“You have to be crazy, like me.” said my project partner. “Two days ago, I said in a meeting that I thought we should have coffee for when important people visit. Today, I got us a stove, gas tank, coffee pot, and cups, in exchange for promoting a local business on the radio. You have to be crazy to make things happen, to make anything change. Not enough people here are crazy.”
I’m not crazy enough. I take too much time to figure things out before taking chances. I want to know everything about something—to be so far above other people’s knowledge of something that I can understand how the decisions I make affect things, and when problems come up, I can have solutions. In training, they told us to “fake it till you make it.” I’ve been faking a lot lately, but I’m getting there.
I think the difference between faking it till you make it and being crazy is that when you fake it, you’re waiting for someone to call you out. Being crazy dares them to. Being crazy means accepting failure as a possibility and still doing it, instead of pretending failure isn’t there.
I’m an introspective introvert. I wait in lines and rely on systems. What am I doing in a country dominated by the informal sector, where to do anything, you have to have the loudest voice and talk over everyone else? When you walk into a quickie mart, you just yell “GIVE ME 5 PESOS OF BUTTER” without caring if someone was there before you. If you don’t get the butter, you yell again, this time waving your money in the air. You have to be crazy to buy butter.
I went to Pantoja to drop off some keys with my old Dona, and stopped by the training center to see the new Peace Corps class. 50-some brand-new trainees, fresh off the airplane. Biggest class ever. I’ve faked it for over 5.5 months already, and as circles of trainees formed around me as I talked, I couldn’t believe that I was telling them to not freak out. FREAK OUT. The ways you’re used to doing things won’t work, and you can’t fake learning the ropes. And then, in a non-neocolonial, non-culturally-imperialistic way, you’re supposed to teach things. Things that, for the most part, I just figured out on my own. You have to be crazy to sign up for this stuff.
My project partner and her husband were two of the ones arrested by the military my first day in-site… I guess that’s just a possible side effect of being crazy. At least we have coffee now!
UPDATE ON CHICKENS: The chicken truck came around, and my neighbor bought a live one. She tried to talk the guy into giving me a chick to take care of, and for about 4 seconds I was hoping he would give me one. He didn’t. But thanks to him, the neighborhood has about 5 times as many chickens! hooray!
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