and boss of mine, but she has been receiving all town hall calls on her line recently, so I have been unable to use the phone to make appointments or check email.

Amidst this sudden disillusionment with my life here, the Peace Corps main office in Praia has been cracking down on how much volunteers can leave their sites and use the Transit House, a house where we can stay whenever we do business in the capital. Up until now, it has also been our refuge from site when we need a break for ‘mental health’ reasons and a hang out spot to meet up with fellow volunteers. We are now forced to sign in and pay when it is not business related, but, most importantly, get authorization from our Peace Corps boss. The Transit House may even be closed for good in the next two months because Peace Corps feels it is too expensive and is a perk we do not merit. Most countries don’t have a Transit House, and they are actually stricter in other places, like Senegal, where they have to have an official voucher in their hand in order to enter the grounds of their Transit House. Right now, our guards are lax enough that we can slip in for a few hours to watch TV and relax without official permission. That will probably soon change though. Every time I see the Peace Corps country director, like last Friday, I get the typical “Hello Elektra! How are you? When are you going back to site?”

This morning, I walk out of my house and admire my first sunflowers in bloom. While crossing the riverbed to catch the minivans exiting the valley, I hear my four-year-old neighbor Dani say something about an owl. I spin around to see an owl hanging from a rope in his hand. I gasp and yell over to find out why they have an owl. No response. I run up to their house and grab the owl from his hand. It is in shock that he has it tied at the leg, hanging upside down, and Dani tries unsuccessfully to grab it back from me. The grandfather stares from his cement seat at my quick, agitated movements. When released, the owl hops down the hill to the safety of a bush – it is very weak. A dog lunges at it, and I throw a rock. I yell at the mother and aunt about how birds of prey are not meant to be pets or treated like livestock – they will not survive.

I am so angry that I threaten them that I will not visit them or ‘cure’ them anymore if I ever see an owl at their house again. They are now dependant on me (by choice) for curing their small cuts, wounds, and diarrhea, and the mother gasps at the thought of buying medication again. Dani starts to cry, as I cross the riverbed with the bird in hand. He throws a rock at me, and I yell at him to go play with his puppy (with sarcasm because he has one that he seems to have forgotten about). The mother calms him with words that I will take care of the bird. I laugh to myself because his promiscuous mother who comes only a few hours a day from a neighboring village, if at all, does not really know her own child. He is not afraid I will harm it but angry that he cannot control it anymore. I climb the mountainside in my flip-flops, searching for a tall tree where I can release the bird, rocks crumbling beneath my every step, corn cracking behind me. It hops to safety, and I descend to wait for the minivans to pass in the next few minutes.

I contemplate my fate at a time when nothing seems to be going right. I have even decided to close all doors to my house during the day, despite the ninety-degree heat, because the flies are unbearable. They have even begun to bite me on my arms and back the moment I stand still. At night, like the same time last year when I arrived at site, there is a massive inundation of small black bugs into my house through my roof tiles and shutters. They seek out light and fly directly into candle flames – in Portuguese they are called ‘suicide bugs’. I open my front door to water my plants by moonlight or head to my latrine, lantern in hand, and they swarm down from the sky at me, into my hair, ears, and shirt like a Stephen King movie. Last night, I sought refuge in the solitude of my mosquito netted bed, candle and cats by my side. I listened to world news from the BBC London on my short-wave radio while reading “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze”, published by a returned Peace Corps volunteer in 2002. I find comfort in reading the challenges of another PCV, and wonder if my own story will have a happy ending. Hessler writes: “Of course, none of it was that simple. I was a Peace Corps volunteer but I wasn’t; China was communist but it wasn’t. Nothing was quite what it seemed, and that was how life went in those early days, everything uncertain and half a step off.”

p.s. Later the same day that I wrote this email, I came home to find a few of my neighboring kids trying to stone more owls to death on the hillside, and the saga continued. In the end, I stormed off to the houses of the parents of the kids and lectured their parents on disciplining their kids and how killing owls will only increase the mouse population, which destroys their crops. They had never seen me so angry, and vowed to keep their kids more under control. Now many of the kids are fearful of me and avoid even passing my house, which, I think, is probably good since they should feel that I have the power to make their lives miserable if they are going to abuse innocent animals.