Every now and then I stop and look around me and have to remind myself aloud that I live in a village in West Africa.
After seven months, no matter how many times I say it to myself, it never really feels real. The Africa I live in is a bit different than the stereotypical picture- no giraffes or elephants unfortunately- but its not that different. I live in a remote village surrounded by desert brush and scraggly desert thorn trees, my mothers wear brightly colored clothing and carry babies on their backs and water on their heads. At night children dance around drums and in the morning we cook breakfast over an open fire. Its a village in Africa and its actually pretty exotic.
So why doesn't it feel different to me? Why do I have to stop to look around and realize that its foreign?
My travel experience before Peace Corps was relatively limited. I've never lived in a different country before, never studied abroad, never spent more than three weeks out of the US and I had probably never gone more than a months without seeing my family. So I've never done readjustment before. It should be shocking to me, all the changes and differences. But I guess what I have learned most so far is the resiliency of a human to change and how similar we all really are. Your first week somewhere new, you notice differences- "hey, we don't say that" or "this doesn't look the same as it does in America." But by the second week, all you see is similarities. A market is a place to buy things, public transportation sucks, you have a taste for certain foods and not others, little boys never want to take showers, and if you're tired enough a bed is a bed anywhere. Sooner than you think, all you see is similarity. Before you know it, all you see is normal. Maybe you've changed somehow, accepting a new sense of normalcy, adapting to you surroundings. Or maybe nothing you find in the world is really all that different.
