Red Dust

excerpt from memoir in progress

People tell me I was brave to go in the Peace Corps at the age of sixty, but bravery had nothing to do with it. Is it brave to run away from failure? A failed marriage. A failed career path? A failed family of origin? Is it brave to find a way to escape the financial demands for a couple of years? Is it brave to want to do something of substance and still be taken care of?

I would not have to worry about health care, car insurance, a mortgage, heating bills. I would not have to figure out how to manage a life that appeared to be going nowhere. Sometimes I think my fellow volunteers and I were a ship of fools. Who would leave the place everyone else in the world seemed to want to be. “Can you get me a job in America?” was the first thing many villagers asked me. They didn’t know what to make of me. I was eleven years older than the Head of School, who had just retired. My counterpart, the head of the guidance and counseling department, was my son’s age. They could not walk as far as me, could not believe I was divorced. After a thirty-seven-year marriage. Their responses varied from “is that possible?” to “why bother?”

 And yes, there is another side to the story. I was not ‘old’ in Botswana. Or rather, I was old, and that is not a bad thing in Botswana. I was accorded respect. I had work to do, work I could not find here at this age. The bravest things I did were take cold showers, shit in a pit latrine, take a deep breath when the power went off and head for my mosquito net when the sun went down. And I didn’t have to do that everyday.  One of the hardest things for me, was to step outside my two-room concrete box and walk the dirt paths, past the animal dung, the broken glass, the plastic detritus, and try to find some beauty in my dusty village. There were the sunsets, only visible if I got outside the six-foot brick wall of the compound where I lived. There was Lydia’s garden at the end of the path, until the water gave out and everything died. I got used to it. You can get used to anything. I just couldn’t get used to myself and my inability to ‘integrate.’ In truth, the bravest thing I did in the Peace Corps was get up each morning and look in the mirror.