After thinking about my “crazy train” post, hearing from other volunteers and having a particularly grumpy day in village, I realized that the irrational anger that flares up from time to time is actually something I have experienced before life in the Peace Corps. The emotion I recognize isn’t the anger triggered by a random guy hissing in the market (which I think is actually 100% valid, if somewhat blown out of proportion) but it’s the frustration I sometimes feel with my host family. They’re great, so let me explain.
My recent grumpy day was triggered by a seemingly innocent gesture – my family calling me to breakfast. Now, I don’t eat breakfast at home because 1) I don’t like Senegalese breakfast (it’s either my least favorite item – mooni – or partially reheated dinner) and 2) I don’t get to make any decisions in village regarding what, when or how much to eat so this is my little way to declare a modicum of independence. On a handful of occasions – usually when I’m being lazy and stay in bed late – I have eaten at home, but usually I head downtown for beans, bread and café (condensed milk and hot water). On this particular day, I just wasn’t in the mood to be told what to do but I obliged and drank the mooni.
After breakfast I went behind my house to do some gardening, hungry and slightly peeved. My war against the weeds isn’t going in my favor, but after an hour it was looking better. For no sane reason I like to keep a few weed bushes around for appearances, to pretend that my backyard is actually landscaped and not a forgotten wasteland. After trimming down my lawn with a machete – a process only slightly more effective than mowing your lawn with a butter knife – my dad came home to ask why I hadn’t come for breakfast. He then proceeded to grab my tools and rip up every bush I’d strategically left behind and to chuck them over the fence. No using those for compost.
This is when the blind rage kicks in. There is no way to explain – either in English or Pulaar – why I want to keep ornamental weeds in my douche to maintain the illusion that I’m bathing in a tropical paradise without sounding like a lunatic. Just the same, I spent the rest of the day bubbling with irrational irritation. Not anger that they’d acted maliciously or really done anything wrong, but that they just didn’t get it.
My emotional deja vue harkens back to the hayday of emotional angst – high school. Remember that feeling when your parents just didn’t understand? For me, it wasn’t the rare occasions that my parents got mad but the absolutely infuriating times when they were being nice. Their attempts at being helpful just highlighted how phenomenally out of sync I thought we were, what with my extremely complex teenage emotions. That’s the exact feeling that I get here – frustration with my complete inability to express myself, my family’s ignorance to the fact that there’s something I want to say and the sneaking suspicion that even if I could put my feelings into words, I would sound just as crazy and irrational as I feel.
I have no doubt that my family here feels the same way about many of my actions, and in a cross-cultural experiment like this I don’t think there’s a way around it. I realize that most of my frustration – which I can acknowledge is unfounded even in the throws of it – comes from other factors. Still, between the cultural chasm and language wall, I can’t help but feel like a 15 year old again looking across the car at my mother and thinking, “we are from completely different planets.”
