pcv

How to make a man fall in love with you

They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. From my own travels around the world through various cultures and times let me propose this common path to love has missed a bit low: it’s really through his ears.

I was waiting for a friend one day outside a library so I decided to sit down and take out my guitar. Some volunteer friends and I are in a band that performs Kyrgyz music and we had a show coming up so I figured this was a good chance to practice in public to see how my nerves would stand up. Just as I got to the part where the song goes, “I love you, truly from my heart…” a man happened by, stopped, turned, crouched down, put a hand on my knee, and gave me the biggest love-struck smile I’ve ever seen. For a moment my voice faltered and then I thought, “No! The show must go on!” and completed my love ballad to this swooning stranger.

He was so happy. I was more happy to turn my guitar over to him.

I think he’s winking at me

I’ve never really liked music. Sure, I have thousands of songs on iTunes playlists ranging from 90s alt to mash-ups to Mozart. I was even in a ska band in high school. But I think music has been more of a cursory enjoyment than an integral part of my life. I’m not that person who lists all the live shows he’s been to on his “about me” section of Facebook. The list wouldn’t be more than a line long anyway. I do enjoy music, but compared to a lot of other people it might seem I don’t like it at all.

This may be why it’s taken me so long to find the secret to making men fall in love with me. As a straight dude, this is a lesson I could have gone a lifetime without learning. I suppose this lesson could also apply to making women fall in love with me, but so far this hasn’t shown out through experience. I have much more luck with the guys.

Our little Peace Corps band has played at several shows around the country, and was even showcased on one of the national TV channel’s New Year’s Eve program. I’ve been struck and humbled by all the people who are attracted to our music, women and men alike. And though people are impressed by the fact Americans are learning their language, I believe it’s the universal language of music that’s the biggest draw. You don’t even need to speak it well to communicate great volumes. Show up to a party with a refrain and a verse of almost anything and for a moment you will captivate a soul, tying a cord between yours and his, the song’s vibration dancing along this string, igniting desires and emotions within. Why else would they say it tugs on the heart strings?

This lesson learned may not be the best help in my own quest for love. But who knows, maybe you’ll be more lucky. Choose a song that you’ve fallen in love with and sing it out with all your heart. You might just make someone fall in love with you.

Don’t join the Peace Corps

You heard me. Don’t do it. I’m telling you, it’s going to break your heart.

The Core Expectations for Volunteers states you are expected to “serve where the Peace Corps asks you to go, under conditions of hardship, if necessary…” What it doesn’t state however is just what hardship means.

Right now you’re thinking, “Oh. There’ll be no flush toilets or showers. I can handle that. I might have to squash a few spiders, but for the high calling of changing the world, I think I can put up with those things.”

But the truth is, hardship isn’t the quirky and fun hardship you’re expecting, where each new day brings adventure upon crazy adventure, more wonderful than the next. True hardship is much more sobering.

During your service you might have to bury a neighbor. Or watch helplessly as your host family is torn to pieces by corruption. You might show up to school to learn one of your students was killed by a classmate. Your host sister could be kidnapped and forced to marry a man she’s never met. You might witness abuse, violence and mistreatment. You may see your best student lose to a kid from another school because his bribe was the biggest. Your dog might be fed a needle, just to quiet it down, forever.

And if none of that happens, then something else will. There’s just no knowing how hard it will be or it what way. It could be dealing with other volunteers is your biggest challenge. Or that you can never live up to the expectations of your host organization. Or that the Internet is so accessible you spend your entire day trolling Facebook, jealous of all the lives continuing on back home.

And what about all the things you’ll give up? Your boyfriend might not wait two years for you. You’ll put your career on hold. Your familiar support networks probably won’t be around – there’ll be no gym, no fast food joint, no car to drive, no family to visit. The stress and diet could make you lose thirty pounds—or gain thirty—whichever you don’t want.

The Peace Corps uses phrases like, “Life is calling. How far will you go?” and in a breath you’re ready to sign your name on the line. But two years is a long, long time and in the middle you find the world you wanted to change is a confusing and complex puzzle of which you are just one, tiny piece.

So please, if you’re not ready for the heartbreak in the hardship, don’t join the Peace Corps.

Or do.

Because you might just find that all your blood, sweat and tears are worth it – worth the pain, worth the time and worth the investment in the people for whom your heart breaks. Because you might learn some of the most important lessons of your life – that a broken heart can heal stronger than it was before, that a softened heart has more compassion for the world, and that in between its cracks and fissures is the only place where true beauty and grace can grow.

image

The inconvenience of flying ‘Peace Corps Class’

Obama was right when he said you cannot have both 100% security and expect 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. I just wish I didn’t have to learn this one the hard way.

Peace Corps status DOES NOT give you special privileges when traveling internationally. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to be more difficult.

Stepping up to the Boarder Control desk, I took a deep breath, then told the truth. There was a pause at the keyboard. “Sir, you said you were where for how long doing what?” It turns out spending a year in an unpronounceable place slaughtering sheep does not put you in the fast lane through customs and security.

image“Sir, did you ever leave your bags unattended?”

It was one moment in a long string of precautions and questions. When I finally made it to my gate I was told by the airline agent that I had been flagged for additional security and I would have to return. The plane would leave without me.

You can understand how disappointed I felt, not having been home for a year, my family waiting eagerly on the other side of that portal, just out of reach. The airline agent assured me this was all for my safety. “Your security is our top priority,” she said solemnly. Really, I wondered, because stopping and preventing me from getting on the plane seemed a lot more like she was concerned with everyone else’s security. Huddling in some forsaken corner of Toronto’s airport clutching my bag and shivering off the cold certainly did not make me feel more secure.

I spent the night in Section Q with the other squatters, awaiting my turn through customs and security once again the next morning. I was tempted to do it differently this time. To lie. To just get through that card in a way that would reunite me with buffalo wings as quickly as possible. Then I got to the part where it asks, “Were you on a farm?” Considering the fact that Kyrgyzstan is basically one large sheep pasture it was too difficult to answer “no.” So I was pulled into the back room for some shoe washing.

After waiting half an hour for the U.S. Customs Shoe Washing Unit to arrive, they glanced over my shoes for caked on dirt, determined there wasn’t enough to shake their washing stick at and passed me through. It didn’t seem like the appropriate time to mention the turkey and horse blood stains so I followed the extended arm out to the next security step.

After sending my bag through, I was randomly pulled aside for the “raise ‘em and spread ‘em” machine. Try coming from a country ending in –stan while wearing a beard and see if you don’t get randomly selected for extra security. If you want to serve your country in an unknown corner of the world for vast stretches of time doing “development work,” you are going to have your freedom and convenience violated.

But that’s what we signed up for, right? It’s not convenient to put a relationship or career on hold. It’s not convenient to step out into the unfamiliar and unknown. It’s not convenient to give up hobbies and support networks and to say goodbye to family and friends for two years of your life. And it’s not convenient to travel through airports.

But we didn’t sign up because of that. We signed up because, despite the difficulties, despite the hardship, we know this work matters. That nothing worth doing has ever been easy. That the inconveniences are not an end in themselves, but rather show us we’re on the right path.

I made it through. I’m in America, typing this right now in the land of the free and home of TSA. I have only two weeks here and then I’ll be back at the airport, back in line, headed back to the work and people I love. Yes, it’s inconvenient. And yes, it’s so worth it.

Most of the world doesn’t understand “9-5”

I recently saw an article floating around my facebook newsfeed disparaging America for refrigerating eggs. People were like, “What the hell, America?! You are so stupid!” And I was like, if we have resorted to criticizing America for refrigerating eggs, that is actually proof of how great America is. “Oh, no civil war? No mass starvation? People aren’t fleeing the country by the millions? Ok, well I guess everything is going pretty—REFRIGERATED EGGS!! OH MY GOD! ALERT THE PRESSES!”

Just imagine: a country so incredible its affluence permits people to spend hours arguing in weblog comment feeds about the proper temperatures for eggs. Few places on this globe allow for such luxury.

What about turkey eggs?

It’s now after fall break at my village school, and our recently settled schedule has been messed up again. An outbreak of hep A has obliged our director to ban unnecessary movement throughout the school and keep classes in students’ own homerooms. I suspect at least a few of the absentees are cases of great acting rather than a crippling month long illness. “I can’t go to school, mom. I’ve got that thing, I think, that people are talking about, you know, the one where people get to—I mean—have to stay home from school…”

In one particularly bad day of student attendance last spring, I talked my counterpart into taking a little visit together to the “troubled” students’ houses to talk with the parents. While several of them were supportive and said they would do a better job encouraging, what one mother said caught me off-guard. I asked if school was important and she said yes, but that her son was needed to do the farm work so the family could have food.

I know not everyone in America has it altogether easier, and most people work very hard. But if I had to put a number on the average work schedule here, 5am-9pm would be a little more accurate. People work really, really hard, and especially the women since the lack of running water and consistent electricity tends to hit the domestic chores the hardest.

It’s not always the same kind of work we’re used to in the states, assisted by all our time-savers. But people are doing what they need to do in the moment to secure a future. That means when the coal truck comes to town, you stop what you’re doing, go home, negotiate a price, and then spend the next couple hours shoveling it into your shed. Staying warm is kind of a priority in Kyrgyzstan. Yet this disrupts my neat little 9-5 schedule I have all written out for myself, like I thought I was still in the states or something.

We get up, we brush our teeth, we hit the office, take an hour off for lunch, put in a few more hours and then go home to an evening full of whatever we want to do. We press a button and the dishes are magically polished. We flip a switch and are kissed by warm air. Our biggest complaints are re-matching socks from the dryer or that minute rice actually takes five. Now I scrub my clothes with a bar of soap and that’s after hauling the water from a pump down the street. I never realized what a precious gift I was being handed – that precious gift called time.

Time gives us so many opportunities. We can get a second job, help our kids with their homework, volunteer at a food bank, or even surf the web for articles on eggs. Let’s just not forget what grace a 9-5 affords.

How to slaughter a sheep

I was hanging out, having a cup of tea with my neighbor when he pointed at my leg and said, “That’s horse blood.”

I said, “Yeah, you’re right – I helped kill a horse this morning. How did you know?”

“Every animal’s blood is a little different color. You can tell the difference between sheep, horse and cow blood stains quite easily.”

I thought about that exchange this afternoon as I looked down at my pant cuff, freshly spattered with the blood of my own first sheep. I had helped with half a dozen sheep slaughters before, but this one I had bought at the market, tied down, slit the throat and cut up into its 12 ustukans for serving guests, mostly on my own. I wondered if my neighbor could match this color of red correctly.

I had the help of my landlord, Bolot-baike, only a couple years older than me, but still old enough to receive that respectful brother-title baike. I was adamant on doing each step on my own, with directions only. I may speak Kyrgyz like a 7-year-old, I may even look funny, but with two days shy of 30 years under my belt, there are a few things I’ve learned to do. Like which end of a knife to hold.

“You hold it like this, Baatyrbek,” Bolot-baike showed me, using my Kyrgyz name.

“Oooohhhh, thanks Bolot-Baike!” I answered enthusiastically, “I thought I was supposed to hold it with my butt. So, I learned something today.”

Truth be told, I did learn a little more than that. Like how to find the cartilage between vertebrae under half an inch of meat. Or how to rip out the hip sinew with my teeth. And I did make a few errant cuts; the guests may grumble a bit about that hunk missing from the side of the spine. But then again they’re my guests, and they would be grumbling about the host.

imageHow to slaughter a pumpkin (not quite as bloody)

Turning 30 is a bit of a milestone. Every year is I suppose, but I’ve spent so long defining myself as a “twenty-something” that I’m not sure how this fourth decade is going to go. The thirties are a whole new ballgame. Or, slaughter, or whatever.

It felt almost like a rite of passage. Like I had been turned loose in the jungle with nothing but a loincloth and a stick and I had come back with a tiger. Except I was standing outside my front door, wearing a jacket and holding a knife over a tied up sheep. Sheep are quite possibly the lamest adversaries in the entire animal kingdom. You really get the sense that God was not giving us a compliment when he had Jesus continually refer to us as such.

So my sheep laid down its life for our little bit of humanity, my friends, my neighbors, the people I’ve grown so much to love over this past year. Plus now if I’m ever lost in the woods and a sheep walks by, I know I’ll be ok.