These long summer days give me a lot of time to wonder and, lately, I have been wondering if my new-found high level of patience (usually) will continue in America's work culture. Will I stay calm and collected when a deadline is missed, placing trust in my fellow man to do his job, or given a seemingly impossible deadline, believing I can meet it? When something unforeseen happens, will I accept it, handle it, and move on? I sure hope so despite a recent event and my reaction.
The patience I sorely lacked growing up has slowly come to me during my long stay here. The last 23 months have taught me more about frustration and patience than any other experience. Sure, I have fought battles I should not have. They were losing battles before I arrived and they will be losing battles well into the future, decades after I have left. I have fought the occasional winnable battles, triumphing in some and not in others. Trying to set a firm meeting time can be the week's biggest frustration. While negotiating and trying to narrow down a meeting's start time to a 2-hour time frame, internally, I just want to cry out "set a firm start time like Western, civilized countries do" thinking this little outburst comparing cultures will help me. For the sake of all those involved and my relationship with community counterparts, I am able to refrain from these ruinous remarks. It is these times that teach me how to be patient, to stay calm and collected, and to smile like everything is going to be okay—I may not believe it to be at that moment but eventually, things will be okay.
Patience does prevail and more often than not, I find things that would have bothered me or gotten under my skin in the States do not do so here. When ants crawl near my head while I sleep, I calmly pick up my mattress, mop the floor, and fill in the holes in the wall with an ant-killing blue powder. And I silently endure all the harassment—the catcalls, the rocks, etc. I just go about my daily business no matter how degraded I feel. And when salsa spills ruining a $50 polo shirt, I just shrug and move on. This is the attitude and approach I want to take back to America.
So what happens during one of my ponderings about patience, and flight or fight: I see a rat sneak through the cracked door, a confident swagger into my bedroom.
Do I react rationally and calmly by trying to corner the rat or gently push it out the door? No, I hurriedly closed the door and ran to my host family's. No one was available so I timidly returned to my house and notice that I had not fully closed the bedroom door. Realizing the rat could be anywhere in my house, I curled into the fetal position on the couch and sent SOS emails. Responding to nature's call, I got the courage to leave the couch. As I am about to flush water down my Turkish toilet, I see the rat—I sure as hell hope it was the same rat—stick its' head out of the toilet. I screamed, threw an entire bucket of water down the hole and plugged it with a spare water bottle.
My scream brought Naima running to the window. She asked what was wrong and unable to hold it in any longer, I broke down. Between sobs, I tried to explain that there was rat in my bathroom. Without knowing the word for rat, I started to describe it and got as far as "there was a thing in my bathroom that was small like a kitten but it was not a kitten." Naima immediately understood and tried to reassure me that it was gone and would not come back. Not convinced and still terrified there could a rat in the house, I unsuccessfully tried to sleep and headed to Azrou the first chance I could. I can honestly say I have never been more scared in my house than the next morning when I had to pee.
During an 18KM hike yesterday, I mentioned the rat scare to other volunteers. One asked if I immediately ran to my host family's and when I replied "of course" she said that was exactly what she would have done. If she said that purely to give me a little comfort, it worked. Still wondering how I was going to go to the bathroom in peace, I got very valuable advice from a local. I returned to my house later in the day and poured a half-liter of hydrochloric acid down the toilet.
Thanks to the mental health break in Azrou, the hike with other volunteers, and a strong chemical, I woke feeling refreshed and eager for coffee and the Sunday papers. My flight or fight response failed me this time but I still have 100 days to ponder, reflect, and work on patience and the ability to stay calm and collected when problems arise.
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