Saturday, June 26, 2010

Grumpy Santa Claus

Yesterday, a little bird was resting outside my kitchen on the ground. It didn’t move when I stepped next to it so I assumed it was hurt. I went back inside for an hour and when I finally came out, all that was left of the little bird was some feathers on the ground and a little skull. Horrified, I searched for the culprit and soon eyed the ubiquitous crows that circle my house. I hate those birds. They’re big, ugly, loud and I guess, cannibals also. All day long, they love to jump and dance on my tin roof. Anyway, today, I went into my kitchen and I saw another little bird just like that one on the floor. It suddenly dawned on me that these were baby birds that had just left their nest. I had been eyeing this nest for weeks hoping the birds would grow up so I could knock the nest down since it’s in my kitchen. Oh well, I guess the birds have left the nest now. Too bad, they just sit on the ground waiting for other animals to eat them. That really is kind of unsettling.

So, I have not written a blog in a long time. For a while, I struggled with mechanical problems such as my computers dying. I killed my last computer so well that I not only fried the hard drive, I also broke the motherboard. Another reason for not writing a blog was that I only had the opportunity to write a blog when I was in a bad mood. I decided that was not a good idea either. I guess my last reason for stopping to write as much is that I’m starting to think writing blogs is a little pretentious. I guess it depends on how you write a blog or for what purpose, but when you’re in the Peace Corps, some blogs do come out sounding self-serving or gloating. Despite all these negatives, I’m back to blogging. I figure it’s a better use of time than staring at the walls in my bedroom and generally going insane. Actually, I’m not surprised people can go insane when they’re in the Peace Corps. It can really get to you.

So, maybe you’re wondering what I have been doing with my time here. Well, lately, I’ve been chicken shopping. And if you’ve ever tried to go chicken shopping, you will realize it’s not as easy as one might think. When I decided to give a chicken to each parent in my nutrition program (around 120 of them), I inconveniently forgot that I’m not in the United States and can simply go to a chicken farm and order them. The first ten chickens I bought off of the nutritionist, my partner in this project. That was easy enough but that purchase supposedly zeroed out the stock of chickens available for sale in my sector. A sector is about the equivalent of a county in the U.S. Therefore, I decided to buy chickens in the markets in the other sectors. The only problems to my idea were the following. Number one, I have no transportation of my own; two, I am a muzungu so the price of chickens is essentially tripled for me; three, I don’t really know how to buy young, egg-laying chickens so anybody can essentially cheat me. Despite these problems, I decided to at least try, and after some asking around, I caught a lift on my hospital ambulance to a sector and market around 20 kilometers away. Miraculously, one of the NGO workers volunteered to help me that day and we took a motorcycle to the market to buy chickens.

The market was huge but the chicken selections not so huge. After identifying me as a muzungu, the sellers immediately started doubling and tripling the price. Exasperated, the NGO worker told me to go hide in one of the shops while we sent a villager to go bargain down the price. After several hours, we ended up with one chicken and a rooster. Too bad I needed eleven chickens. That day, I finally arranged for a local health clinic worker to buy chickens for us and we would pick them up the next week. Well, that failed completely so we came back the next week to buy more chickens ourselves. This time, we fared a little better. We bought three chickens after two or three hours. Not deterred, I decide to try another market in another sector two days later. Unfortunately, I missed the bus so I had to walk the whole way to the market, about 8 or 9 kilometers away. There, I got chided again by my co-workers for being muzungu because all the sellers started increasing their prices when they saw me. This time, I bought five chickens that morning so I’m still missing one chicken now. I figure, after going to the market three times and not finding enough chickens for my program, I’m just going to let my clients start finding the chickens. If they really want chickens, they will have to find them and I will buy them then. As it turns out, being a muzungu is really a bad thing when you want to buy chickens.

Another bad side-effect of my project is that many of my villagers are asking me for money and chickens now. I have turned into the “money volunteer,” which if you ask any Peace Corps volunteer, that is not a good thing. I have again become a walking dollar sign. Imagine having people come up to you and instead of greeting you or making small talk, they just immediately ask, “What will you give me?” I feel like I’m Santa Claus living with hundreds of children on Christmas Eve.

Oh well, I guess being Santa Claus for two years is not that big of a deal in the overall scheme of things. People are getting chickens and hopefully the kids are recovering from malnutrition. Now, if I can only have my sleigh with reindeer or even a motorcycle would be nice.

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