Reading myself into emergency sex

I cannot lie, today is not what I would call triumphant. My tolerance for flies, heat and local cuisine is weak; my health is weaker still; and cultural integration today stopped just short of wearing a skirt instead of jeans. I have not yet stepped out of Tyler’s compound today and I refuse to feel guilty. Kinda. Ok, I am guilty but not wracked by it. Yet. Look, I’m allowed.

My manifesto of lazy thus laid out, I will nevertheless attempt redemption. I cannot help my immune system’s susceptibility to giardia or my sanity’s susceptibility to flies, but I will enrich my mind while I suffer. I just plowed though a three hundred page book in less than twelve hours. Including time for sleep.

The book caught my eye in a stack of dozens at the bureau: Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: a True Story from Hell on Earth. Far from a sordid tale of betrayal and friendship (so said the sensationalist book flap cover), this is a dense and gritty memoir written by three individuals whose lives intersect internationally while serving as UN peace keepers. This set of intertwining biographies takes place over a decade and a half, four continents and five genocides – a shockingly honest, gruesome account of what it means to be human in the face of inhumanity. It is an amazing read as a volunteer serving overseas in the name of peace just as it might be for someone in the States trying to understand international developmental aid. While certain elements are beyond my scope of experience – namely gunfire, flak jackets, mass graves and war tribunals – the author’s experiences abroad were still intensely relevant to me. For example:

Heidi’s fear before joining the UN that her life had been squandered, over after just thirty years of unaccomplishment. Andrew’s struggle with a higher power who “pisses prayers down to earth, leaving everyone to die” (248), his attempt to reconcile undeserved, pervasive destitution with God. Ken’s longing for admission into a society of knowledgeable, selfless, worldly people. The recurring themes of hopelessness in the face of ineffective aid structures; of recklessness of foreigners high on altruism, youth, and invincibility; of impotence against global entropy and egoism; of decadence given the astronomical buying power of even a measly aid worker’s salary; and of doubting the value and durability of your work both during service and after departure.

I know what it is like to be loaded with local currency in the third world, to fight beyond language barriers to hear a first-hand account of brutal, present-day slavery, to stare in amazement at a seven-year old girl cradle her naked baby brother with dirty fingernails and no complaints, to feel simultaneous triumph and failure. And I can foresee the estrangement I’ll have upon reentry in America. Substituting one metropolis for another, Heidi summarizes my exact fears:

“I used to have a lot of friends here in Cincinnati. Now most of them have moved on or are busy tending to their own lives. They go to work and come home and worry about paying rent and how many years it will take them to save enough for a down payment on a house in Blue Ash. I want to escape that for as long as I can. Ordinary life will always be here; I can come back to it anytime” (212).

She balances this loathing for “ordinary life” later with her own yearning to settle down and refuse “the privilege to stand in another field, another country, another war” (241). She craves normalcy and companionship and 2.5 kids and dripping mangoes beside lazy pools and creamy stouts drank on green couches… I can’t help but read myself in her words, project my own wishes into her memoirs. I too suffer from illusions of grandeur and cravings for domesticity and hard-as-nails pragmatism and youthful idealism and self-importance and self-denigration.

Clearly, I read this book in reference to my own experience, and perhaps ten years from now, these passages will have lost their poignancy and relevance. But at a pivotal moment in my life, I see myself in a woman who grew up in Jersey, but grew wise in Somalia, in Haiti, in Cambodia. At this pivot, my service in Africa represents one of two things. It is either a welcome break from suburban monotony; a chance for one last, cultural, developmental, life-changing hurrah before settling down in Middle America. Or, it is the first stone on the beginning of my path in Africa. I cannot bring myself to tell my mother, my brother, my best friend, but already I have considered a third year in Mauritania. Never mind that I’m just finishing my third month; I have found something I am good at, that is good for me, and that is ostensibly good for the world. How, then, will I return to a desk job in two years and leave this exotic life of altruistic, fulfilling service behind? And if I cannot, how will I endure the self-inflicted heartbreak when I leave those I love in the States? How can I weigh phone cards and professional gratification, loved ones and Arabic dialects, and what am I going to do with my life??

For now, I’ll bask (burn?) in the light of introspection afforded me by this lazy day in Mauritania. In a feeble attempt at nourishment, I’ll choke down a can of pineapple and maybe a bag of crackers. And try to stomach the unfolding (unraveling?) of my life.