Running with your mail
The mission: Deliver this month's mail, medical supplies and packages to all volunteers serving in the field by way of a 6-day journey around the country in a land rover.
The obstacle: Our own incompetence.
Biggest Errors: 1. Gave one volunteer's package to a student at a not-so-rural high school in the hopes that said student would dutifully pass the package on to our volunteer so as not to interrupt his class. Needles to say, package was not recovered. Anonymous youth no doubt enjoying contents.
2. Discovered that we hadn't delivered the packages of 3 volunteers long after we had passed and stopped at their sites, despite our list telling us exactly what to look for. (Did not check list twice.)
3. Found one padded envelope we decided to pack far beneath several heavy boxes. Looked as though Andre the giant had trampled on it and given it to a pack of rabid rodents to chew on. But package was delivered as promised.
4. After discovering several agro-forestry volunteers' villages were abandoned due to an upcoming in-service training, we decided not to bother with one volunteer who was quite far off the main road. Later we received the call that he was indeed there, waiting in his hut for the truck that never came. Sorry buddy.
Greatest Joys: 1. A volunteer's host grandmother who professed her love for him and informed us of their plans to marry.
2. My own host family pretending not to know me when I stopped by. "You have a toubab living here, right?" "No, she went back to America."
3. Delivering a very culturally-insentive but highly amusing "minty bombing" at one volunteer's site. (Watching the children dive at candies we tossed while the volunteer shook his head in horror.)
4. The weeding out of "Fedex employee" as a potential career choice when I return to the states.
Lessons to be gleaned from this experience: If you didn't get your mail, or if your mail was damaged or brought to someone else, consider it a powerful lesson in object impermanance. Don't rely on goodies from home as your crutch for surviving life in Africa. Now I'm off to enjoy my care packages.
The obstacle: Our own incompetence.
Biggest Errors: 1. Gave one volunteer's package to a student at a not-so-rural high school in the hopes that said student would dutifully pass the package on to our volunteer so as not to interrupt his class. Needles to say, package was not recovered. Anonymous youth no doubt enjoying contents.
2. Discovered that we hadn't delivered the packages of 3 volunteers long after we had passed and stopped at their sites, despite our list telling us exactly what to look for. (Did not check list twice.)
3. Found one padded envelope we decided to pack far beneath several heavy boxes. Looked as though Andre the giant had trampled on it and given it to a pack of rabid rodents to chew on. But package was delivered as promised.
4. After discovering several agro-forestry volunteers' villages were abandoned due to an upcoming in-service training, we decided not to bother with one volunteer who was quite far off the main road. Later we received the call that he was indeed there, waiting in his hut for the truck that never came. Sorry buddy.
Greatest Joys: 1. A volunteer's host grandmother who professed her love for him and informed us of their plans to marry.
2. My own host family pretending not to know me when I stopped by. "You have a toubab living here, right?" "No, she went back to America."
3. Delivering a very culturally-insentive but highly amusing "minty bombing" at one volunteer's site. (Watching the children dive at candies we tossed while the volunteer shook his head in horror.)
4. The weeding out of "Fedex employee" as a potential career choice when I return to the states.
Lessons to be gleaned from this experience: If you didn't get your mail, or if your mail was damaged or brought to someone else, consider it a powerful lesson in object impermanance. Don't rely on goodies from home as your crutch for surviving life in Africa. Now I'm off to enjoy my care packages.
posted by mchughtie at 7:44 AM
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