Everything Almost Fell Apart But Then It Didn’t

Peace Corps Mozambique’s 32nd cohort at our swearing-in ceremony on November 20th, 2019. Photo from the U.S. Embassy’s press release.

We officially swore in as Peace Corps Volunteers the week before Thanksgiving 2019. We should have left for our permanent sites that same week, but due to a technical documentation issue, we were delayed and had to stay together in our training homestay houses and then in a hotel in Maputo. We were delayed for over a month.

For lots of reasons, that’s all I can directly say publicly regarding that issue.

So instead of discussing our delay, I’m going to write about a completely unrelated topic: the first thing that happened when I was alone at my site, or the moment everything almost fell apart but then it didn’t.

But first, the events leading up to that moment.

We were finally able to leave for our sites on December 27th. The night before, Noah organized a cohort-wide Group Hug in the lobby of the hotel in Maputo where we were staying. We hugged and cried together, affirmed one another, and then went to sleep for a few short hours, bubbling with anxiety for the adventure awaiting us in the morning. Volunteers in the Northern and Central regions of the country flew to their sites, but everyone in the South was driven in Peace Corps vehicles. I am the only volunteer west of Maputo so I missed out on the clown car road trip that the other volunteers took east. I was scheduled to leave at 6am but I didn’t end up leaving until 8am with driver Miambo and Biology Tech Trainer Anabela. Because of this little delay I was able to eat a quick breakfast with some of my closest friends who were leaving on later flights. While initially, this delay in departure was frustrating (I was in the lobby at 5:30am! Why can’t I just GO already?), looking back now, I am pretty grateful. Getting to spend extra time surrounded by the people I love the most was a special treat. It made saying goodbye a little bit harder, but also a little more meaningful. When the car arrived, Cat, Maggie, Cole, and Lauren scooped up my bags and walked me outside. I lingered for a moment hugging each of them, and then we said our final farewell.

Every day for the past four months when I’ve said goodbye to my friends, it’s always been an “até amanhã!” Until tomorrow! This time, it was an “até a próxima!” Until next time! Next time will be at least three months from now, but more likely when we have our reconnect conference in May. Until May, friends. We drove out of the parking lot and I took one breath.

One last Tom e Jerry photo (for now) next to the hotel pool at Group Hug. From Cat: “The theme is sweaty.”

On a normal day it would take between two and a half and three hours to arrive at my site by private car. We managed to stretch it out to just over five hours, though. We stopped six times: two government buildings searching for a stamp for a document announcing the arrival of the Maputo Province Volunteers, a SuperSpar (the closest comparison, thanks be, is Target) because Anabela was concerned I wouldn’t have any buckets at my site (I didn’t), a market (for different buckets), and two gas stations. At the first, Miambo filled the tank and got soup and a sandwich. At the second, we picked up some ice for a cooler he and Anabela were sharing for the trip back to the city. I happily went along for this winding journey. My excitement grew with each new stop along the way.

The last hour of the trip is a slow, bumpy ride out a rocky dirt road that connects the closest neighboring town with my site, which is located further out in the countryside of northwest Maputo Province. Noting the distance when we arrived, Miambo conjectured that had the road been paved, the last leg would have only taken 20 minutes. But it is very much not paved: there were moments when the car tilted up on the slanted edge of the road to avoid a giant patch of rocks and my seatbelt hugged me tightly as my shoulder slid against the car door; at times we came to a complete stop to allow the occasional oncoming car traverse a giant bump before we took our turn slowly mounting the one safe path. Though we’d been chatting up a storm for the first few hours (providing much needed and great practice for my Portuguese, which had been lying fairly dormant for the previous weeks—the longer we spent delayed for site, the less structured our days became until eventually the peak of one afternoon’s intellectual stimulation was playing the card game Durak for the 800th time in the hotel lobby, seeing only other volunteers and hearing only English), we were fairly silent for the last hour of our trip, as it was hard to hear one another over the sound of the rattling dashboard.

It was a long, difficult journey, but we made it.

After stopping at the high school to briefly meet with one of the secretaries, we slowly drove down my town’s one main road (less bumpy, but still unpaved) towards my new house. We turned off the road onto a narrow path well-worn with one set of tire marks, continued for about a minute, and then I spotted it—I recognized the house from a photo the previous volunteer had sent a few months prior. We pulled up, my landlord and his family appeared from their house, and I stepped out of the car, ready for the first few moments of my new life.

And immediately I was hit in the face with dust. It was just over 100 degrees and incredibly windy, and the ground I stepped onto was essentially sand: very thin, very fine, very dusty dirt. The next half hour was a blur of stilted introductory conversation where I mostly just listened politely and peeled my hair off of my sweaty, dust-covered neck. We unloaded my belongings into my empty house, and soon enough, it was time to say yet another goodbye. With the small private car, the stop at almost-Target, and all of my things loaded up in the trunk, this whole day felt like I was being dropped off at college, so it made as much sense that there’d be one last family goodbye. We took a photo on my front step, Anabela gave me a hug and gifted me two spoons, I thanked Miambo for everything, and they were off. I was alone and covered in dust. I felt surprisingly calm.

Me, Miambo, and Anabela on my front step just before they headed back to the city.

But I was alone for only a moment. My landlord and his son quickly reappeared at the house with a toolbox and got to work fixing the one window in my bedroom. This had come up in conversation with Anabela—for the house to be considered livable by Peace Corps standards, I must have a bed, a small table and two chairs, electricity, a locking door, and windows that shut. All the rest (how to cook dinner without food or a stove, for instance) I can figure out on my own, but these things are essential. One window was broken, so Jacob and his son, Junior, were determined to repair it immediately. Repairing that window was crucial.

Thus, we have arrived at the moment when everything almost fell apart but then it didn’t.

Let me set up the metaphor situation for you: there was a thing that needed to happen before I could officially continue with the next phase of my service, and that thing was completely outside of my control, and entirely essential. The…“window.” And until the thing was fixed, I was unable to unpack my bags, unable to leave my house to explore my community, and unable to proceed with the job I came here to do. I had to wait, delayed, for an indeterminate amount of time until everything was resolved. If the attempts to fix the thing didn’t work, there was a very real, very scary possibility that I would not have been able to serve—I could have been sent home, in all honesty. Because of—the window. And the problems with the window. Yes. That’s all this story is about. Okay.

Jacob and Junior made a great team. Jacob stood inside with his toolbox, and Junior was outside holding the window in place. The technical piece they were fixing was a sliding lock that would allow me to open the window and fasten it in one place so that it didn’t flap about in the wind. But the metal had to be situated in such a way that it would allow the window to fully click shut, too. It seemed simple enough, and I expected them to finish the repair quickly.

The window repair in question and the sole focus of this blog post.

As they passed a screwdriver back and forth, I poked around my bags without actually unpacking. If I was going to have to wait, I was determined to keep myself busy: I opened and re-secured all of my luggage locks a few times, flipped through pages of my notebook, and shuffled my stack of new buckets. But there is only so much running in place one can do. Even in, say, a big group of people who get along very well and are united with the same purpose—when there is no end in sight, morale will eventually dip because there is simply not anything of substance to be done. We were left feeling powerless, stuck and—or, err, I felt powerless because of the window. And how I couldn’t do anything because of the window. Remember? Right.

“Bom,” Jacob said, indicating they were done. I walked over to check it out. Junior let go of his part and they tried shutting it. It didn’t come close. Their measurements had been off, and the sliding hinge got stuck, preventing the window from shutting. Junior started cracking up, and Jacob sighed, then laughed. I chuckled, too. It became apparent that this positivity would be key in the success of the window repair job: even though the odds were not in my favor, finding the humor in my situation and holding onto that small sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, the window would be fixed and I could unpack, was what I needed to focus on.

I retreated back to the edge of my bed, trying to keep my head up, but suddenly negative thoughts started creeping in. I graduated college, joined the Peace Corps, and ended up in this house. All roads led to here. And I didn’t know to expect window problems. If this house were to be deemed unlivable because of the broken window, and effectively this window were to send me home, what would I tell my family? My friends? Or more importantly, how would I reconcile all of this with myself? I didn’t break any windows. But this would still be my failure, my dream that didn’t work out. Who would remember that it was because of a window that was already broken when I arrived?

Jacob screwed the last screw, Junior let go, and they tested it again—still off by a few inches. Not quite there.

The longer I sat waiting, the harder it became to envision an outcome where this messy, complicated situation ended with a fixed window and a hassle-free two years of service. I began to grow at peace with this fact, because it felt like I had to. I also started to wrap my head around the fact that my family and friends back home would never understand what it meant to dedicate myself to this specific thing and then have a broken window take it all away. There were a million reasons why it would be awful if the window remained broken, and a million reasons why it would be wonderful if it were fixed. So many of them selfish, and some of them not. I knew, intellectually, that with each passing moment there was still a 50% chance everything would work out. The window might not be broken forever. But, my god, it was hard to feel that way.

Junior was sent back into the main house to look for a different set of screws. Maybe a new angle, with new materials, would yield better results.

The one comfort in all of this was that I was not alone. All 53 members of my cohort were experiencing the exact same issue with a...uh...broken window. We were the only people in the world who understood what it felt like to be in this situation, and because of this, during the time that we waited to hear about the outcome of our windows, we grew closer. And closer. We’d spend every waking moment of our days together because we knew that to be alone during our delay was to be alone with our spiraling, terrified thoughts. We’d be open with each other about our fears and dive into them or distract from them, together, depending on the day. We learned how to support one another by being thrown into the most extreme, stressful, unexpected reality of all of our lives.

Jacob realigned the hinge and marked a new spot on the wood with his pencil.

We were charging headfirst towards a very scary future: window repair, we get to serve. No window, no service. If the windows stayed broken and we did all get sent home, we would continue to be the only people who could fully empathize with and support one another. We’d forever be the only ones who understood. But we’d be scattered across the U.S. and the world, starting our lives over again, apart and alone. And that idea was just as terrifying as the broken windows themselves. So we lifted each other up while we still could, knowing that no matter what happened with the repairs, we would try our best to get through it together.

Another attempt. The window still wouldn’t close.

I didn’t tell many people about the broken window. I kept my mom in the loop, of course, but even with her, it took me a while to finally reveal all of the details. I could sense that I was distancing myself from people, sending simple, “Everything’s going well!” deflective responses to texts from family and friends back home. It just made no sense to tell part of the story before there was an ending; why spread fear and concern to yet another person who had no power over the situation? As I waited for the window to be repaired, I posted to my blog about site announcements and the homestay celebration, pretending like the normal timeline was still in place and secretly hoping that I could will the normal timeline back into existence. I knew that I’d have to tell this story eventually, and I might as well wait until the window was deemed broken forever, or it was fixed. Either it would be the story of how everything fell apart, or the story of how everything almost fell apart but then it didn’t.  

Screwdriver, window, window, screwdriver.

Click.

Jacob and Junior high fived, picked up their tools, and went back to their house. I stood up from my bed. I was alone again, and the room was very still. I leaned down to start unpacking my luggage, but then I stopped. I grabbed my keys, walked out onto my hot and dusty front step, started to lock my front door, but then I stopped again. I went back inside, laid down on my bed, and took a two hour nap. I was exhausted.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *

I feel bad that I couldn’t write a post about the documentation issue that delayed us going to site or how it felt living through that time, because it has defined my experience with service thus far. It was hard, but a lot of good came out of it, too, and you’ll just have to believe me on that front. If you want to hear more details, I’d be happy to share offline, especially for the friends who received deflective texts or for the prospective volunteers who happen to stumble upon this blog.

The patience and persistence it took to survive the most anxiety-filled month of my life are now guiding my focused, settled outlook at site. I’ve arrived. I am a full, functioning volunteer with a fully functional window. That’s that.

Now back to regularly scheduled, less cryptic blogging.