Procrastination is the Thief of Time

When I was a little, we had a section in English class about aphorisms. We had to select a quote by a famous person and illustrate it. Even at eleven, I LOVED efficiency and hated wasting time, so I chose the phrase from Edward Young, “Procrastination is the thief of time.” I thought I was so clever—I drew a picture of some Looney Tunes character sleeping in a corner with a long list of things to do with a giant clock sneaking up to steal the list away from him. I know, fascinating, right?

Well, when you are a trailing spouse (as we call ourselves) and you move, you usually have way too much time on your hands when you get to a new post. There is really no such thing as procrastination or wasting time because you have no obligations and your “to do” list is short. Taking a page (no pun intended) from the women’s magazines (see numbers five and six below) I’ve been reading, I decided to create a list of what I’ve been doing with my time:

1. Learning about our enormous house: We have five bathrooms. Five. In the first week alone, I only visited three. We went from almost zero cabinet space to cabinets in all five bathrooms with shelves above them going up to the very tall ceilings. I need a ladder to get to the top shelf.

Our kitchen is almost the size of our apartment in Arlington. We have a refrigerator/freezer, and an additional freezer that take up maybe 5% of the room, the kitchen is so big. The freezer is completely empty, by the way. WE DON’T NEED IT! Our kitchen is so big, it has an actual roach motel behind the stove. Unfortunately, they check in and out, Black Flag.

Once while sitting in one of our two living rooms (one for me to read magazines in and one to read books in, of course), I got so bored that I decided to see if I could jump rope in every room of the house, save our bathrooms. Did I mention we have five of them? I will keep reminding you of how many we have. I was able to jump rope in all of them, hallways included.

Our house is so big that when it moves it does the Harlem Shake. Our house is so big all it wants for Christmas is to see its own feet. Okay, I’ll stop. Anyway, it’s big, and I have time to explore it. And to anthropomorphize it. But, I do leave the house for…

2. Walking the dog: Dogs, like in much of the world, are something to fear here. Dogs only have two real occupations in Rwanda: terrifying guard dog or terrifying street dog. So, when I walk Yoda, I truly feel like Shrek. People run in horror to the other side of the street. They walk into oncoming cars on the street to avoid passing him. They ask me if he’s vicious. They glare at him with anger. They glare at me with anger. Still, I have time to walk him, so I walk him 30 minutes to an hour almost every day. Even though we have a big yard (so that we can look at it from our big house with five bathrooms) where he can run around on multiple levels of the yard, I still walk him for something to do. And because I have so much time, I decided to research cute collars on Etsy.com. I ordered him a navy chevron patterned collar with a matching bowtie. Quel cute!! I know! I will blog about my walking experience with him once the bowtie collar comes in, but I have a feeling we will still suffer from Shrek Syndrome. Luckily, I only suffer from this syndrome walking with him and not…

3. Walking in general: So, I have extra time not just to walk the dog, but to walk to do errands. All of them. The closest grocery shop is about 30 minutes away and you cannot get all you need from one place, so almost every day, I walk to different stores—the cheese place, the bakery, the Kenyan version of Walmart, the Italian Store. Yes, there is actually one here, but there is no deli and no burger place next to it, like the one on Route 29. Sigh. Walking, like running, means I get to be the mayor. Kids shake my hand as I walk past, or give me high fives. Street sweepers point to me and say “muzungu!” That literally means “white person,” but it’s what foreigners are called and you hear it everywhere. I usually say, “where?” when they say that, but they don’t get the joke. But I give a great big belly laugh after I say it, although number four below is whittling that down a bit. Moto taxis and cars honk at me to get me to ride them since they cannot believe I am choosing to walk. Sure, our car is still en route from the States, which is one reason why I am walking, but even when it comes, I’ll still have time to kill and a major fear of driving here. Walking everywhere feeds into the next item on the list, which is…

4. Exercising way too much: Hard to believe since I was kind of an exercise freak before, but I am able to exercise even more now. So, I can run, then come home and eat breakfast. Then swim in the freezing pool at the hotel gym we joined, then come home and walk to the grocery store. Then I can do my stretching/strength training. Then eat lunch. Then walk the dog. Then read. The possibilities are limitless. I am even making plans to start teaching an aerobics class at Hubby’s work place next month. I haven’t started playing tennis yet since that takes some planning (need to be a club member or play with a member or…gasp…the courts are far enough that even I can’t walk to them). But I have already resurrected Swim Team Kigali (team of three, but we are a mean three, we) and am joining a running club. I do exercise my mind, too, though with…

5. Reading: I was impressed with how many books I have read since we arrived until I read my friend’s blog. She has read 12…I’m looking at you, Crystal! But, I’ve read five, which isn’t bad for me for six weeks. All depressing, of course—about Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Rwanda…to liven it up, though, I am now reading Joan Rivers’ I Hate Everyone…Starting with Me. Did I just lose major street cred with my intellectual friends out there? Then stop reading because I am also devouring magazines: Elle, InStyle, Glamour, Self, Lucky…all of which lead to…

6. Conducting a closet inventory/fantasizing about having a tailor make fabulous clothes: Even though we don’t have that many clothes here since we are mostly living out of our suitcases, that hasn’t stopped me from looking at every single item in my closet to see what needs to be tailored and what I would like a tailor to make a duplicate of. And what I would like to have made from the pages of the many magazines I am reading. Of course, I need to find said tailor, which is on my to-do list this week, but I will…I have also done an inventory in my head of the clothes coming, that’s how much time (and brain cells, since I’m not using them for a job yet) I have. When I’m not editing and adding to “The Boutique” as Hubby calls my closet, I find myself…

7. Ordering online way too much: In addition to preparing to put the children of my yet-to-be-discovered-tailor through school with the business I will give him/her, I am also spending too much time on Amazon, NetGrocer, and Etsy. I order so much that I have yet to visit the package room at Hubby’s office without having to use a cart to pick up all of the boxes. It’s my patriotic duty, though, right? And who doesn’t need twelve boxes of Lundberg brown rice? Girl’s gotta have fiber during the End of Days.  Speaking of which…

8. Engaging with proselytizers: When I see missionaries in the U.S., I don’t stop. No time, no interest for this recovering Catholic lass. Here, I not only have time, but find it fascinating to be approached on the street by Rwandans. A few blocks from my house while walking back from the Kenyan Walmart, two young people asked in English if I had time to talk about Jesus. Of course I have time, I said, completely intrigued. They spent about 10 minutes going through a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet about self-injuring among teenagers (the Witnesses weren’t amused when I said, “ah, cutting, yes, I used to do that when I was five. I was an advanced kid.”), not being a slave to wine (but, I always say, remember that Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding, not the other way around), and the wandering albatross (about intelligent design).  

When they finished, I quoted Stephen Colbert’s line that those who don’t believe in God will have the last laugh because they will have an eternity in Hell to prove it, but they weren’t buying it. Of course, I didn’t say that to them, but it gave me a chuckle thinking about it. And I did feel compelled to tell them that while albatrosses may be intelligently designed, they are not good to eat. Just ask the guy in Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken, who couldn’t eat them even after starving for weeks on a raft in the ocean.  He used them for bait instead. I read that book last week. I digress. The Witnesses thanked me for the tip on albatrosses and even let me keep the pamphlet. I will read it in the downstairs living room. Or maybe the first part there and the second part in the upstairs living room.

9. Cooking toddlers: Some of you may recall my fiascos with cooking… forgetting to put yeast in pizza dough; mistaking Uzbek hot sauce for pizza sauce and using it; putting cookie dough on cooling racks instead of baking sheets causing cookie dough to drip all over the bottom of the oven; using yogurt butter to sautee a veggie burger, only to realize that it wasn’t really butter so the pan burnt to smithereens. I should have invented PinterestFail, blurgh.

Here, I have time to make beaucoup fails. Like when I made cookies for the third time in a week and got lazy. Or high. I can’t remember. In any case, even though I have time, I tried a shortcut for making the cookies since all we have in the welcome kit are two pots and no baking sheets. The pots can hold about five cookies each, and the batch makes 45, so it takes awhile to bake them, then cool (no cooling sheets here to mess up with!), then put the next batch in.

Any. Who. I decided to make a cookie cake in one of the pans. Did I adjust the amount in the recipe? OF COURSE NOT! So, the “cake” completely oozed out of the pan all over the bottom of the oven. I wish I had taken a picture of it and my attempts to use other things (pot lids, plastic containers…not good, by the way, plastic in the oven, not good…) to catch the dripping in order to salvage some of the cookie cake, which utterly failed.

While visiting Bathroom Number Three, I thought to myself the other day, why not pull a Julie and Julia with Ferran Adria (of El Bulli fame in Spain)? I will call the book Bulli! Shannon and Ferran…with quotes from Teddy Roosevelt. And if I don’t have the tools to make all of the food, I can make them with all my free time. And that is the perfect segue into my final item on the list…

10. Trying out new activities/hobbies: I took a welding class once when I was in prison so I am in the process of making a liquid nitrogen dewar. Fingers crossed—I’ll need that dewar for the Bulli! book to work.

Some of the quirky, fun things I’m truly, actually doing: outdoor disco bowling (they set up the pins manually! Manually! And use hockey sticks to collect stray pins, it’s adorbs), Vinyasa yoga (fine, I haven’t done it yet, but my friend is the instructor, so I swear I’m doing it soon), and chatting up everyone.

I am on a first name basis with one of the guards at a nearby Embassy, whose name is Joseph and he’s a dead ringer for Stalin (whose first name was…coincidence??). I joke with the guards at the Kenyan Walmart who no longer check my backpack or make me go through the metal detector and instead say, “no bombs, right?” while I fake laugh and point my index finger at them like a politician. I show the guards outside the bazillion daycare facilities in our neighborhood the tricks I have taught Yoda. Those guards know me well enough that they know Yoda isn’t Shrek. They particularly love the Bang! trick, where I point a trigger at Yoda and yell “Bang!” while he slowly lies down and turns around (he does this slowly simply because he is confused, not because I am that good) on his back playing dead.

Since I still have time for more hobbies, I’m now starting to read Amy Sedaris’ recession-friendly book Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People to learn how to make slingshots with wishbones and beards from hair in people’s hairbrushes (Halloween is just around the corner, you devil worshipers).  The reading is slow going, though, as the book is in Bathroom Number Four.

Okay, this is a long blog post and it’s getting way too silly. For I am high again. Totally joking about cooking toddlers, by the way. I apologize, dear readers, on with your day!

Leaning In, Peace Corps Style

Lean In. You’re Not Pretty Enough. Women Still Can’t Have it All. Second Wave Feminism. Poststructuralist Feminism. Funny Feminism. I am not a heavy hitter when it comes to commenting on the progress or erosion of women’s equality. My response to a misogynistic comment is usually something like Tina Fey’s, “Suck my [male part that I don’t actually have]!” A modern-day Betty Friedan I am not.

But I am a returned Peace Corps Volunteer. And I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I also ran a Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) camp in Uzbekistan. The camp lasted just one week, but the planning took months and involved many grant applications (which, I realized after I sent them all started out with “Dear So and So, I am Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan.” Way to make a great impression...an overseas volunteer English teacher with terrible grammar. And who thinks everyone’s name is “So and So”). The highlight of my Peace Corps experience, the camp imparted leadership and self-confidence skills to Uzbekistani girls through sports and half-day classroom seminars.

The first GLOW camp was held in 1995 in Romania by PCVs and their Romanian counterparts who saw a major lack of positive female role models in politics and other positions of power. The camp was a huge success and PCVs have replicated it from the Philippines to Jordan to Guyana. While each camp is unique and tailored to meet the needs of the participants, they share several general principles: developing leadership skills, improving self-esteem, increasing knowledge of women’s health issues, respecting and caring for the environment, and promoting the belief that every young woman can make a difference in her community. They are fun, supportive, safe environments for girls to explore their potential. And learn how to be heard.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend the closing ceremony of a GLOW camp in Gashora, in eastern Rwanda. About 30 girls from around the country spent a week at the technology-themed camp, where they learned everything from how to send an email to how to pursue a career in software development. The girls clearly bonded in the short time they spent there, and opened the ceremony with a progressive cheer, which went from a whisper to a scream (well, a scream by Rwandan standards, where people are very soft-spoken):

We’re Camp Tech Kobwa, read all about it!

We love computers and we want to shout it!

What struck me most was how many girls acknowledged that they might not have the chance to go back to their villages and continue regularly practicing typing on a computer or even be able to send occasional e-mails. But, they said, they knew that wasn’t the point of the camp. They understood the purpose of the camp was to teach them to dream bigger and not to be afraid to pursue what they are really interested in, no matter how few resources they might have. That sounds like a total cliché, but it was striking how many girls said it and how well they understand the challenges involved in pursuing their paths. It was the same way in Uzbekistan.

So, almost 20 years later, PCVs are still running these GLOW camps together with their local counterparts, likely unbeknownst to Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Liz Phair. Are they making a difference? I’m not on the M&E side of things, but as long as people don’t confuse them with Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling camps, then I think we have achieved success!

It’s funny, but I didn’t ask the PCVs running the camp in Gashora if they considered themselves feminists. Looking back on my 22-year old self, I think I considered myself a feminist the way I consider myself 5’4”. I still do. For me, whether we’re dealing with garden-variety chauvinism or entrenched discrimination, I’m opting out of the snarky columns, feminist manifestos, and paint-by-numbers punditry and going for old-fashioned empowerment by action. And reading Tina Fey.

Cheaper Than Therapy

My sport (running) is your sport’s punishment. At least, that’s what the bumper sticker and t-shirts say. I have been a runner since I was 15, when I found out that high school tennis team tryouts would require running a ten-minute mile. After a summer of forcing myself to run three miles every day, I was hooked. Over the years, addicted to the punishment, I’ve increased the mileage and the pace. Long runs can be unbearable sometimes, but for some runners, that’s the point—enduring the pain can act as a relief from private torments. It gives suffering a purpose. Or at the very least, an outlet.

For all its agony, running has served me well for living and traveling overseas. It doesn’t require a gym membership. It’s portable, solitary, and way cheaper than therapy, that’s for sure.  And it provides lots of stories when I do it far from home. Below is a list of trends and mini-adventures I’ve encountered when running.

Street dogs

I first encountered street dogs in Uzbekistan. This sounds cruel, but the local children would throw rocks at dogs and hit them with sticks. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we learned that this helped us because the dogs were dirty, diseased, and pretty vicious. Essentially, the kids trained the dogs, so all we had to do was mime picking up a rock on the ground and they would run away. One day, I was running in the abandoned park near my host family’s house. I could hear several dogs coming up behind me, but because it was dark, with thick-as-chowda winter fog covering the valley where we lived, I had no idea how many dogs there were. I waited until they were very close, then snapped around and pretended to pick up a rock. There were at least five large, angry dogs behind me. I was pretty terrified, and I had no Plan B if they didn’t run the other way. Luckily, they did, or this cover girl wouldn’t have gone on to grace InStyle magazine ten times.

Bosnia. I only ran into street dogs twice. The first was running along the river in a highly trafficked pedestrian area. A gang of about six dogs came up behind me and surrounded me. I immediately slowed down to a walk and tried to act completely calm. They walked with me for a very tense two blocks before turning off. I never saw them again. My second experience with street dogs was my last day in the country. I was running up a steep hill just before sunrise on an empty street. Two dogs came charging down toward me barking angrily. Before I even had time to try my rock trick, a taxi came speeding out of nowhere and stopped just between me and the dogs. The driver jumped out of the car, whooping and waving at the dogs, who ran in the opposite direction. Without a word and before I could even thank him or process what happened, he hopped back in the car and drove away.

Rwanda. I have only been here a month, but already have a dog story. Yoda used to run with one of his many previous owners, so I took him running for 30 minutes up the crazy hills in our neighborhood. He loved it. I thought we would be a match made in heaven, me and Yoda. The next day, about five minutes into our run, I turn the corner. I see an ex-pat running down the boulevard toward us and halfway down a bit farther, a street dog who looks just like Yoda (which is not strange, I suppose, since Yoda is a former street dog). The ex-pat speeds up, turns the corner, and looks back at me as if to say, “good luck with the dog, sucker, not my problem anymore.” I had an internal thought of my own for this ex-pat, which I won’t repeat here, when I realized he was going to leave me with the streetdog, who immediately redirected his attention from the runner to us. Yes, the streetdog came right for us and the two dogs went at it. I tried my pretend rock-throwing trick, I tried hooping and hollering to get the other dog to go away, I tried walking away, I tried running away. As they continued to fight, I dragged Yoda to the house of a colleague nearby. As it happens, he used to live in that house (Yoda has been passed from family to family to family, so he has probably lived in half the houses in Kigali). The guard came out, recognized Yoda and chased the other dog away with his nightstick. Sigh of relief.  And we haven’t gone running together since.  

Being the Mayor/Rock star

You know that scene in Rocky when he’s running through the streets of Philadelphia, trailed by a crowd of cheering children who followed him all the way up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art? Depending on the country and the audience, I sometimes feel like that—part local celebrity, part rock star, part public official. In my neighborhood in Kigali, I am the mayor. Kids in school buses cheer me on. They scream with laughter when I throw my arms up like I’m crossing the finish line or kiss my biceps. The ones on foot always want to shake my hand. I am trying to teach them to fist bump. There is a local runner who gives me a high five every time he sees me. Usually I look like a deranged animal puffing and running crookedly uphill while he gracefully lopes past me. In Sarajevo, when I did my long run on the weekend, it involved several loops up a steep incline dotted with refreshment stands and playgrounds. There was an old man who was always out walking who would say, “You run too much! Come on, let’s go drink Coca Cola at the café at the top of the hill.” I would laugh and spit at him. I’m just kidding. I always pretended I didn’t understand him, even though he also mimed it, so it was impossible not to understand what he was saying. In Uzbekistan, in the same creepy park with the dogs, there was a gingerkid who only ran in the summer and would say “Guten Tag! Go! Go! Go!” And on my way back to my host family’s house from the creepy park, I would wave to the white beard (aksakal, as we said in Uzbek) who sat outside drinking tea in his long traditional robe. Even though he probably wouldn’t have been a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, he always smiled and put his hand on his heart as I went by. Perhaps he was praying for my wicked, doomed soul.

Obstacles

Running in new places isn’t exactly parkour, but it does present unexpected obstacles that help keep me alert and aware when racking up the miles. In Uzbekistan, kids would chase me with rocks, mud, and trash. In Vietnam, the motorbikes and lack of sidewalks made it perilous to run in the streets. Equally, the parks presented barriers to running, with their older occupants engaged in calisthenics, fan dances, and badminton—very stationary activities that require you to run in a zigzag pattern, while dodging outstretched limbs. In Kigali, the main impediments are cars, motorbikes, and random ditches. The cars and motorbikes get so close sometimes that I can feel them brush my arm going past. On vacation in San Juan, I was totally blocked from running by teachers protesting their low salaries right outside our hotel, and the nearby beach was too rocky to navigate safely. On another vacation, I was running in Sydney Harbour with Hubby, when we encountered the Prime Minister out for a morning power walk in his bright green and yellow track suit, along with some beefy looking security guys who would not let you pass through the restricted path they created with their armored vehicles. There is always a way around these things, whether it’s outrunning the rocks or jumping over the armored vehicles. Maybe it is more like parkour…

Scenery

The best part of running around the world, though, has been seeing some pretty majestic scenery. Hitting the hills in Colorado Springs, with Pike’s Peak looming over you and passing the kissing camel rocks in the Garden of the Gods. Jogging along the rolling coast in Cape Town, with the Atlantic Ocean below you cheering you on. Slogging up and down the impossibly angled streets of San Francisco with the Golden Gate Bridge emerging out of the fog. Running in the pre-dawn hours in Paris with snow covering the pedestrian paths around the Eiffel Tower, the sidewalks along the River Seine and the dirt paths in the Tuileries Garden. Sweating puddles as you pass the enormous temple of Angkor Wat trying to make it to the smiling Buddha faces of the Bayon two miles farther. Trying not to fall in the random ditch in Kigali with motorbikes grazing your arm as you watch the purple sunrise.