8. Thinking of Central Asia, Fall 2002
9/11’s airplanes did get me to Central Asia though, if not yet knocked up. It’s cliché but true that tragedy and loss are great motivators for those who survive them and/or are not directly touched by them. As I related before, I wrote to the Peace Corps when I was 15 and then I just waited. For what, I don’t know. After Spain and meeting the boy who would be my boyfriend for a long time, he and I moved first to New Brunswick, NJ, and then to Manhattan. Paying over $1,500 monthly for a ragged room that was a hotel back in the olde steam ship days. I had a job, working at a nonfiction publishing company. He rocked back and forth between jobs, fired and unemployed, and I guess I thought I had settled into “life.” That said, during this time, pre-2001, I still thought of Peace Corps at times, my hyper-romanticized version of it, of course.
The planes smacked me out of my lethargy and emboldened me to announce to Steve one night while eating Indian food on Eighth Avenue at a place with red velvet on its walls, roaches in the crevices, and delivery boys swathed in black leather, that I was going to apply to the Peace Corps. It was emotional for us both. The cheap house white wine fueled my melodramatic tears.
He said he supported my decision and encouraged me to apply and see what would come of it as he couldn’t stomach being the reason I chose not to do something. He feared, he said, me looking back over the years, not joining Peace Corps and feeling a bang of regret and transferring that blame onto him. He couldn’t countenance that, he said. It was big of him.
With that, I moved on. I applied. I attended info sessions on the West Side, picking up a bootlegged CD of Alanis Morrisette while heading over to PC’s NY offices one day after work. It was a relatively painless if über-bureaucratic process.
After a bit of time the length of which I no longer remember, Peace Corps called me and offered me an assignment I had 24 hours to accept. It would be working as a bee keeper in an agricultural extension project in Paraguay: teaching local women how to tend and care for honey bees so to harvest their honey as a way of providing supplemental income to their families. Wow! What did I know about honeybees? Sure, I’d been stung a few times but … I know how bees are flowers’ friends as they scuttle about pollinating blossoms here and there.
I only had 24 hours to decide about the posting as the program was leaving in a few weeks and they only had a handful of slots still available. I got the call while I was at work, at the scholarly publishing house. It was late in the workday. I think I might have Goggled “honey bees” and “Paraguay” to learn that the honey bees that live today in Paraguay are those of the “Africanized” variety, which means they’re more vicious than the now-extinct indigenous (Paraguayan) variety.
I didn’t know how to decide about such an offering and wanted to fairly consider it before instinctively declining. A synergetic flash of possibility charged through my mind. I thought of the Liz Christy Community Garden down on Houston Street, east of Broadway, near the Bowery, New York’s once infamous “Skid Row” of hobos, winos, and the unwanted. I had wandered in the garden a few times before and enjoyed it and I recalled that at the back of the narrow stretch of garden, against the wall of the garage that abuts it, there were hives, yes, beehives. White boxes with little drawers.
After work I scurried down to Houston and Broadway and entered the community garden just as its caretaker was securing the property for the night. She was a kind, older woman. I asked her feverishly if the “beekeeper” was available. I felt like “beekeeper” was some sort of code for a dealer of something illicit. I felt funny asking and in such a frenetic way but I had no time for reflection nor humor.
She told me the beekeeper wasn’t there but passed his number to me (yet another shady element of this interaction). I headed home, this was my long-lasting pre-cell phone stage, of course, and called the beekeeper. No one picked up. I left a desperate message. I wanted to talk to someone who knew something of the ins and outs, the everyday, of being a beekeeper. Would I like it? What’s it like? Am I well suited for it? I didn’t expect the beekeeper, of course, to answer these questions for me but I just hoped he would say something that sparked deep down inside of me some long-lost curiosity in the work of a beekeeper.
After a bit, he called me back that evening. A charming, faceless beekeeper. I thank him to this day. Needless to say, I didn’t accept the posting in Paraguay not really because of the substance of what I’d have been doing but because of the lack of time and dearth of information provided me to make the decision. Also, the idea of teaching others something I myself didn’t know (or have experience with) made me nervous. This points to an inherent weakness of Peace Corps, to my mind.
Don’t get me wrong, I admire the organization and what it does. I respect the people who commit so much of themselves and their youths to its work. It’s good stuff. Not only for those overseas who benefit from learning beekeeping or English or web development and marketing but also for what Peace Corps volunteers bring back to the United States.
The simplest example I can provide of this less-obvious good that Peace Corps does is when I tell people I served in Uzbekistan and they pause, crinkle their brow and reply, “Pakistan?” I answer, never pedantically, “Nope, not Pakistan, Uzbekistan. One of the former Soviet ‘Stans, north of Afghanistan, west of Kazahkstan, east of Turkmenistan.” See, by volunteers’ experiences both while they’re serving through letters and emails and phone calls home as well as once they’re back in the “world,” people in the United States learn more about our world and that’s an invaluable positive. One’s less likely to hate or denigrate someone who’s familiar, who’s life one knows even a little bit about. Knowledge of the other makes it harder to dehumanize him or her.
That said, when it comes down to it, selecting where you will spend the next 27 months of your life while serving in Peace Corps really boils down to a simple choice: location or vocation. For me, my choice hinged on the twin issues of whether or not I wanted to be in Latin America where I knew the language but knew nothing of the task I would be put in charge of or do work I was familiar with and knowledgeable about (teaching English and writing) in a place I knew nothing about and whose language I certainly couldn’t speak.
For some reason, I chose vocation and ended up in mid-January 2003, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A bleak, enigmatic place.
A parting, humorous part of this story is that during this time and shortly thereafter my dad sent me magazine ads for Burt’s Bees products and articles from his local paper about the viciousness of the Africanized bees. It’s become a running family joke on the randomness of my life.
9/11’s airplanes did get me to Central Asia though, if not yet knocked up. It’s cliché but true that tragedy and loss are great motivators for those who survive them and/or are not directly touched by them. As I related before, I wrote to the Peace Corps when I was 15 and then I just waited. For what, I don’t know. After Spain and meeting the boy who would be my boyfriend for a long time, he and I moved first to New Brunswick, NJ, and then to Manhattan. Paying over $1,500 monthly for a ragged room that was a hotel back in the olde steam ship days. I had a job, working at a nonfiction publishing company. He rocked back and forth between jobs, fired and unemployed, and I guess I thought I had settled into “life.” That said, during this time, pre-2001, I still thought of Peace Corps at times, my hyper-romanticized version of it, of course.
The planes smacked me out of my lethargy and emboldened me to announce to Steve one night while eating Indian food on Eighth Avenue at a place with red velvet on its walls, roaches in the crevices, and delivery boys swathed in black leather, that I was going to apply to the Peace Corps. It was emotional for us both. The cheap house white wine fueled my melodramatic tears.
He said he supported my decision and encouraged me to apply and see what would come of it as he couldn’t stomach being the reason I chose not to do something. He feared, he said, me looking back over the years, not joining Peace Corps and feeling a bang of regret and transferring that blame onto him. He couldn’t countenance that, he said. It was big of him.
With that, I moved on. I applied. I attended info sessions on the West Side, picking up a bootlegged CD of Alanis Morrisette while heading over to PC’s NY offices one day after work. It was a relatively painless if über-bureaucratic process.
After a bit of time the length of which I no longer remember, Peace Corps called me and offered me an assignment I had 24 hours to accept. It would be working as a bee keeper in an agricultural extension project in Paraguay: teaching local women how to tend and care for honey bees so to harvest their honey as a way of providing supplemental income to their families. Wow! What did I know about honeybees? Sure, I’d been stung a few times but … I know how bees are flowers’ friends as they scuttle about pollinating blossoms here and there.
I only had 24 hours to decide about the posting as the program was leaving in a few weeks and they only had a handful of slots still available. I got the call while I was at work, at the scholarly publishing house. It was late in the workday. I think I might have Goggled “honey bees” and “Paraguay” to learn that the honey bees that live today in Paraguay are those of the “Africanized” variety, which means they’re more vicious than the now-extinct indigenous (Paraguayan) variety.
I didn’t know how to decide about such an offering and wanted to fairly consider it before instinctively declining. A synergetic flash of possibility charged through my mind. I thought of the Liz Christy Community Garden down on Houston Street, east of Broadway, near the Bowery, New York’s once infamous “Skid Row” of hobos, winos, and the unwanted. I had wandered in the garden a few times before and enjoyed it and I recalled that at the back of the narrow stretch of garden, against the wall of the garage that abuts it, there were hives, yes, beehives. White boxes with little drawers.
After work I scurried down to Houston and Broadway and entered the community garden just as its caretaker was securing the property for the night. She was a kind, older woman. I asked her feverishly if the “beekeeper” was available. I felt like “beekeeper” was some sort of code for a dealer of something illicit. I felt funny asking and in such a frenetic way but I had no time for reflection nor humor.
She told me the beekeeper wasn’t there but passed his number to me (yet another shady element of this interaction). I headed home, this was my long-lasting pre-cell phone stage, of course, and called the beekeeper. No one picked up. I left a desperate message. I wanted to talk to someone who knew something of the ins and outs, the everyday, of being a beekeeper. Would I like it? What’s it like? Am I well suited for it? I didn’t expect the beekeeper, of course, to answer these questions for me but I just hoped he would say something that sparked deep down inside of me some long-lost curiosity in the work of a beekeeper.
After a bit, he called me back that evening. A charming, faceless beekeeper. I thank him to this day. Needless to say, I didn’t accept the posting in Paraguay not really because of the substance of what I’d have been doing but because of the lack of time and dearth of information provided me to make the decision. Also, the idea of teaching others something I myself didn’t know (or have experience with) made me nervous. This points to an inherent weakness of Peace Corps, to my mind.
Don’t get me wrong, I admire the organization and what it does. I respect the people who commit so much of themselves and their youths to its work. It’s good stuff. Not only for those overseas who benefit from learning beekeeping or English or web development and marketing but also for what Peace Corps volunteers bring back to the United States.
The simplest example I can provide of this less-obvious good that Peace Corps does is when I tell people I served in Uzbekistan and they pause, crinkle their brow and reply, “Pakistan?” I answer, never pedantically, “Nope, not Pakistan, Uzbekistan. One of the former Soviet ‘Stans, north of Afghanistan, west of Kazahkstan, east of Turkmenistan.” See, by volunteers’ experiences both while they’re serving through letters and emails and phone calls home as well as once they’re back in the “world,” people in the United States learn more about our world and that’s an invaluable positive. One’s less likely to hate or denigrate someone who’s familiar, who’s life one knows even a little bit about. Knowledge of the other makes it harder to dehumanize him or her.
That said, when it comes down to it, selecting where you will spend the next 27 months of your life while serving in Peace Corps really boils down to a simple choice: location or vocation. For me, my choice hinged on the twin issues of whether or not I wanted to be in Latin America where I knew the language but knew nothing of the task I would be put in charge of or do work I was familiar with and knowledgeable about (teaching English and writing) in a place I knew nothing about and whose language I certainly couldn’t speak.
For some reason, I chose vocation and ended up in mid-January 2003, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A bleak, enigmatic place.
A parting, humorous part of this story is that during this time and shortly thereafter my dad sent me magazine ads for Burt’s Bees products and articles from his local paper about the viciousness of the Africanized bees. It’s become a running family joke on the randomness of my life.
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