Two and a half weeks to go

With a symbolic flair, the satchel that I’d used my entire undergraduate career snapped in half minutes after turning in my second-to-last final exam. And thus was a signal of a closing chapter in my life.

I graduated Saturday on our university’s Jeffersonian quad with the announcer growling, “Jordan Christopher Butler, in coursu honorum magna cum laude!” as if we were filming a movie trailer. My mother, grandmothers, siblings, cousin and her boyfriend hooted and clapped underneath the beaming sun. Four years of the college experience—classes, friendships, girlfriends, late nights, studying abroad, partying, working and so on—came to an end.

When they had left Reno, my leaving for the Peace Corps became very real. I’ve been saying my last goodbyes to coworkers and friends and have been eating at my favorite Reno restaurants for perhaps the last time. I renewed my bank cards and driver’s license the other day not because they were expiring soon but because they would expire during my two years in Madagascar. I’ve also slowly been acquiring clothes and gear for my excursion abroad. (I’ll provide a list of what I’ve packed in a future blog entry.)

The idea of my leaving struck me most when I purchased my plane tickets last week. Having dates, flight numbers, and cities written onto paper transforms the Peace Corps from nine months of speculation into an oncoming reality. I leave the morning of June 7 for Philadelphia, spend a few days there for orientation, then fly from New York City to Johannesburg via Dakar, spend a night in Johannesburg, then finally arrive in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, on June 12.

The Internet is such a beacon of knowledge, my friends. Through the Internet I’ve made contact with many other volunteers who will be in my Madagascar group from June 2008 to July 2010. Including me, I believe I know of 23 of them. They seem to be refined and admirable people: open-minded, generous, well-traveled, confident and so on. We’re all bound to become very close as we endure Madagascar together.

The collective knowledge that we volunteers have amassed has also taught me new things about Madagascar. It sounds like my chances of having electricity in my own are extremely high. I also learned that Madagascar has the highest third year rate of all Peace Corps countries; that is to say, more specifically, that 30% of Peace Corps volunteers in Madagascar choose to stay in Madagascar for a third year of service. This fact must speak volumes about the country and the meaningfulness of volunteers’ work there. (It’s reassuring to know that I’ll probably find meaning in my work and that I probably won’t be teaching English and HIV/AIDS awareness to rocks, palm trees, and Aye-ayes.)

It’s a little bizarre to find how hard it is to find information about Madagascar and what my life in the Peace Corps there will be like. I frequently read conflicting information about both subjects. For instance, I read that my monthly living allowance will be the equivalent of $130, and then I read somewhere else that it’ll be $250. The size of Madagascar adds to this problem, too, because climates and living conditions differ throughout the country. I wonder why the Peace Corps doesn’t try to alleviate our uncertainty with more information on what life may be like.

What I have found, though, is that the Malagasy people are tiny! If what I’ve read is accurate, the average height for Malagasy women is 5 feet and Malagasy men is 5 feet 4 inches. For the first time in my life, I’ll be a monster with my 5’ 11” stature and might even be able to intimidate something other than puppies and toddlers. Watch out, Madagascar: The Rock is coming.

A Peace Corps social

The wind in Reno on Monday threw tree branches to the ground and lifted hats off our heads and into the air. Cars were blown into other lanes without warning, and I walked as if five invisible bouncers were trying to push me out of a bar. The wind was so powerful that a business building window at my university shattered, raining glass four stories down and sending a set of blinds into a nearby tree.

Outside’s tumult was incongruously met with a warm gathering of return Peace Corps volunteers, volunteers soon to be leaving, and applicants inside a restaurant a few blocks away from my apartment. This gathering was a social put on by Peace Corps employees from the San Francisco office. (I already knew one of the employees because she helped conduct my in-person interview in September.)

I climbed the restaurant’s staircase to find two tables of people young and old sipping on beers and telling stories of their travels. I sat down at the end of a table and a girl, Carly, the girlfriend of a volunteer who I believe returned from Ukraine in November, spoke to me.

“So how about you?” she said. “Have you already done the Peace Corps? Are you leaving or what?”

“Oh, well, actually, I’m leaving in June,” I said. Another person further down the table heard me and called out, “You’re leaving in June? Where are you going?” The other guests at the table turned their heads to me with curiosity.

“I’m going to Madagascar.” Everyone then gave a collective gasp of jealousy. They turned to each other and gossiped about how lucky I was.

Accordingly, volunteers throughout the evening told me how they had hoped to be sent to Madagascar. A twenty-something man going to volunteer in Mali in June told me, “I’m a little mad. Apparently my recruiter lied to me. I told her I wanted to go to Madagascar, but she said there was only one group of volunteers going there, and that group was leaving in February. But obviously after talking to you, there’s another group going.” He said this while smiling—he didn’t mind, of course, that he was going to Mali—but I could understand if he had a hint of ire.

Another man in his fifties was preparing to leave for Togo this summer. He said Madagascar was on top of his wish list because he wanted to see and work with the animals, but instead he was assigned to Togo, a country where its inhabitants have eradicated most of its animals by burning its trees. He gave me his e-mail address and told me to write to him of any Aye-aye sightings.

(Madagascar’s Aye-aye is the most horrifying animal I’ve ever seen. When I jokingly wrote my grandpa that I wanted a pet lemur during my term, he wrote back, “Bet you find some strange little animals over there that you’ll want as a pet more that a lemur. Like maybe this little guy!! He’s a Aye-aye.” Not knowing what an Aye-aye was, I researched it online. This Satanic animal is like a wingless bat with huge grass green eyes and long-fingered human-like hands. Malagasy folklore says this beast crawls into homes during the night and kills sleeping humans by puncturing them in the heart with their middle fingers. I wrote back to my grandfather and sheepishly said that I would rather have a friendly lemur for a pet than a monstrous Aye-aye.)

Most of the guests at the social were return volunteers. At one point we took turns standing and introducing ourselves and telling of how we were affiliated with the Peace Corps. The return volunteers said the Peace Corps had changed their lives and was the greatest job they’d ever had. Their words made me even more excited to leave—less than two months to go!

Carly, the girlfriend of a return volunteer, said she was a special education teacher at an elementary school, and I related to her the story of when I visited a class of autistic students at my former high school a few weeks ago. Last month over Spring Break I went to Las Vegas. In between fighting a head cold, writing my honors thesis, and visiting my family and friends, I met with Allie Levine, my high school sweetheart who recently married and now goes by Allie Garcia, a name still awkward for my tongue to pronounce. She is presently a long-term substitute teacher for mentally-challenged students, and I met her while she taught class. The students, about ten or so, occupied themselves with their own pastimes: A boy played with an electronic globe game, a girl wrote of her day in her journal, a third began reading “The Giving Tree” with Mrs. Garcia and so on. One had the ineluctable tendency of touching his ears with his hands, and another wore a helmet and carried herself as if one touch would break her into pieces.

“And there’s nothing you can really do with these students,” I told Carly, “other than babysit them, really. You can’t teach them anything, they don’t have the ability to learn. So all you can do is play with them. Going to that class made me realize that all these students need is love. They need friends and people to care about them. They’re often ignored, you know, and I think they need to have the feeling that there’re people that care about them.”

Mrs. Garcia gave them that feeling. During our relationship and afterwards, I admired her for her ability to love indiscriminately. She was always smiling and her eyes were always sparkling.

“And so I’m trying to incorporate that into my own life. I think there needs to be more love in this world. There’s a whole lot of love going on between family and friends that isn’t really expressed—and why not? Why is it so hard to tell the people you love that you love them? I have friends that I genuinely love, but I don’t know if they know it because I don’t tell them that I do. I didn’t start telling my parents that I loved them until I went off to college, and that’s a shame. I mean, they’re my parents!

“I’m going to try live lovingly when I’m in Madagascar. Along with teaching English, I want to be their friend. I think if there’s more love in this world, then people can start talking to each other and understanding each other easier. If I can help teach the mentality that we should be more open and loving with each other, maybe it’ll spread and spread throughout the world and then people will stop being so violent with each other. It doesn’t hurt to try.”

What I know before I go

Before I received my country invitation, I imagined my life in the Peace Corps to be like me living in a hut on the moon. I’d be in a barren, lifeless African country isolated from mankind.

Then when I received my invitation for Madagascar, my image of my future life in the Peace Corps changed. I still imagined me living in a hut on the moon, but now there were lemurs. Me, hut, moon, lemurs. Maybe bananas, but now I’m pushing it.

So I’ve been doing some research on what my Malagasy life could be like when I arrive there in June. I’ve sought out other Peace Corps Madagascar blogs, checked out photos of Madagascar, read the Peace Corps handbook and welcome book and so on. Here’s what I’ve gathered since I last left you:

I may not be as isolated from humanity as I thought I would be. It sounds like English teachers are placed in higher population density locations than, say, environmental workers. My country invitation said I would probably be living in a city or large village, which is a better circumstance to me than my sitting in the middle of nowhere talking with my best friend Maggie, my Magnavox short-wave radio. I’m eager to interact with the Malagasy since I want to become a full-fledged Malagasy culture expert by the time I leave the island in July 2010.

There may not even be a hut on my moon. Some volunteers live in cement-made shanties with electrical power. Being an aspiring luddite of sorts, I wouldn’t mind living in a place without electricity. The lack of running water will be the biggest challenge for me, though. I’m very fond of hot showers, toilets, and tea—perhaps not in that order—in the United States. My living conditions will again depend on where I’m stationed after my three months of training, but know that I will likely be taking bucket showers and using an outdoor pit latrine. But I’ve also read that the Malagasy grow their own tea leaves—phew!

And speaking of culinary indulgences, the food in Madagascar sounds fantastic. Its base is rice with many types of vegetables and fruits. Mangoes, zucchini, peanuts, bananas, coffee, sugar, breads, and zebu (a strain of cattle) meat sound like normal foods for eating in the island. I read I’ll be routinely cleaning my home’s floors with a half-piece of coconut, so unless it’s strictly used as a household cleaning product, coconuts are another element of Malagasy cuisine. My curiosity is also piqued by a homemade yogurt drink found throughout Madagascar.

Christianity isn’t even the dominant religion of Madagascar. A little more than half of the Malagasy are animists, a ceremonial-based religion that differs in practice among the tribal regions of the island. I won’t even pretend I know what animism is, but I read that they have a regular ceremony of digging up the dead, performing a ceremony on their bodies, and reburying them. Christianity is the religion of about 40% of the population, and the rest is largely Muslim.

“The practices of fady, a ritualized system of taboos and cultural mores combined with ancestral veneration, have tremendous significance for Malagasy, though there will, of course, be differences in the degree depending on your location.” I’ve read a little about fady. It sounds like these taboos deal with wearing certain colors or articles of clothing in public. But I’ll leave it at that since I’m sure you’ll hear plenty about these taboos when I begin living in the country.

Since Madagascar is enormous, it has many regions with cultural, linguistic, and climate differences. My life in the country will depend on where I’m placed. No matter how much research I do, there will still be uncertainty and mystery in store for me—but that’s what I want. A novel isn’t nearly as enjoyable when you already know its plot.

Committing myself

The last seven days were surprisingly not as self-reflective for me as I thought they would be. A cool relief came over me after receiving my invitation, and I’ve been relaxed and confident since then on the idea of my joining the Peace Corps.

Before my eyes scanned across an ink “Madagascar” on Peace Corps letterhead, I was anxious by the specter of the organization. That specter, the one in which I would be dropped into an impoverished country rife with hunger, disease, and violence, evaporated with my invitation. The idea of enduring a third world country is somehow more manageable when it’s attached to a name. Last week’s invitation gave the specter a name, “Madagascar,” and now it was no longer a specter and a cause of anxiety. There was now certainty in my future. I was going to Madagascar.

My completion of the Peace Corps’ lengthy application process was already a sign that I was ready to accept the invitation. I had applied in August, done my in-person interview in September, and completed my medical and dental work in January. Plus, I’d been considering the Peace Corps as an endeavor since I learned about it shortly after graduating high school. The fact that the Peace Corps had been a viable option in my life for some years now was my emotional and psychological preparation for calling a placement officer in Washington D.C. and committing myself to 25 months abroad.

I made that step this morning. Around 7:30, I took out the Peace Corps manual, found the number for the African Placement offices, and dialed it. An officer answered.

“I’m calling to accept my invitation,” I said.

“Great. And who am I talking to?”

“Jordan Butler.”

“Butler?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Hold on a second, let me grab your file.”

I was sitting at my desk in my apartment bedroom. I took a sip of tea while I waited for the officer to return.

“I’m back,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your invitation? Tell me what you’ve read from your packet.”

It was a little curious how vague my placement officer was being. It was as if I received my invitation in the mail, discovered that I was going to Madagascar, and threw the rest of my packet into a lit fireplace. I didn’t think my acceptance would be an oral reading comprehension exam.

“OK, well, uh, I’m going to Madagascar,” I said. “I know that there’s about 20 million people who live there. I guess I didn’t realize how that many people lived there, and I guess I didn’t realize how large Madagascar was. I know that I’ll be teaching English to prim—no, junior high and high school students. I also know that I’ll be helping the English of Malagasy teachers, too. And it also sounds like I’ll be doing some curriculum building, too. Let’s see, it sounds like I’ll be speaking French and Malagasy while I’m there, but mostly Malagasy. Uh, I guess I probably won’t have running water or electricity. Oh! And there are lemurs there!”

“OK, that’s good enough.”

The conversation continued. He gave me the official spiel about applying for a passport and visa, airplane tickets, my mailing addresses and so on. He also asked me to send my college transcripts to the Peace Corps offices after graduating. Oh, and what a small world! My officer attended the University of Nevada, Reno a decade ago, and we spent a few minutes talking about the new student union, the new library, and the Wolf Pack basketball team.

After updating the placement officer on his former university, he wrapped up the conversation. “Congratulations and have fun in Madagascar,” he said. Thanks and goodbyes and hang-ups.

And I was committed. I set my phone on the desk, sat for a moment in silence, and took a sip of tea—then I laughed to myself. What a funny image I must’ve been! A 21-year-old sipping raspberry-infused green tea and wearing Chuck Taylors and a maroon V-neck sweater just committed himself to 25 months in a Malagasy hut. How different he would appear this time next year!

My invitation

After a dreadful week of anticipation—one in which Monday felt like March, Tuesday felt like April and so on—July was here and I had the feeling that my country invitation would finally be in my mailbox.

At 10 o’clock on today’s abnormally warm Reno morning, I walked into my post office, checked my mailbox and—a key! I snatched the key, closed my mailbox, and walked to the large mailboxes where customers’ large letters and packages are kept. My heart was beating. I clumsily put the key in the hole, turned it, and a large white envelope with “Peace Corps” on the top was inside.

You know that clear plastic window on envelopes where a recipient’s address is listed? I was so impatient to look at my invitation that instead of opening the envelope and taking out the letter, I pulled the envelope from its contents, peeked through the plastic and haphazardly read portions of my letter: “Dear Jordan,” “Congratulations!” “great pleasure,” “thousands,” “stronger communities,” “Corps service,” “Madagascar.”

Madagascar. Was it true? Madagascar! That gargantuan tropical island off the coast of mainland Africa, known as the “Big Red Island” or the “Eighth Continent” for its size, was my new home! I really did win the lottery!

So I did what all Mega Millions winners do: I called my friends and family and told them of my luck. They were as impressed as I was for my good fortune. Former girlfriends were jealous and proud of me. Friends promised they would come to visit. My father said, “I can’t think of a better place, maybe except the Galapagos Islands, that you could’ve gotten.”

Even my initially-dissenting mother said, “Yes! I’m happy and relieved!” Because The Crocodile Hunter once went to Madagascar, my mother preferred Madagascar over most other African countries. Heck, if The Crocodile Hunter didn’t die by stampeding elephants or murderous Tarzans, neither would I. (I will, however, be particularly on the lookout for renegade stingrays.)

In my hands I’m holding my invitation packet that has information on my departure dates, job sector, passport and visa applications, and other forms. There’s also a signed letter from President George W. Bush who wrote me on July 18, 2001 to congratulate me for representing the United States, developing long-lasting friendships, and helping others pursue a better life for themselves. I also found it ironic that he told me to “Take this opportunity to build goodwill and to help lay the foundation for a more peaceful world.”

I’m off to read my packet and learn of my future life. From what I’ve read so far, I’ll most likely be living in a city or large village and regularly speaking French and Malagasy, the native language of the country’s 20 million residents. I will be teaching junior high and high school students English as well as improving the English of my peer Malagasy teachers. My home, which will either be with a Malagasy family or my own, will probably not have running water or electricity—but don’t fret, my friends, because chances are high that I will have an outdoor pit latrine. Cozy!

The guessing game

Exciting news! Yesterday I received a phone call from Jolie, a friendly placement officer for Africa. She was about to select my country for my 27 month Peace Corps term, but she was reviewing my application and had two concerns to talk with me about.

The first concern was that on my application, I wrote that I only wanted to volunteer in a community where its people spoke a world language like French, Spanish, or Arabic. “If learning French is the driving factor behind you doing the Peace Corps,” Jolie said, “I would suggest that the Peace Corps is not for you.” I immediately retorted that volunteering and community service was the driving factor for my joining the Peace Corps and that speaking and learning French was just a side benefit for my service. She said, “The reality is that you may only be speaking French sometimes, like in the capital of your host country, and you may be speaking tribal or local languages on a more regular basis.”

To this I said that was alright, and she said, “You’re being considered for a country where French may be spoken in the capital, but outside the capital, you’ll be speaking a language that is growing in use and becoming more widespread.” Again, I said OK.

Second, Jolie was concerned about my family’s support in my ambition to join the Peace Corps. I said except for my mother and grandfather, my family supported my endeavor. These two dissenters believe in the inevitability of my dying by coup d’états, diseases, popular revolt—and, because it’s Africa, ferocious zebras, stampeding elephants, and murderous Tarzans. I appreciate their concern, though, because their worrying shows that they love me and want me to be safe. I am, after all, their son and grandson.

On a scale from 0 to 10, I told Jolie that I ranked my family’s overall support as a 9. She seemed relieved at my 9 because she said family support for volunteers is very important, and a lack of it could easily make volunteers prematurely quit their terms and return to the United States.

Now onto the juicy parts of my placement. To torment the souls of potential Peace Corps volunteers nationwide, Satan devised the bureaucratic policy that Peace Corps placement officers aren’t allowed to disclose the volunteer’s country over the phone. Jolie could only give me hints of my future home.

Here’s what Jolie the Reluctant Clairvoyant revealed about my life for June 2008 to September 2010:

• I leave June 9, 2008.
• I will be teaching English and HIV/AIDS education to secondary education students.
• My country is “exciting.” (Note: When I asked Jolie if she said all countries were exciting to all her potential volunteers, she said, “No, this country is really exciting. We just sent a group of agriculture volunteers there, and the general consensus among them was that they had won the Peace Corps lottery with their country.”)
• My country is not Morocco.

The answer to this frustrating game of “20 Questions” is now in the mail and will arrive in Reno in little less than a week. Considering that I thought my invitation letter would arrive in April, this is happy news.

Until then, gumshoes, where is this Carmen Sandiego going? What country is like winning the Peace Corps lottery? I excitedly looked through the Peace Corps web site with Jolie’s clues and have four guesses for my country: Lesotho (prized perhaps for its remarkable landscapes), Cape Verde (prized perhaps for its tropical islands), Madagascar (prized perhaps for its exoticism and tropical climate), and Morocco (prized perhaps for “Casablanca” and hashish).

Of these four, I think the most likely is Madagascar. French is a growing language there while in the outskirts, people speak Malagasy and other local languages. Volunteers in Madagascar teach English and HIV/AIDS education (and agriculture, too, which plays into Jolie’s lottery anecdote).

Cape Verde is a close second in my guessing. While French is not spoken in the capital, its main language is Portuguese, a somewhat widespread language. Volunteers there also teach English and HIV/AIDS education, and it is probably like winning the lottery because of its tropical climate and not-horrible economic conditions.

Arabic, a widespread language, is spoken alongside French in Morocco. This prediction comes with the assumption that Jolie’s a world champion leg puller. As for Lesotho, some French is spoken there, but its outskirts host regional languages like Zulu and Xhosa, languages I doubt the Rosetta Stone will be soon offering for their growing popularity.

For the fact that I’ve “won the Peace Corps lottery,” I’m no longer ambivalent about my impending invitation letter. Now I’m more giddy than a child on Christmas morning. What present will Santa drop into my mailbox next week?

Waiting for my invitation

When I tell people of my plans to join the Peace Corps, the first question they usually ask me is, “Do you know where you’re going?”

To some extent, yes, I do know where I’m going. I will be leaving the United States in June for a Francophone country in Africa to teach English. I don’t know which country I’ll be headed to—I’m hoping for Morocco or Madagascar—but I believe I’ll learn of my country in April.

In April the Peace Corps will send me an invitation letter with a date of departure and my country. This is the last step of the application game: I’ll have 10 days to mull over the letter and respond with my decision whether or not to join. Ten days to decide my fate for 27 months.

Of course, I can leave the Peace Corps at any time during those 27 months. At the moment I’m forced to shovel elephant dung for an African shaman or sever an arm for an obscure Togolese sacrificial ritual, I can snap my fingers and return via plane to the United States. Permitting, however, that I don’t develop suicidal tendencies from being in such a miserable state of affairs, I plan to stay in the Peace Corps for the full 27 month term.

Indeed, 10 days to decide my fate for 27 months. Perhaps I don’t value my arm as much as I should.

I’m very ambivalent about my impending invitation letter. One part of me is excited to rip the envelope open, swing open the letter and discover my new home; the other part is nervous that when I swing open the letter, I’ll find that the Peace Corps bureaucrats in Washington D.C. mistakenly assigned me for Iraq or the South Atlantic Ocean. After seeing an op-ed in The New York Times in January 2008 from a former Peace Corps director of Cameroon, I’m also dreading to read “Cameroon” on my invitation letter. (The director painted a bleak picture of the Peace Corps’ ineffectiveness in the country for recent college graduate volunteers like me.)

Then again, as crazy as it sounds, I don’t think I’d decline the invitation if the Peace Corps does want to drop me into a war zone, ocean, or eternally ill-fated country. I’ve banked on joining the Peace Corps for six months. I’ve ignored other possible plans like graduate school, Teach for America and exciting international employment opportunities so that I could volunteer in God-knows-where enduring God-knows-what. For years I’ve wanted to do the Peace Corps for its humanity and adventure. When the invitation letter arrives on an April mid morning, is there really within me the possibility of declining?

In the meantime, I’ll continue my last semester at the university. I have other occupations in my classes and honors thesis to distract me from my ambivalence. What is very certain, however, is that when I do receive the letter and the 10 day consideration period begins, it’ll be the most self-reflective 10 days I’ve ever had.