A Wild Patience Has Brought Me Here

While you are waiting for back bones to heal it is discovered that there are a limited number of activities you can accomplish to help the time pass. You sleep in with no call to prayer to wake you up. You spend all day strapped into your pajamas by your back brace. You gorge on copious amounts of dairy disregarding the carnage it will inflict on your digestive system later. You spend an entire day binge watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and silently judge their life choices. You eat brownies. You eat brownies while judging the Kardashian’s life choices.

It has been four months since I was sent home to recover from a freak bike accident I sustained while playing with kids in my community. Four months of healing, waiting, wondering and grappling with how it feels to fail unexpectedly. Sitting at home watching tv and chowing down brownies made me feel like the ultimate failure. This was not what my 24th year was supposed to look like! At age 24 I was meant to be in the thick of my Peace Corps service. I wasn’t supposed to be reading People magazine while getting a pedicure! I needed to be doing something that was gritty, gratifying and life changing! My poor off-road biking skills I was able to come to terms with, but what made things worse was the internal ringing inside that clanged “go back to Indonesia” and “don’t” simultaneously.

As these conflicted emotions grew stronger, it seemed as if fate had nailed another nail in the proverbial coffin in May, when I learned from my counterpart that my host family was no longer able to host me should I return to my community. With Ramadan’s strict fasting and praying schedule looming, there was no way my counterpart would be able to find me a new house until it ended a month later. Without a place to live, I would not be able to return to work. I put my reinstatement paperwork on hold with relief, grateful I had more time to think about what I wanted to do and waited. Was returning something I really wanted for myself at this point? Was moving on to something different a cop out? What was the right thing to do? The ringing grew louder.

While my bones began to calcify, my self-image started to crumble. If I couldn’t be a Peace Corps volunteer, who was I? In the life blueprint I had drawn up for myself, there was a big blank space post Peace Corps. Thoughts of graduate school, alternate jobs, relocating to different states and different countries raced through my brain like slides on a projector. I applied to a job in West Africa. I mapped out an 8-week hike across Colorado. I seriously considered medical school. All these options felt like desperate attempts to whip up a new version of myself. None of it felt right.

In May I went out for Indian food with a beloved family friend. Over naan and curry and all the delicious foods I lamented I wouldn’t eat if I went back to Indonesia she told me “you already know what you are going to do. The decision is buried somewhere inside and it is up to you to dig it out.”

She was as usual, right.
I once watched a TedTalk on hard choices. I don’t remember much, except that the speaker talked about chocolate doughnuts and the way tough decisions define who we are, and who we become. I also remember I thought that the thirty-something year old speaker had already forgotten what it feels like to be a twenty-something year old.

I think what my elders say I will miss about this time in my life is the very thing that drives me mad. What I will miss later and don’t miss now is the feeling that nothing has started yet; that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the rest of my life. What an overwhelming privilege it is to choose to go back to Peace Corps or move to West Africa or apply to medical school! What I don’t want to forget about this age is the loneliness of it all. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything yet.

This is why the choice I had in front of me was a difficult one–I had no prior “hard” life experiences to draw on to back myself up. By having no former knowledge of what to do in a situation like this my decision would become a characterization. What kind of young woman did I want to be? Was I a person who returned to Indonesia because she stuck to her guns and followed through on her commitments? Or was I a woman who understood that sometimes it is better to let go rather than to hold on, and move forward in a different direction?

Wondering if I was returning to my Peace Corps service or moving on has been a lesson in growing up. Probably no one ever feels like an actual grown up, except for certain high school math teachers or members of Congress. These past few months have taught me the importance of the progressive, the “ing” ending on grow. It was realizing that most of growing up is an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally–and sometimes maddeningly–who we are. It was noting that all of us on a gut level already know the answers to the questions we ask. How difficult. How divine.

24 has been a big year for me, a painful, wonderful, deeply necessary year. A long relationship I was in ended and continued forward simultaneously. I trimmed my hair with a swiss army knife, met interesting people, butchered a cow, and could feel the engine of my life quietly revving up beneath me. I took a pottery class. I tried listening to jazz music. I couldn’t afford books on Amazon but sometimes I bought them anyway.

My decision to return to Indonesia is at the same time surprising and not to me. That both could be true is the very mystery of becoming that Rilke so beautifully writes of; the notion that you can know and not know yourself at the same time. There is a sense among many of my friends and peers that these next couple of years are the precious few we have to make something of ourselves. To grow into the people we want to be; to manifest the vision we have for our lives. The most important lesson this injury/recovery has taught me is that transformation is often quiet and sans big revelatory bangs.

We grow into the people we want to be and also already are. Looking back, I wish I had trusted more in my ability to make the right decision. I should have felt for the quiet blossoming of truth that would ultimately be the choice I always knew would take me to where I need to go. It was not the frantic transformation of growth but a wild patience in myself that has brought me here. And so I am returning to Indonesia to finish my final year of Peace Corps service. I am nervous about the traffic I will have to once more navigate on my bike (my back can’t take another fall!) I am jittery about laying down a foundation yet again with a new host family, and rebuilding the relationships I left so quickly back at site. My language skills need brushing up on. All of this is simply an indication that there is more grow(ing) and learn(ing) to do.

Out of Indo

In 1913 a young Danish woman followed her new husband (who also happened to be her second cousin) to Kenya to establish a coffee plantation. The Baron and Baroness Blixen started life in the Ngong Hills well enough–many a hunting safaris and coffee planting days were had, until Karen Blixen contracted syphilis from the philandering Baron and returned to Denmark to recover.

There have always been aspects of Karen Blixen’s life that I have loved and admired. I like the idea of Ms. Blixen arriving in Kenya not quite understanding what she is entering into, yet embarking anyway. Karen allowed herself to be shaped, and ultimately transformed by Africa itself. Her stories of plantation floods, bankrupt businesses, cultural faux pas, disease and an affair with an intriguing safari guide are the kind of redemption stories and silver linings we readers love.

I reread her memoir (published under her male nom de plume Isak Dinesen) two years ago when I accepted my Peace Corps invitation to Indonesia. At the time, it was the grandness of her experiences abroad that struck me the most. This past month I picked up her book again. This time, the only thing I could think about was the syphilis.

Thinking about syphilis became almost a sickness in itself. I thought about Karen Blixen and syphilis in hospital waiting rooms, on x-ray and examination tables, and propped up in a hotel bed. I had been biking with some of the kids in my neighborhood when a few of us collided over a pot hole and I landed flat on my back. Sustaining four fractured vertebrae while casually biking in my village post giant bike trip to New Zealand is almost too ironic to even mention.

“But at least it’s not syphilis” I told myself as I hunched my way to electro-stimulation therapy in Surabaya. And when Peace Corps informed me they were medically evacuating me to the states I read the words of Karen Blixen with renewed fervor. “God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road” she writes. I hold these words in my head the first day I learn how to walk in my back brace.

Being sent home to heal has been more complex than I thought it would be. The prematurity of my homecoming in itself has left me in a strange position, like a sheepish party guest who has made a great show of saying goodnight to everyone and then finds she must return to retrieve her car keys. I understand now, what Ms. Blixen must have, upon her return to Denmark: the feeling of having left something behind only to realize that what you left behind was your life. To have left my life in Indonesia, which is so beautiful in its complexity and so maddening in its mystery leaves me with a feeling of buzzy muzziness unrelated to cracked bones.

There’s no way to know what makes life go in one direction and not another. I could not have foreseen that the breaking of my back would rebuild and reinvigorate my sense of purpose as a Peace Corps volunteer. As Ms. Blixen notes, “difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.”

It is true. The love and support that has been revealed to me is a gentle reminder of how lucky and enriched my life both here in Colorado and back in Indonesia is. It’s the kind of love that is almost tangible. It makes me feel fierce and humble and gathered up inside. This accident has left me trembling, but glad.

In the end, Karen Blixen is able to take back her life from syphilis, and return to the hills of Africa she loves so much. Later in life, she will write a memoir about her experiences there. In 2015 I will reread “Out of Africa” for the third time and wait and hope for the day in the not so distant future when I too will return to the country I love and cherish so much.

Joy, Actually

Tis the season for sugar cookies, twinkly holiday lights and that annual viewing of the amazingly saccharine film “Love Actually.” Little pleasures I would most certainly be reveling in if I were stateside this time of year. But because I am not, I find myself humming little ditties like “Joy to the World” to the baby in my house and doing my best to convince myself that I don’t need that peppermint latte to feel fulfilled. Which is a lie. No amount of fried tofu can ever come close to a delicious holiday beverage. I was griping about the lack of such wintry customs to a friend a few weeks ago on Skype when she asked me if, in spite of it all, I was happy. Such a simple question gave me pause, and as it is the season to cherish life’s happiness, and to wish even more “joy to the world” I can say with absolute certainty that while I am happy in Indonesia, it is a happiness hard won. I’m basically Emma Thompson’s “Love Actually” character if the sequel were to take place in a humid Indonesian village. Like her character I’ve been listening to an inordinate amount of Joni Mitchell lately too.

For the purposes of this post it might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road–you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you were to ask me if I considered my Peace Corps experience to be a pleasure or a joy, I would answer the latter. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life right now, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves to be such a difficult emotion to manage.

Perhaps the first thing I should say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in adolescence, when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but because small things go a long way. This has proven to be helpful as a lone volunteer. A squishy mango from one of the fruit venders on my road has the genuine power to turn my day around. All day long I can look forward to a glass of es degan (my favorite Indonesian drink: shreds of coconut meat in fresh coconut water). The persistent microstresses that fill the rest of my life are calmed for as long as I have a delicious flavor on my tongue. And though it’s true that when the glass is empty the microstresses return, we volunteers do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure here as to turn up our nose at the ones that are so readily available. A juicy mango. Even the burden of the relentless Indonesian heat can be lifted for the eight minutes it takes to eat a mango.

My other source of daily pleasure is–but I wish I had a better way of putting it–staring into space. A cool breeze, the crowing of our roosters and that delicate tropical sunlight that arrives only at the very beginning and very end of each day here. I can sit on my back patio sans book, music or company and enjoy the nothingness of it all for hours.

I think it’s important to note that I am enjoying my Peace Corps service, but not necessarily finding pleasure in it. Occasionally Peace Corps is a pleasure, though it mostly is a joy, which means in fact it gives me not much pleasure at all but more that strange admixture of terror, pain and delight that I have come to recognize as joy and now must find some way to live with daily here. I’d imagine parents feel the same way about their young children.

Living with daily joy–this is a new problem. Prior to embarking on my service I had known joy only four or five times in my life, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and deform everything else. Let’s call it five. Twice I was in love, but only once was the love viable, or likely to bring me any pleasure in the long run. Once I was in water, once in the back middle seat of a crowded car, once sitting on a high mountaintop, once on a rollercoaster, and once in a tent.

It is hard to arrive at generalities in the face of such a small and varied collection of emotional data. What all of my pre-Peace Corps joys do include however is the great struggle that tends to precede joy, and the feeling–once one is “in” joy–that the experiencing subject has somehow “entered” the emotion, and disappeared. I “have” pleasure, it is a feeling I want to experience and own. An ice cream cone is a pleasure. Winter vacation is a pleasure. But here in Indonesia as a Peace Corps volunteer I AM joy.

At the neural level, I’m sure explanations can be given in very clear terms as to why the moment after giving a speech to a hundred Islamic middle schoolers can feel ecstatic, or swimming in the Indian ocean with somebody dear to me. Perhaps the same synapses that drugs falsely twang are twanged authentically by sea water, and sweaty pre-speech palms. We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romances–especially if they are fraught with danger–do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. I used to have a wild, dangerous crush on Indonesia. My first few months in this country I couldn’t take enough of it in: the colors, the smells, the cadence of speech. Even laughter sounds different here. I remember climbing a high, steep hill in PST with a few of my fellow trainees simply because we could. We climbed so high and for so long that we did not consider how we would get down. When it came time to descend we weighed our options: a bruised ass or a long evening inching down as mosquitos swarmed. In the end we decided on a strategy that applied both, and eventually my prosaic infatuation with this country fizzled out. But what a wonderful thing, to stand on a hill with good people, dizzy with joy, thinking nothing of bruised asses.

I’d say my real love for this country came months later. It lay at the end of a long and arduous road, and I think the road will be longer yet at times. I was so surprised by its arrival, so unprepared, that on the day this love arrived I had already had a grumpy morning with canceled classes and was biking to what I was sure would be a pointless meeting while people on motorbikes hassled me with cries of “hey Mister.” But then it snuck up behind me and intermingled itself with the sweat on my skin. I was heading toward the intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.

The thing no one ever told me about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live? Joy is such a human madness. The fantastic writer Julian Barnes once wrote, “it hurts just as much as it is worth.” For months after reading that book these words stuck with me, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Why would anyone agree to eight hundred days of pure, painful, beautiful, ever present joy? I don’t know, but for what it is worth, one third of my way through this twenty-seven month commitment I am so happy that I did.

A Tale of Two Women

How do I talk about my host sister except that I mention Charles Dickens? A stodgy, long winded writer, Mr. Dickens and I have spent quite a bit of time together this past month. Every afternoon when the atmosphere sags under the heat of the day, I retreat into his dark, and melancholy stories. In his books, it is usually cold and raining. I find this refreshing. If I am to be honest, I have also been using these books as a literary Irish exit of sorts, allowing me to circumnavigate stilted interactions with Wilda.

My host sister Wilda and I are the same age but the similarities stop there. Aside from the obvious (she is married, she is pregnant with her first child, a girl) there is a gaping cultural divide between us. Wilda acts her age within her Indonesian culture, and I act my age outside of it. This often leaves us at a loss for what to say to each other. We talk too much about the weather and count down the days until Ibu and Bapak return home. Our parents (her biological and my host) have been gone for a month and will not return until the end of October. They are making the pilgrimage (or Haji) to Mecca. It is one of the five pillars of Islam and it sounds to me both very important and incredibly boring. (Note: when I ask my host parents about Haji before they leave, they sum up the 40 day pilgrimage as “just walking around in circles and praying”). Wilda has moved into her parents house while they are gone for two reasons: she needs to be closer to her older sister as her due date draws near, and someone needed to babysit the American while Mom and Pops are away.

It is awkward to say the least, because we can’t quite figure each other out. From Wilda’s perspective, there must be something wrong with me that I am not married yet. There is something strange about me that I am here in Indonesia on my own, and more over, that I chose to be here independently. On my end, my Western liberal and feminist upbringing makes me wrinkle my nose at marriage and kids at this time in my life. The family jokes that Emily is afraid of nothing, and Wilda is scared of everything. While I have managed to move to the other side of the world, Wilda will not cross a busy street without her father or her husband holding her arm. One time she asks me to hold her elbow while we sidestep traffic, and I do my best not to laugh. I sleep with the lights turned off. The dark scares Wilda. In all things she seems to be the Charles Darnay to my Sydney Carton. Or something like that. And so it happens that we really don’t have much to say to each other. We are alone in the house, but don’t spend too much time together. Most evenings, my nose is buried in a book about orphans and pickpockets, while Wilda sends Whats App messages to her husband.

I like Wilda’s husband, Khusul. He speaks with the soft cadence of a boy who works in a crafts boutique, and for the longest time I affectionately referred to him (in my mind) as “Lady Butt”. He is not chubby, but curvy in a masculine way. He is quick to flash a smile, but rarely speaks. He spends long periods of time out in the yard, with a cigarette between his fingers, blowing lazy streams of smoke into the sky. I love it when he is here on the weekends. I like watching them together, hoping to catch a glimpse of the reason they got married. I want to see them in love, because Western tradition and Rachel McAdams rom coms have taught me this is why people get married and have babies. I am a little disappointed when I ask Wilda how they met, and she says they met in school and they texted a lot. That’s it. That is their story. I have grown up thinking love and marriage is the product of a fantastic meet-cute encounter. Wilda was raised to see matrimony as a necessary and practical step in becoming an adult. I ask her how he proposed. She says her parents talked to his parents and they set a date.

In contrast, my Mom and Dad met in their late teenage years. Their love story is the kind you hope for when you ask people how they came together. There are cheesy pick up lines, initial misunderstandings, red sneakers, love notes on gum wrappers, break ups, pizza in the park and Carole King love songs. I love imagining them then, knowing no more than I do, just that they liked the way it felt to be together. I try and imagine Wilda and Khusul, sending texts back and forth, the high “ping” of a message received making their hearts jump with anticipation. I wonder if Wilda’s daughter will be disappointed to learn that her parents’ marriage is built on emoticons, or if she will privately thrill at how her parents were brought together as I do with mine.

I give up on trying to find common ground with Wilda towards the end of September. I finish reading “A Tale of Two Cities” where Dickens writes “that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other”. When it comes to my host sister, I think no words could ring more true.

Around 3am on October 4th, I am roused from sleep by the bright kitchen light outside my room. I think Wilda has turned it on again after I’ve gone to bed (she is afraid of ghosts, so likes the lights on at all times). I can’t sleep with the glare, so I groggily rise to shut it off again. In the kitchen, I find Wilda pacing in circles. She has felt a few contractions and can no longer lie in bed. I proceed to privately flip out. I’m trying to recall anything I know about emergency home births and labor breathing techniques. For some reason, I can only think about Dennis Quaid. I remember seeing a movie with him as a kid where he must deliver a baby on the side of a highway. I forget the name of the film, and wish my eight year old self had paid more attention. Luckily, this baby isn’t on Dennis Quaid time, and we walk around the kitchen for a few more hours, until Wilda is exhausted and needs to rest. For a woman who is wearing Hello Kitty pajamas un-ironically, she shows immense maturity in these early moments of labor.

I have one class that morning so leave Wilda and Ninin (my other host sister) after a sleepless night. I can’t concentrate at school. I think about all the ways the date October 4th will be ordinary for most people, and how it will completely transform Wilda’s life. I rush home and catch Ninin and Wilda as they are heading out the door and I am hustled into the car with them. It is unclear as to whether my going with them was part of the initial plan, or if they are worried of what I will do if left at home unattended. Either way, I am pressed as far against the side window as I can be, giving Wilda a wide berth for her ever expanding and quickening contractions. I believe I whimper “oh man oh man oh man” all the way to the hospital.

The hospital is painted bright green and yellow and there are no waiting rooms. I am led into the delivery room with everyone else and promptly move to cower in the farthest corner. “Everyone else” at this point includes Khusul who has left work to meet us, and another female neighbor. We’re crowded into this sterilized space and I can see each of us are breaking down from the excitement and the trauma of it all. There are spazzy hand motions, raised voices, and nervous laughter. Everyone is freaking out. Everyone except Wilda. Wilda, who is afraid of moving traffic, geckos and the dark is the bravest soul in the room. She is a planet of calm, and slowly we all gravitate into her orbit, taking big, deep breaths.

What follows is an experience I can never give back. To say that “labor” is labor is an understatement. To be honest it looks fucking terrible. As the baby crowns I think that this is the way we get sexually active teens to use protection. Stick em’ in the maternity ward and I guarantee girls will never let boys “forget” a condom ever again. I think there is no way I will ever put myself through this unless I am positive I really want the baby I push out of my body. I become radically pro-choice standing by Wilda’s head.

Every time I freak out in that delivery room though, all I have to do is look at Wilda’s face. I am ashamed, adding to the nervous energy around her as she (not me) undergoes something so profoundly world shattering. Wilda is with us, but not with us. She is with herself on a different plane. We all could not be there and I don’t think she would notice. She seems to have gone to some place deep inside herself and alternately rests and draws energy from this point of focus only she can feel. Her strength is awe inspiring.

My host sister gives birth to a beautiful baby girl at 3pm on October 4th. She has a mass of dark hair and sweet puckered lips. They wrap her up like a Chipotle burrito and put her in a baby “health box” while the mother naps. The rest of the day and into the evening, family members come and go and sleep in the room with Wilda. I stay, because no one has taken me home yet. I stay because I can’t take my eyes off of the baby and her mother. Wilda looks the same, but she also looks different. She has undergone something I can’t even imagine. She is twenty four years old and she now has a little person who depends on her. We are the same age, but now I think she looks older than me, like she knows something I don’t.

Later that evening, everyone leaves for evening prayer and it is just Wilda, the baby and me. I pull out my copy of Charles Dickens and my host sister watches her daughter sleep. Quite suddenly, she breaks the silence. “Thank you for being here”, she says. I look at her, and she looks at me. I don’t have the words in Indonesian to tell her how moved I am. I don’t have the words in any language to tell her what she did this afternoon inadvertently changed me, and has changed how I view her. I don’t have the words to tell her I am sorry I held up her life and compared it to my own. I can’t communicate how much I admire her. Instead I simply say “Anda sudah sepurnah”. You were perfect. She smiles at me and drifts off to sleep. I go back to my book, where the following words leap off the page and hover over me in this hospital, over this experience, over my life here: “Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true”.