This is a new kind of quiet. Seven inches of snow have fallen today, the most in over a decade for this part of the world. Tonight as I sit in my house, the only thing I can hear is the scratch of the pen and the hiss of the stove, boiling water for tea.
I’ve experienced the silence of a heavy snow before, but never the kind of preternatural stillness of this night. There are no dogs outside, nobody playing music, no traffic, no movement.
When I was in Chicago last spring, I went to a service at the local Unitarian Church. The pastor spoke of an old Gaelic idea of the “thin places,” where the boundary between the human and the spiritual was very apparent, and very thin. The quiet tonight is almost physical in its presence, and I can’t help but think back to that sermon.
This place, this experience, has already had a profound effect on me. When I think back and realize that I have been here only three months, I am left a little awed at how so much can change so quickly. With two years in front of me, it is hard to even begin to grasp how my sense of myself will change.
So much of the Peace Corps experience is that of deprivation-of family, of friends, of communication. This night seems to be the extreme, deprivation of everything but the self. In the end, I think that is what you learn; left with only the self, you can have no illusions of who you are all. We all hope that the self we are left with is someone we can live with.
Over the past month and a half, I have had a rough time. I have been very frustrated, both with my work situation and the (seeming) lack of personal development. Some of you have heard about this, but I’ve refrained from posting it publicly to avoid giving people the wrong impression of my life here. Tonight I can see that while it has been very, very hard here, I have made progress.
After almost two months at site, I still believe deeply in what it is the Peace Corps does, and what the project here is Bobete is doing. The petty day to day things are still deeply frustrating, but not as overwhelming as they seem at the time.
At home, I kept on my desk a copy of Reinhold Neibuhr’s prayer:
Grant me the courage to change what I can,
the serenity to accept what I cannot,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
I think that this is at the heart the Peace Corps experience. We all come in with the courage to change things, or we would not have made it through the application process. After getting here though, we realize that there is so much that we cannot change. Unless we can accept that and move on, we will spend two years tilting at windmills, and leave feeling we have accomplished nothing.
Wisdom can only come through experience and perspective, and it is my hope and my prayer that I keep the perspective I see tonight as I look back on my first months in Bobete.
