Malawi has made me . . .. indecisive. I mean, I had occasional (frequent) problems making a decision before, but in Malawi you can make as many decisions as you want, and they rarely have any effect on the end outcome. Which is not to say there’s no point to making decisions; but, if you’re going to bother making a decision, it better be worth it and you better be ready to work for it. Where to have lunch just isn’t worth the trouble. Even things about which I would, in America, stress about—say, where I was going to sleep while traveling—seem unimportant and not worth deciding about before hand. After all, it’s all going to change 20 times anyway.
It may look the same to my friends back home, my indecisiveness. But I can explain the difference. Before Peace Corps, if I would fail to make a decision and someone stepped in to do what I had failed to do, I would suddenly have a strong opinion. Whether that was because I didn’t feel like I could say what I wanted or because I was that out of tune with what I wanted, I can’t say. Most likely it was a mixture of both. But now, when I say I don’t care, it means I don’t care. If I say I don’t know what I want, I don’t know. I can roll a die, someone else can make the choice, or whatever I used to do to be slightly less annoying in making choices, but it doesn’t change anything because I really don’t care or don’t know. I really am just waiting for a good option to present itself. And if the option I like the best isn’t available, that’s okay, because I’ll just do something else.
I can only justify caring about things I’m willing to work for. And I can’t be bothered to work for things I don’t care about.
I’m also more confidant, although that’s in a weird way I’m not aware of. I still think of myself as being pretty shy, and in large crowds, I still feel overwhelmed and out of my depth. But, if I go to a party and I know one person, I call it good: I know I can meet other people, and if I get too shy I can return to my friend like a toddler checking in with a parent. I’ll start random conversations with people around me sometimes. I’ll continue random conversations other people start more often than that.
I was at a Yakima Valley Community College game with my grandpa for his birthday, and when we all got together again that night, my uncle commented on my fearlessness: an old umpire friend of grandpa’s was cracking jokes and telling stories with the other ex-coaches, and I kept asking for details and cracking jokes myself. I mean, come on, if you heard a story about a ball thrown to an ump asking him if he needed help because of all his bad calls, and you knew he wrote something on the ball and threw it back, wouldn’t you want to know what it said, too? Yeah, well, apparently my ears are too delicate for that information, so I razzed him a bit about not telling me.
When my uncle told my mom (admiringly? horrified?) about how I just got into the conversation, I at first thought he was crazy. Of course I did, I wanted to know what happened. But upon further reflection, I realized that before I would have wondered, perhaps made up a story to satisfy my curiosity, perhaps nudged my grandpa into asking for me. But just jump in like there’s nothing to fear in starting a conversation with random people? No frakking way.
Also, I am now very passionate about when people talk about “African culture” or “African language” or “African people.” If you’re not very clear about where the generalities of those phrases fail (which is to say, practically everywhere) don’t use them. Sure, Malawian culture has things in common with that of several other African countries. But it has more things different. And to pretend that Africa is somehow one people bound by more than their presence on the same landmass is to force yourself to completely misunderstand the entire continent.
I’m sure there are other things. The lines aren’t as delineated as I thought they would be. This whole process of returning home and returning to American culture hasn’t been what I thought it would be. I didn’t have culture shock. I sort of had a slow culture miasma. I’m still sort of having a slow culture miasma. Sometimes I think this is how it will always be. Sometimes I’m sad that it isn’t.
