PC Life

Call your family

You are driving in a car with your wife and mother on the way to a party. While crossing a river, another car swerves and causes you to go careening off the edge into the water. As the car is sinking you realize you only have time to save one person, either your mother, or your wife. Whom do you save?

This question was presented to us in a cultural anthropology class I took in college. It was a scenario from a study that had been done some years before. I still remember the Saudi men’s overwhelming majority answer: Mother, of course. You only have one. You can always get another wife.

While I can’t say that answer would come so easily for me (sorry mom?), I like to think the Saudi men’s answers show a deep devotion toward family more so than a lack of concern for a drowning wife…?

As Peace Corps volunteers we’re given 48 days of leave that can be used throughout the two years of service. This time can be used to travel in country, but most people use a lot of their time for out of country travel to neighboring “far-off” places since plane tickets are cheap and, heck! we have the time. At Christmas break and after seven months in country, I was one of only two volunteers who made the trip back to the States. The reasons for not going back were varied: insufficient funds, too soon, rather go somewhere else, and not wanting to see what is being missed. I don’t think there’s a single Peace Corps Volunteer who doesn’t miss friends and family they’ve left behind, but for me, those reasons simply couldn’t hold a candle to how much I missed people back home.

My parents will be my parents for life. My sisters won’t ever stop being my sisters. And because they’re family I want to keep getting to know them and continue these very significant relationships in my life. It was really hard to leave again and return to Kyrgyzstan, but I am so happy for each memory we made back home.

I try to live by few mantras, and “Let the wife drown” certainly hasn’t made the select list. Yet, a piece of paper ripped from a notebook is taped to the wall above my desk. Scrawled there bubble letters it reads, “Call your fam.” It’s a decision I never regret.

I miss home like hell

And by that I mean I miss it in a way that is exactly opposite of how I miss hell. I left my family, friends, language, culture, food, church, holidays, hobbies, ways of dealing with stress, support networks, country and that comfortable feeling of knowing you’re “home.” I sometimes pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming; am I really stuck in the middle of nowhere for two years?

But then I think about Nazgul, my counterpart. She’s never left an area the size of southern Minnesota, except this isn’t Minnesota at all but an equally tiny sliver of known universe lost up the side of a mountain. If I hadn’t been flung here in a Peace Corps blessed aircraft, I never would have met her. I never would have met any of these people, walking to school, planting their crops, building houses and flour mills and barns, driving their animals to pasture and driving them home again at night. People with stories as big as the open sky and bright as the stars that wash the valley. People who will spend half their paycheck to make sure you feel welcomed.

People ask me sometimes what I think is better, America or Kyrgyzstan. I answer, “America, or course. It’s my home.” “Ah, you must miss it,” they say wistfully, their minds wandering to nearer mountains and land well loved. “Oh home beloved where e’er I wander…” is what my heart starts to sing, “Though fair be nature’s scenes around me and friends are ever tried and true…”

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The truth of it is, I’m going to miss this place too. I think everyone misses it when they’re gone, and you have to let that future knowledge affect your appreciation for the place today, no matter how shitty things are going or how fed-up you are with the whole lot. We miss things. And we’re going to miss this.

There’s something about shoveling manure that’s good for a man’s soul

Now admittedly I’m coming at this from the angle of the weekend dabbler – like the man who works in an office all week and then hauls some rock in his yard on Saturday and feels tough. If I were a farmer for a living I’d probably feel differently about the manual labor, but at the present I feel pretty good about my blister.

I think it’s the work specifically that does it. Manure means cows. Cows means production. Production means provision and that there, gentlemen, is what each of our souls strives for. We’re getting dirty. We’re getting involved.

It’s like God who stooped down into the mire of His creation, choosing to be born of the very dust into which He first breathed life. I’m so above a cow and I think that also puts me above what comes out his rear, but for a higher goal I’ll spend a day pushing it around.

Unlike God, we can’t get rid of it. I have no way of dealing with the stuff other than to turn it into a neatly stacked pile, or burn it to heat my bath. And don’t think burning is efficient removal. Then you get to push around a pile of manure ash.

And this too is good for the soul. You watch it carefully. Cool it indoors for a day. Gingerly sift it onto the ash pile watching for any remaining embers. You don’t want to miss one and inadvertently burn your house down. That would be the opposite of provision. Whatever that might be. And so we provide. The cows are fed, the udders are milked, the calves are sold and the manure is shoveled. And it is well with my soul.