It's a Hard Knock Life

The island of Santo Antao is preparing for a major whirl-wind, a shock to its system…. A visit from the Wilsons! That’s right. My mom and dad are about to stretch their wings, try out their new passports, and see what life is like for me and Scott in Cape Verde.

There have been several international phone calls devoted to the planning of this trip, and through conversations with my mother I’ve come to understand that my blog posts may not paint a completely accurate description of the day to day living that Scott and I are accustomed to. For instance, at some point my mom mentioned packing a suitcase of bottled water, peanut butter and granola bars so that she would be able to eat and drink while here.

She was pleasantly surprised to hear that bottled water is very easy to find, and so are many other familiar foods. Scott and I eat an absurd amount of peanut butter and I’ve never in my life consumed so many packs of Ramen Noodles. Perhaps because I tend to write about the more interesting aspects of our lives, I have unintentionally placed emphasis on our home-grown produce and poultry and devoted less time to the cans and cans of tuna fish, black beans, peeled tomatoes and SPAM that we’ve put down. All of these items are readily available in the city. Since the vast majority of food consumed in Cape Verde is slowly shipped in from other nations, we have access to a plethora of nearly indestructible, questionably nutritional, non-perishable “food” items. These packaged items supplement our meals of more traditional, locally grown foods.

I think I was finally able to communicate to my mom that familiar foods would be available to her. Not all the food here is totally different from food in America. I can’t be sure if I got my point across, though, because I had a hard time hearing her over the squeal of my neighbor’s pig who was being lead to slaughter. True story.

I think the words “Peace Corps” tend to evoke in people ideas of totally exotic lifestyles, of hardship and even mild martyrdom. But Scott and I don’t view our experience as roughing-it or some sort of sacrifice. There are certainly some inconveniences related to our living situation, but those things are minor compared to the far greater annoyances associated with work and social challenges. The real roughing-it for me is the problem of waiting.

In Cape Verde, waiting comes in lots of forms. There’s your traditional “go-postal” kind of waiting. This involves inefficiency at the bank or sitting on a curb for a couple of hours waiting for a ride home. It’s frustrating, but familiar, and I’ve largely grown numb to it.

I’m having a harder time with “professional” waiting. This sort of waiting means it will take several weeks for a partner in a position of authority to get around to responding to your request for assistance, permission, etc. When you finally nag to the point of becoming a nuisance, the answer will likely be a casual and vague, “hm. It could be possible. We’ll talk about it later.”

And last but not least, there is the “boredom” sort of waiting. There are far fewer organized forms of entertainment in our community and limited electricity to boot. Our neighbors have an amazing capacity for sitting still and staring off into space together. Of course, there are great conversations as well, but people in general are just better than Americans at simply being… without feeling that they need to be amused. Scott and I are not quite there yet. We’ve certainly increased our ability to sit alongside neighbors and withstand what formerly seemed like the world’s longest awkward silences, but the Americans in us still feel the need to be entertained. Our standards for fun seemed to have slipped, we realized the other night, as the two of us enjoyed an impromptu game of charades. Alone. We tied.

Cut us some slack, though, it has been raining for 5 days straight, and there are only so many hours that a person can bare to sit still reading or watching movies on the laptop.

Speaking of waiting… Ruby Sue has not yet given birth. I’m beginning to suspect that she’s not pregnant but just really really fat. Her walk has turned into more of a goat waddle, though, so we believe there may be a little one any day now.

***Update***

Since the composure of this post, we descovered two tiny goats sitting with Ruby in her house. Ruby birthed them without so much as a peep. The kids are now two days old and the size of small cates. They´re very cute. Pictures to come shortly.